Let’s follow up a bit on the distinction between practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning. I’ve got two more things to add to my general description of what distinguishes the two modes.
1. In the comments section to my previous post, I suggested that practical reason is in all cases irreducibly first-personal. This is not a metaphysical claim about the experience of such reasoning (a la Tom Nagel) but rather a defining feature of practical reasoning: that it is conducted from within a certain personal point of view. This is much like but the Sartrean dictum that even in cases of extreme coercion, one still technically has a choice. It may be an impoverished or a difficult choice, but from a strictly logical point of view if one is totally forced to do something by some external factor, then one has not done (or decided to do) anything at all.
I should hasten to add that no Sartrean metaphysic is implied by this observation. I remain neutral on the ultimate ontological status of the being that so chooses. Regardless, the contrast with theoretical reason should be obvious. Truths in theoretical reasoning are discovered, and while there may be extraordinary and peripheral counterexamples to this, theoretical truths are not, technically speaking, any one person’s truths at all. Moreover, the concept of choice plays a far more restricted role in theoretical reason. Epistemologists may puzzle over the details, but it seems clear that much of our theoretical knowledge is grounded in very basic seemings or perceptual events, and I am not at liberty to simply decide that such phenomenal objects exist or choose to have them exert no force on me whatsoever.
While this all needs a lot of clarification, it seems undeniable that we are responsible for the results of our practical deliberation in a way that we are not in the strictly theoretical case.
While this all needs a lot of clarification, it seems undeniable that we are responsible for the results of our practical deliberation in a way that we are not in the strictly theoretical case.
2. A second, related distinguishing feature is this: the theoretical mode permits us to suspend judgment while the practical mode does not.
Given almost any theoretical proposition, it is logically possible to suspend judgment on it, to earnestly say that one takes no position on its truth or falsity. In other words, to say that this indecision is one’s settled position. Is Venus really the same object as the morning star? Dunno. Will the new government initiative reduce homelessness? Not sure, don’t want to say. Should Bernie go out with Imelda? Fecked if I know, and I’m going to leave it at that.
However: should I go out with Imelda? Notice that the introduction of the distinctly first-personal pronoun changes the character of the question entirely, in accordance with 1. above. It moves instantly from the theoretical to the practical. Notice that, practically speaking, to settle on “dunno” as an attitude towards this proposition is to decide to not go out with Imelda. Practical reason forces its excluded middle on us with inescapable necessity. In Sartre’s words, we are condemned to be free.
As I mentioned in the previous post, this reasonably clear-cut divide between the theoretical and the practical should make us suspect any theory which draws too heavily on analogies between the two modes.
2 comments:
I see two objections relevant to your view that it is the first-personal viewpoint that is “the defining feature of practical reason” rather than a claim about “the experience of such reasoning.”
1. You divorce the conceptual definition from how we should let experience bare itself out. This is extremely odd in two ways. The appeal to the first-person standpoint is always an experiential claim over and beyond how a third-personal explanation will interpret a phenomenon. It is always an appeal to lived-experience of how subjects undergo their own experiences. It makes no sense therefore to say that what you meant was a claim about the defining feature of practical reasoning itself apart from how it bares out in experience. This is why the appeal to Sartre is really undermining of your attempt to parse a definition and experience. In Sartre, or De Beauvoir, the choice one has (even in the most dire circumstances where such a choice is not really a choice we might want) throws us back upon ourselves and reveals how consciousness is truly a lack. The experience of our freedom in choosing is that we can never be determined by our choices. It is a radical incompletion that we are forever not.
There is no Sartrean metaphysics to be had. There is no metaphysics, only the raw components of lived-experience. It would be an unsatisfactory version of existentialism that even proposed a metaphysics—even if such a metaphysics was consistent with existentialism and a positive thesis that denies moral realism. Look at how staunchly distanced De Beauvoir is against Marxism in the “Ethics of Ambiguity.” The problem is you cannot really have a choice in a situation like Sartre apart how that situation is experienced.
2. Secondly, and I think the most devastating and overlooked, is that the first-personal viewpoint occurs within two modes. First, there is the type of examples you have already furnished. You don’t have the build to have a reason to pursue a career in Olympic weightlifting but Jim does. There are individual factors of each person’s situation, and dimension of lived-experience that bare out only from them. These were reasons of choosing a profession. They deal with each person’s individual happiness, and likewise, you are right to think such reasons have a moral resonance only for them within the sphere of practical reason’s exercise relative to the individual. You ignored the second mode of the first-personal viewpoint. There is a both an I and a We within the first-personal viewpoint.
In the previous example and in Part 1, I urged you to consider that morality and values not only pertain to the choices of individuals relative to them, but that what we want as a desideratum for having moral reasons in the first place comes from our experience as communal beings. There will be times where your individual factors do not indviduate moral experience, and that your practical reason itself is constituted by the experience of living in a We-community, a communal intentionality. This level of experience I hinted at through the use of you and Jim applying to a job in which neither musical talent nor muscular strength had any bearing. At that point, both of you would, I think, make the appeal to being treated fairly in the job application process.
The avoidance of communal intentionality and the perspective of how we are constituted through our intersubjective experiences is further revealed in the tendency to promote Sartre as an analog to your thinking. Sartre hated man and avoided thinking of him as an individual in relation to others. Within his phenomenology, he does not have a place for communal experience. In addition, this is a surprising weakness in Nietzsche as well. Nietzsche can claim in the Genealogy that we can create values over and against those values that have made us sick – Judeo-Christian morality and its echoes in Kant, who Nietzsche calls “the cunning Christian” in Twilight of the Idols. He can claim we create values on the individual basis of living a healthy, strong and vibrant life in the world of concrete sense all he wants, but it doesn’t make it anymore true. Such radical existentialism takes for granted experience as individual without seeing that it is only within the bounds of community that such individual experience can have its basis already.
In conclusion, I have suggested there are two points on which your sketch falters. On the first, I claimed that you cannot separate out the defining feature of practical reason from its baring out in experience. If they are separated, then the appeal to the first-personal viewpoint does not make any sense. The implicit premise here is that persons are intentional, and not in that stupid analytic sense that has only understood intentionality from Chisholm’s radically inadequate reading from Brentano onward. You don’t have persons if you don’t have intentionality at all. Secondly, the first-personal viewpoint has both the singular experience and the communal aspects within it. Somehow, your approach must take seriously the communal experience of values. This intersubjective dimension is where practical reason mostly exists.
The positive feature of your sketch has its basis in the possibility of paying attention to experience over and against a tradition that does not do so. Kant assumes the a priori pure experience of autonomy over say whether or not we are psychologically or phenomenologically constituted to experience value in that way. It seems you’re operating on a deflationary account of reasons, and that’s probably a more realistic in its approach.
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