The Practical Self: Replies

Lichtenberg's enigmatic remarks on the cogito form the backbone to The Practical Self. Rory Madden raises a set of rich questions about their proper interpretation and the argumentative work to which they are put.

Lichtenberg writes that to say cogito is already too much as soon as one translates it as I am thinking. Madden contrasts two readings of this line. The traditional reading takes Lichtenberg to be raising a challenge to the claim that I am the subject of my episodes of thinking on which those episodes depend. The revisionary reading—and the one offered in The Practical Self—takes Lichtenberg to be raising a challenge to the claim that I am the sometime agent of my thinking. The final sentence of the passage, on this reading, responds to the challenge by suggesting that we have practical grounds to accept that we are the agents of our thinking. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement.

Madden worries about the translation of this final line and, with it, the claim that it offers practical grounds for assuming the I. Lichtenberg writes: Das Ich anzunehmen, zu postulieren, ist praktisches Bedürfnis. Günter Zöller translates the final word as ‘requirement’ (1992, p.418); Stephen Tester as ‘necessity’ (2012, p.152). Madden suggests that ‘need’ is a closer translation and that this deflates the suggestion that Lichtenberg is adverting to practical grounds. A practical need is not a necessary condition on some state of affairs but a pressing or basic impulse, like the need to stretch one's legs.

My account of the practical grounds available for our sense of ourselves as intellectual agents is modelled on Kant's account of the practical postulates. These are claims which Kant says must be assumed (CPrR 5:121, 126) or postulated (5:122, 125) in virtue of their connection to the demands of practical reason. In particular, they must be assumed or postulated in virtue of a connection to what Kant calls ‘a need [Bedürfnis] of pure practical reason’ (5:142). A need of pure practical reason—a practical need—contrasts with a need of inclination. It is a need based on duty. We might say, then, that to assume these claims about God, freedom, and immortality, to postulate them, is, for Kant, a practical need based on duty—a practical requirement. This is the context in which to understand Lichtenberg's final sentence. Madden's deflationary suggestion severs these connections.

What about the target of those sentences? Madden notes the difficulty of interpreting an aphoristic writer such as Lichtenberg. In The Practical Self I made the case for the revisionary reading by appeal to other passages in his writings—including, crucially, a passage in the notebooks where Lichtenberg returns to the contrast between ‘I am thinking’ or ‘it is thinking’.1 Madden is right that these are not determinative—even if the later passages show a concern with intellectual agency, it might be that Lichtenberg had not distinguished the two issues when writing the passage at K76 or that both concerns were at issue. He is right too that Lichtenberg's use of the first person in the opening sentences does not tell against the traditional reading.2 But the context of Lichtenberg's wider writings and its Kantian background should open us to the possibility that worries about subjectless episodes of thinking—important as they have been to the development of our philosophical tradition—were read into Lichtenberg given the local concerns of early analytic philosophy.3

These questions of interpretation are not Madden's main concern. On the issues of content, he argues that the problem of agency has less going for it than I suggest in The Practical Self—that we have perfectly good theoretical grounds for taking ourselves to be the agents of our thinking. And that the problem of a thinking subject has more going for it than I allow—that some answer to the traditional problem must be given if the argument to objectivity is to go through. It is in this context that he draws attention to some subtleties in Frege's discussion of self-consciousness which I missed in The Practical Self.

Start with the first. Madden suggests we can know that we are the agents of our thinking through the unproblematic use of causal explanatory reasoning. My knowledge that there are four people living in the house opposite may be based on the best causal explanation of the number of cars parked outside, the state of the recycling bin, and so on. Similarly, my knowledge that I am the agent of my thinking may be based on the best causal explanation of the overall pattern of my thinking. Such reasoning provides theoretical grounds of the sort which I claim are unavailable (PS, pp.88–97).

Causal explanatory reasoning involves taking up an observational stance towards the object of one's explanation. Madden notes that I am sceptical that such a stance can properly capture the relation we stand in to our prospective actions. When we reason about what we will do, we treat the constraints imposed by our decisions as revisable in a way which allows us to retract the decisions without thereby counteracting the available evidence. And that requires us to take a stance towards our decisions which contrasts fundamentally with the stance we take towards the constraints imposed by the environment (PS, pp.125–128; cf. Soteriou 2013, p.287 f.). Madden does not here dispute these considerations. But he suggests that they do not apply to the retrospective use of causal explanatory reasoning. We can look back over episodes of thinking and reason to their best causal explanation. This gives us a growing body of evidence that we are the agents of our thinking.

