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At stake in many of Ricoeur’s discussions, is the question of how to correctly characterise the complex issue of Causality in a Historical context. We do, for example, understand that the question “What caused X?” is an important question for a historian to answer. Ricoeur, consistently refuses, however, to directly adopt the Aristotelian position which argues for 4 different kinds of cause(Aitia–a word which also means “explanation”) regulated by 3 principles in the context of 4 kinds of change, 3 media of change(space, time, matter) and three different types of science(theoretical, practical, productive). For Aristotle, the metaphysical issue which drives all scientific activity in general, is manifested in the claim “all men desire to know”. History, we claimed in an earlier essay, is trans-scientific(concerned with all three types of science), and insofar as practical science and the ethical content of History is concerned, historical reflection is in Aristotelian terms “aiming at the Good”. This is not to be construed as it has been in analytical Philosophy as subjective or psychological, but is very much regulated by the categories of the understanding and the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Ricoeur turns his attention to analytical Philosophy and refers to the “covering law” model of History, calling, upon the critical work of William Dray:”Laws and Explanation in History”:
“Three fronts are opened up….On the first front, a purely negative criticism is carried out that concludes by disconnecting the concept of explanation from that of law. On the second front he pleads for a type of causal analysis that cannot be reduced to subsumption under laws…Finally, Dray explores a type of “rational explanation” that cover only a part of the field emancipated by the criticism of explanation in terms of empirical laws.”(P. 122)
Ricoeur elaborates upon this theme by acknowledging that the explanations we encounter in our History books, are ” a logically miscellaneous lot”(P.122). In the previous chapter Ricoeur pointed to “logical deficiencies” in the covering law model, but at issue in his discussion is a theoretical idea of law, and not the kind of laws we encounter in morality or a bona fide legal framework. We can certainly agree with Dray that the idea of “subsumption” is problematic, when used in the attempt to discuss the relation of the event to its explanation. For example, the event/action of failing to keep a promise not to pay money back to a creditor, is logically related to the “principle” “Promises ought to be kept”, and the use of the term subsumption in such circumstances is certainly problematic. Making the Judgement “Promises ought to be kept”, in relation to the event of non payment of debt, indicates a possible request for further explanation: “Why ought promises to be kept?”, and this in turn indicates that a reason can be given for the judgement in the form of the Categorical Imperative(“So act that you may will that the maxim of your action can be willed to become a universal law.”). Subsumption is a term better used, not at the level of a complex subject-predicate is-ought claim, but rather in the case of the subsumption of the subject under the concept expressed by the predicate. In such cases it is the categories of the understanding that regulate whether the subsumption is legitimate or not, whereas in the case of the relation of the subject-predicate claims to each other we are in the realm of reason and the principles of logic. In the case of the relation of the categorical imperative to the principle and the relation of the principle to the event of the non payment of the debt, it needs to be recognised that the term “moral law”, used to designate the categorical imperative, is an appropriate use. The term “covering law”, however, does carry with it implications of the mechanism of subsumption.
The emphasis upon subsumption and the way in which a concept relates to an object( a particular object) is continued in Ricoeur’s discussion of the uniqueness of a particular event. He points to the role of explanation as that which differentiates one object/event from another:
“historians do not proceed from the classificatory term toward the general law but from the classificatory term toward the explanation of differences.”(P.124-5)
This is an account of explanation in an inductive context of exploration/discovery, but it is less likely to be found in a historians writings, and more likely to be found in an academic discussion about historical thinking. Classificatory terms, on a Kantian account, are, of course, related to the categories of the understanding/judgement, if we are dealing with the case of statements claiming to be true. The way in which a concept of a subject relate to other concepts, is part of both the sense and reference of the statement. A revolution, to take a central historical example, may or may not be in the name of freedom, and the Categorical imperative. A Historian, that is, may wish to categorise the intention of a revolution in terms of the law of freedom, but as the revolution develops over time the Historian may be increasingly reluctant to use positive moral judgements in those cases where violence is used, because of an attachment to democratic principles, which in turn favours the rule of law and non violent means of settling disputes in a nation. Kant, in fact, found himself in this ambiguous position in relation to the event of the French Revolution.