This is a helpful reminder of the variety of ways in which experience can provide theoretical grounds for assent. But Madden's use of retrospective causal explanatory reasoning looks primarily geared towards establishing the habitual claim that I agentially think rather than the progressive claim at issue for Descartes. Just as I might look at the discarded books around the house and reason to the thought that I struggle with contemporary fiction, so too can I look back on some episode of thinking and reason to my status as a cognitive agent. Either Madden thinks knowledge of the progressive can be grounded in knowledge of the habitual—an approach which requires rejecting the considerations about decision-making sketched above—or he thinks that knowledge of the habitual suffices to answer Lichtenberg's challenge. Neither is straightforward.

Still, even if causal explanatory reasoning doesn't allow knowledge that we are agentially thinking in the sense at stake for Descartes, did I need to deny such knowledge in The Practical Self? Madden worries that my denial of knowledge—my denial of theoretical grounds for assent—sits uncomfortably with various claims I make in the positive argument for faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking. These are claims about the existence and importance of deliberation, its status as a cognitive activity, and its relation to reactive attitudes and practices (see, e.g. PS, pp.120–125, pp.147–152). Do I present myself as knowing these claims in a way which contradicts the denial of knowledge presented earlier in the book?

The denial of knowledge in ch.3 of The Practical Self is more precisely a denial of theoretical grounds for assent, understood as grounds which bear on the truth of the claim. The distinction between theoretical and practical grounds is supposed to show that we can have reason for assenting to claims even when they cannot be established on theoretical grounds. In The Practical Self I claim that our status as cognitive agents is one such claim. That is to say, our recognition of ourselves as cognitive agents—as creatures who deliberate, puzzle, and decide—is available only from the practical point of view. Madden is right that I take myself to have grounds to assert that claims about deliberation which feature in the positive argument of The Practical Self. That is compatible with my taking them to lack theoretical grounds.

This may be a point where the term ‘knowledge’ occludes the issues. A denial of knowledge can sound like an invitation to scepticism. But would we call Kant a sceptic about morality because he denied it could be established on theoretical grounds? Kant is sometimes willing to use the terms practical cognition or knowledge for our recognition that we are subject to the moral law (see e.g. CPrR 5:4–5; 43). And that is compatible with his taking it to lack theoretical grounds. The kind of cognitive activity which is at stake in The Practical Self is accessible only from the practical point of view. The same is true of some of the arguments which establish its conclusion.

Would it be a problem to allow that we have theoretical grounds for taking ourselves to be the agents of our thinking? Madden points out that little, if any, of the argument for practical assent developed in chs. 4 and 5 turns on the theoretical undecidability of our status as cognitive agents. Why not allow that we have both theoretical and practical grounds to recognise ourselves as such? The requirement for theoretical undecidability is motivated in The Practical Self by appeal to Kant's account of the practical grounds available for assenting to God's existence. But all I say in support of the requirement is that it is needed to avoid a conflict within reason. For otherwise there could be practical reason to assent to a claim which was opposed by theoretical evidence (PS, p.113). And Madden could reasonably point out that the proscription of conflict excludes only cases where theoretical and practical reason point in opposite directions. There is no conflict if both concur.

This is a good and important point. In fact, it is not even clear that Kant's own discussion motivates anything beyond the avoidance of contradiction. In his discussion of conflicts within reason, he writes: “That which is required for the possibility of any use of reason as such, namely, that its principles and affirmations must not contradict one another, constitutes no part of its interest but is instead the condition of having reason at all’ (CPrR 5:120, my emphasis). This does not obviously rule out theoretical and practical reason supporting the same claim. Kant does characterise a postulate of pure practical reason as ‘a theoretical proposition, though one not demonstrable as such’ (CPrR 5:122, my emphasis). But this characterisation may apply solely to the cases of God, immortality, and freedom, rather than any claim which can be asserted on practical grounds. Madden is right that I ought to have said more to motivate a connection between practical grounds and theoretical undecidability—but it may be that moving in the direction he suggests does not involve deviation from Kant.4

Let us turn to the problem traditionally associated with Lichtenberg—the problem of introducing a subject of my episodes of thinking on which those episodes depend. Madden thinks we should take this problem seriously. On his reading of Lichtenberg's remarks, they pose a problem for those who want to explain our ability to form a generalised conception of a subject of experience on the basis of experiences which do not themselves present a subject. Filtered through Wittgenstein and early twentieth-century empiricists, this raises a conceptual problem of other minds: if we start with subjectless episodes of thinking, the result is a solipsistic refusal or inability to countenance other subjects of experience.5

The conceptual problem other minds is an important part of early analytic philosophy's engagement with Lichtenberg and through Wittgenstein's writings it influenced notable moments in twentieth-century philosophy.6 Madden thinks it matters for the project of The Practical Self. For if we cannot form the conception of a subject of thinking independent of its episodes of thinking, we cannot form the conception of other thinking beings. And my account of the interpersonal practices which sustain our faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking puts at its centre practices which involve thinking of other subjects as thinkers capable of holding and being held to account (see especially PS, pp.158–159). So if we cannot make sense of a generalisable subject of thinking, there can be no such practices, and the proffered connection to an objective world is severed.

This is the context in which Madden draws attention to an aspect of Frege's discussion in ‘The Thought’ which I passed over in The Practical Self. Frege's concern in that paper is to provide a counterexample to the claim that the only thing I can think about are my own ideas. The counterexample is thought about myself. For I am the bearer of my ideas and no bearer of an idea can itself be an idea. So, in thinking about myself, I am thinking about something which is not an idea. In The Practical Self I complained that this ignores the way in which we are presented to ourselves in episodes of thinking: it is compatible with Frege's argument that my status as the bearer of my ideas does not show up in the character of self-consciousness thought and experience.

This is what Madden denies, and he thinks that it allows Frege a response to the conceptual problem of other minds. For he thinks that Frege's discussion contains the germ of an idea later developed in more detail by both Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore: that there is a relational structure to experience which is manifest in the character of experience. That relational structure has an implied relatum which is the subject of experience. So in undergoing a sense experience, I am aware of a relational structure in which I, as subject of experience, feature as one of the essential constituents.

I think Madden is right that the conceptual problem must be taken seriously, whether or not it is ultimately to be found in Lichtenberg. And the claims about the structure of experience which he finds in Frege are a promising line of response.7 But what are the constraints on responding to the conceptual problem? In particular, which resources are we allowed to use in explaining our capacity to think about others as potential subjects of experience?

Madden offers the Fregean solution as one which meets the constraints imposed by the isolationist starting point of the Cartesian project. But he notes that we need not accept such an etiolated origin. And he quotes Bernard Williams in support of the thought that the starting point of the Cartesian project may itself preclude a solution to the conceptual problem of other minds: ‘If we have no help from anything except the pure point of view of consciousness, the only coherent way of conceiving a thought happening is to conceive of thinking it. So, sticking solely to the point of view of consciousness, we are forced back to a position in which there is, in effect, only one such point of view…’ (Williams 1978, p.84). Madden offers his reading of Frege as assistance from within the pure view of consciousness. But he gently suggests, with Williams, that Lichtenberg may ‘share with Descartes his deepest error’ (1978, p.79).

Williams's wonderful discussion of Lichtenberg in chapter 3 of Descartes: A Project of Pure Enquiry needs to be situated in the context of its reprise in chapter 10. There Williams says that his argument against Descartes's isolationist starting point is ‘in effect only a development of Kant's in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ (1978, p.292). Williams takes Descartes's starting point to be episodes of conscious experience intelligible independently of their connection to the wider life of a thinking thing. And Kant's thought in the Paralogisms, at least as presented and defended by Strawson in The Bounds of Sense, is that such a self-contained conception of consciousness does not contain within it the material to make intelligible the idea of a persisting subject.8 If Williams is right to see his argument prefigured in Kant, my co-option of Descartes and Kant into a common project is mere whimsy.