Ricoeur believes the categories of the understanding, and principles of reason to be irrelevant to his phenomenological/hermeneutic attempt to provide an account of historical explanation. The focus is turned upon judgement, and the procedural principles of justice that are used to decide whether a defendant is guilty or non-guilty. The weighing of evidence is necessary, Ricoeur argues, to arrive at the judgement of guilt or innocence. This, in the legal sphere, is activity that falls clearly in the context of exploration/discovery, and until the judgement is final, it is the “hypothesis” of the state that the defendant is guilty. As we shift from this context to the context of explanation/justification and ask, for example, why the defendant was found guilty, we may refer to both the evidence and the formulation of the law that was broken. The judge in this context is using his knowledge of the law to direct the proceedings of the court , hear the evidence, and move logically toward a correct judgement. Here we do not see induction alone deciding the proceedings , but rather see a deductive movement from the law to the evidence to the judgement. The principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason will be intimately involved in this context of justification. This nomological-deductive structure is not, then, only applicable to the activity of the natural scientist, but is also operating in the realm of ethics and the law, and there is no reason not to believe it is also operating in the realm of History. Ricoeur prefers to focus on the context of exploration/discovery and would regard appeals to the nomological-deductive structure in these contexts as dogmatic. He believes, that is, that:
“another explanation different from that by laws is referred to as a “warrant” which will be called causal explanation.”(P.125)
Causal explanation, that is, becomes in Ricoeur’s eyes, an alternative to explanations in terms of the principles and laws outlined above. This of course requires accepting the following condition:
“if there are singular causal connections whose explanatory force does not depend on law.”(P.125)
The picture that is struggling to emerge in this discussion is that of Hume’s account in which one singular billiard ball strikes another singular billiard ball, and the mind moves from “one event occurring after another”, to “one event occurring because of another”. This account characterises causation as something “psychological”–a habit of mind. The description given here is clearly favouring a process of induction in a context of exploration/discovery: a process which hopes to arrive at some kind of particular terminus.
Ricoeur takes up a Historical example of what he calls an “alleged causal law”: “tyranny causes revolution”. He claims that this is not a law but rather a second-order generalisation based on an inductive gathering of particular facts. There is no doubt that in the minds of Plato, Aristotle, and Kan,t this was a law-like principled presupposition that had to be part of the political organisation of a well-ordered polis. Certainly, for Plato and Aristotle, this “alleged causal law” was a principle of justice(diké). For Kant too, this would have been an important categorical principle of his political philosophy, and intimately connected to the freedom of the people in a polis. Kant would certainly have used this principle as a premise in arguments explaining the occurrence of some revolutions . Ricoeur claims that there are causal laws integrated into the fabric of what he calls “narratives”, but unless he wishes to acknowledge a much wider meaning of the term “causal”, such as we encounter in hylomorphic and critical philosophy, the only way in which “cause” can be integrated into a plot is in terms of “one thing after another”. The plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth is driven by a cause involving the usurpation of the power of a king, and the effect of the deterioration of the mind of the guilty party, and it is clear, because of the universal intent of this plot, that we can legitimately say “one thing occurred because of the other”. The universal intent of this plot is clearly connected to the ancient Greek project of “knowing thyself”, and this project in turn “aims” at The Good.
Ricoeur’s preference for the term “warrant” reminds us of Gilbert Ryle’s appeal in his work “The concept of mind”, in which he referred to dispositions as “law-like”, and whilst the word “warrant” may concretise the problem, it does not solve the aporetic problem of the universality and necessity of causal laws, or the problem of whether these can be found in History.
Ricoeur turns to the work of Dray and agrees surprisingly to the use of rational explanations in relation to the action of agents, but it is also clear that what this amounts to, is not a logical connection between action and its circumstances, but rather some kind of hypothetical means-ends calculation. Means-ends judgements are instrumental /hypothetical judgements which fall into a different category of judgement in comparison with judgements that are characterising “ends-in-themselves”. The former do not command the same level of universality and necessity as the latter. Ricoeur appeals in this discussion to Aristotle’s theory of deliberation, and claims that in order to establish what he calls the “logical equilibrium of this calculation” we must:
“inductively gather the evidence that allows us to evaluate the problem as the agent saw it.”(P.129)
Ricoeur also argues that Dray’s account of “calculation”, is related to “probability”, but there is a suggestion that if we proceed in the above fashion we might find ourselves defending a position of methodological individualism, and opening up an abyss between individual explanation and the explanation of large scale historical processes. Ricoeur leaves this discussion hanging in the ai,r and turns instead to a consideration of how causal explanations and teleological inferences may be related. Aristotle is paradoxically invoked as being dialectically opposed to a “unified scientific method” in the name of “methodological pluralism”, a term which Ricoeur has a tendency to interpret relativistically. Aristotle, we know, was not opposed to unifying all science under a universal and necessary “desire to know,” and he would also claim that all the three different types of science(theoretical, practical, productive) are concerned with the unifying themes of the media of change, causes of change, and the principles of change. Aristotle would also openly admit that the three different types of science differ in their methods and domain of application.
Von Wright is appealed to in relation to the Tractarian view of the world: a world composed of atomic states of affairs combined into a totality. Von Wright asks the obvious question of whether the world we live in satisfies the criteria laid out in Wittgensteins Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus and his answer is that this is a:
“deep and difficult metaphysical question, and I do not know how to answer it.”(P.133 in Ricoeur)
Reference is then made to “ontological building blocks” whose constitution is unknown to us. This deep and difficult metaphysical discussion, however, makes no reference to Aristotelian metaphysics in which “change”, rather than “states of the world” is the starting point of all philosophical reflection. Kant’s critical Philosophy would also appear to accept the above Aristotelian starting point, and perhaps claim that we live in both the phenomenal and the noumenal world. Kant’s position implies that the ontological claims of atomism are trying to say something that cannot be said. This reminds one of Wittgenstein’s long time reluctance to give an example of an atomic proposition. He too claimed that the propositions of the Tractatus were attempting to say what cannot be said, and should be used as ladders which must then be discarded after being used. Von Wright thinks it sufficient to add “tense-logic” to the Wittgensteinian world-view, in order to generate historical statements. He also adds the idea of a system defined as :
” a state-space, or initial state, a number of stages of development, and a set of alternative moves for each stage”(P.134)
Systems are subject to interventions by “free and responsible agents”(P.134). On this account, states take the place of events and actions, and this appears at first sight to be problematic, given the static nature of states and the dynamic nature of events and actions. We know that Wittgenstein characterised states of affairs in terms of the concatenation of objects. We also know it would be difficult to fully analyse the Kantian event of a ship sailing downstream with this “model”. Artificially breaking the event up into a number of temporal atoms(nows), would seem not to capture this event as lived by an observing subject. On Von Wright’s account, it is possible to characterise the event of the ship sailing downstream as a “systematic state” that is “developing”. Action, on this account, becomes a problem that is solved by construing it as a “closed” system, and is characterised as “interfering” with the world. On this account it is difficult not to regard the subject as just another cause in a chain of causes transforming a closed system into a deterministic system(which of course has always been an ancient aim of atomism). Wittgenstein tried to avoid this problem by mystically situating the subject at the boundary of the world or outside the world. Von Wright calls upon the work of the analytical Philosopher Danto, and his work on basic actions to resolve the aporetic questions that arise in relation of the linking of Action to causality. Teleological explanation is invoked in order to neutralise the impression that there is only a causal bond between different phases of action. Von Wright claims that the tie between a reason and an action, is a “motivational mechanism”(P.138) and he also makes an appeal to the concept of “intention”: behaviour is “intentionalistically understood”, it is argued, and this is necessary in order for it to be teleologically explained. History, Ricoeur argues in this context, is connected to a theory of Action and he refers to Von Wright’s claim that:
“the behaviours intentionality is its place in a story about the agent.”(P.139 in Ricoeur)
Narrative , Ricoeur argues, includes both the circumstances of any action plus its unintended consequences, and the action is likened unto the use of language which is characterised in Wittgensteinian terms as “:
” a gesture whereby I mean something”(P.139 in Ricoeur)
Ricoeur continues with the claim that historical explanations are not fully teleological but are rather “quasi-causal”. This claim is then immediately mitigated by an acknowledgement that there are indeed many different kinds of explanation in historical texts. In addition to the internal relations between an intention and an action and its consequences, there are also external relations between two events, e.g. the assassination in Sarajevo and the outbreak of War.
Ricoeur regards Von Wrights account as incomplete and wishes to tie into one intelligible whole, “circumstances, goals, interactions, and intended results”, using the emplotment strategy of narrative. Ricoeur insists, in the context of this discussion, that causal explanation is preceded by narrative understanding. This, he insists paradoxically, requires the rejection of the “covering law” model which construes narrative as episodic and not as a configurational or transfigurational mechansm. Ricouer refers to Danto’s account of “narrative sentences”, in an attempt to link historical explanation and our understanding of narrative. He points out that Danto is an analytical Philosophy and also that analytical Philosophy is:
“in essence a theory of descriptions”(P.144)
Danto, like many analytical philosophers, hold up the idealism of Hegel as a position to avoid –not because of its controversial use of the dialectical method, but because of its pretension to understand the whole of history. Following upon this criticism, it is bluntly stated by Ricoeur, that it is not possible to make judgements about the future unless they are extrapolations from the past. Narratives, it is maintained, on the other hand, possess the power to re-describe past events in the light of events that occur subsequently, and it is this power that primarily interests Ricoeur, because, as he puts it:
“there is no history of the future”(P144)
Danto, on the other hand, claims that every narrative sentence written by a historian is subject to revision by a later historian, and that some historical explanations do not have a narrative structure. No reference is made in this discussion to the fact that Classical historians recommended waiting 30 years before writing about events, because some important chains of events take time to complete themselves. This enabled these historians to have a knowledge of the future of past events. On this classical view, it is maintained that a history of the present and the future are not possible until 30 years later. This “waiting period” was also important because it allowed for the appearance of important documents. Even if at present, documents are becoming available much quicker, there is the problem of completely and correctly describing events such as the 30 year war whilst it is still ongoing. There is of course more than a whiff of logical atomism and logical positivism in Danto’s account that Ricoeur does not comment upon. The description of an earlier event in terms of a subsequent one, of course, occurs on the logical level of particular events, and this leaves us with the problem of accounting for the abstract entities of principles and laws(e.g. the future will resemble the past), as they are presented in historical writing. Some forms of explanation rely heavily on these abstract entities. Danto replaces the “covering law” model with a “covering descriptions” model that is essentially describing particulars. This is why Danto is forced to admit that descriptions in the end will have to “count” as explanations. Such descriptions will certainly allow us to characterise efficient causes in a Humean manner, but there will be problems in using Danto’s account to characterise the universality and necessity of formal and final causes.
Ricoeur criticises Danto’s account for its failure to distinguish between the narrative sentence, and a narrative text which connects particular events. He looks then to the work of W B Gaillie, “Philosophy and Historical Understanding”, to fill a whole left by Danto’s account of narrative sentences.(P.149) Gaillie’s thesis is that historical explanations are intimately related to the narrative form in which they are embedded. Explanation, that is, is derived from the structure of narrative. Ricoeur argues that the following of a story to its conclusion is to be distinguished from following an argument to its conclusion, in that whilst the former has to be merely acceptable, the latter has to meet the criteria of universality and necessity, and provide us with some kind of prediction. Ricoeur then claims that the type of intelligence involved in these two cases is different.
Aristotle is accused by Ricoeur of being the source of what he refers to as the “subjective factor” or “subjective teleology” involved in the appreciation of a narrative. Expectations and attractions are, he argues a part of this “psychology of reception”(P.151). This, needless to say is not consistent with Aristotles account of art. which he characterises as a productive knowledge-using practical science, in which the elements concerned are not subjective but rather present in the creation because of the artists conducting his creative activity in the spirit of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). All activities, we are also told by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics, aim at The Good, and Art is no exception to this universal claim. The aim of art is also to help us with the task of knowing ourselves by understanding the role of what is subjective and what is objective, in this search for The Good in the form of the Beautiful.
Aristotle would have been bewildered if confronted by the account of the world we are given in the Tracatatus, namely, that the world is the totality of facts and not things. He would have pointed out that, given the complex structure of our powers of mind, we cannot be satisfied with a mere description of the facts, but would demand explanations in terms of the principles that explain the facts: we wish, that is, to understand both what is happening and why it is happening. Aristotles account of tragedy puts causality clearly on display, and the learning that occurs in this case is not subjectively connected with a modern “psychology of reception”, but is, rather, concerned with the message the artist is attempting to communicate with “universal intent”, or as Kant would put the matter, in a “universal voice”. If the narrative of a tragedy can incorporate causality—“one thing because of another”—there ought not to be any difficulty with History manifesting the different kinds of causation Aristotle spoke about. Transplanting Aristotle’s ideas into the modern subjective-objective philosophical jargon, and the modern context of a “psychology of reception”, does not appear to be helpful, if we are to understand the logical structure of narration. In Historical narrative, the idea of the Good is important, but in a different way to the way in which the idea of The Good forms part of our idea of the beautiful. There is no doubt, however, that in terms of the nomological-deductive structure of Aristotles productive science, narratives satisfy the desire to know, and laws and principles are operative in the form of presuppositions even if they are not always articulated in the text.
Historical narrative must therefore be structured to answer “Why?” questions and must, as a consequence, allow principles to be operating in the course of events that are the objects of the narrative. Ricoeur, as we have seen, dismisses the nomological-deductive structure in favour of the ability of an audience to “follow” the story. This is clearly a descriptive rather than explanatory activity. Remaining at this descriptive level allows Ricoeur to search for a pragmatic justification:
“the criterion of a good explanation is a pragmatic one”(P.155)
which of course takes us back to the idea of a mind calculating means to ends, rather than a mind understanding categories and principles. The activity of contemplating “The Good” does not, as Ricoeur claims, take us back to the realm of judgement about particulars related to other particulars, or the connection of episodic causes, but rather takes us into the realm of practical understanding and practical reasoning and the architectonic structure of concepts and principles.