But the isolation which begins the Meditations need not be understood as committing to a conception of consciousness which is intelligible independently of its connections to the wider life of a thinking being. To assume otherwise is to assume that the first-person mode of reflection at play in the Meditations itself already commits to the conception of consciousness which Williams, Kant, and Strawson rightly find objectionable. An alternative is to understand Descartes's entertainment of the problematic conception of consciousness as resulting from the argumentative pressure developed over the course of the First Meditation. And any seeming endorsement of that conception must be complicated by the fact that, by the Third Meditation, Descartes will insist that we cannot properly understand our form of consciousness as having its character independent of something external to us—not the wider life of a thinking being, admittedly, but an infinite substance who has left in me ‘the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work’ (Med. 7: 51). The first-personal character of the Meditations is not yet a commitment to use only the meagre resources provided by the pure view of consciousness.9

Madden contrasts the isolationist starting point with one on which our notion of a subject of experience is grounded in an objective, third-personal conception of a psychological event which is, by its nature, the undergoing of a complex unit such as a human being or other animal. And in other work, he has shown the powerful reasons for taking us to be animals of a certain sort.10 But one can accept these insights whilst insisting that this notion of a subject of experience cannot be understood independently of a first-personal conception of a psychological event which is, by its nature, the experience of a conscious subject. Kant, Strawson, and Williams are right that we cannot build up a conception of a subject of experience from a starting point of consciousness stripped of any connection to something external. But this need not be part of the Cartesian project. The dispute in The Practical Self is not about whether we can get to objectivity from a starting point which is intelligible independently of its connections to the external but whether those connections are established on theoretical or practical grounds.

The Practical Self claims that we are required to have faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking and that this faith is sustained by a set of practices which relate us to a world of others. Bill Brewer's comments target each of these claims. His questions can be grouped under three broad headings: the nature of cognitive agency, the argument for the claim that we must have faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking, and the connection between faith and others. I'll say something about each of these in turn.

Start with cognitive agency. I claim in The Practical Self that there is a form of self-consciousness which involves an understanding of ourselves as the agents of our thinking. How should we understand the notion of agency involved in this characterisation? Kant contrasts the spontaneity of thinking with the passivity of sensory awareness. Brewer is sceptical that this marks a genuine contrast. We sometimes embark on perceptual projects—scanning the room to catch sight of one's child—and the end results are perceptual achievements: seeing her, half-hidden by the sofa. So too do we sometimes embark on intellectual projects—calculating the number of primes between 0 and 100, say. And the end results of these inquiries are intellectual achievements: the judgement that there are 25 primes. In both cases, the investigation is settled by how things are. To borrow a line from David Wiggins, there is nothing else to think.11

Given this structural analogy, why think that there is some distinctive kind of agency involved in thinking as opposed to perceiving? In both cases, we initiate a project. And in both cases, the end result is a state which is determined by the facts rather than our preferences about them. Indeed, Brewer thinks that we need this symmetry if we are to accept realism about the domain of intellectual inquiry. For he takes realism to be tantamount to the thought that the answers to one's questions are fixed by facts which are independent of one's knowledge of them. So if we are realists about the domains of perceptual and intellectual inquiry, not only should we treat symmetrically the achievements which settle perceptual and intellectual inquiry, we should further take those achievements to be passive responses to a world which is there anyway.

Brewer's forceful comparison between perceptual and intellectual inquiry presupposes that the achievements which end inquiry are independent of the wider activities which encompass them. This seems appropriate in the case of perceptual inquiry, since one can come to be in the perceptual states which end inquiry simply by opening one's eyes. Walking through the woods, I come across a pig—‘I can now just see that it is [a pig]’, says J.L. Austin, ‘the question is settled’ (1962, p.115). The passive voice is important here: perception can settle questions without one intending to settle them. And if the achievements which end intellectual inquiry are similarly independent of the wider activities which encompass them, then we seem compelled to treat judgement as equally passive to its objects. At the least, it makes it hard to see why we should treat thinking as distinctively active or spontaneous in a way that perception is not.

But this independence is not compulsory. Ryle denies it in a series of late papers on the nature of thinking. ‘It is not incidental to thoughts that they belong to trains of thought’, he writes; they are ‘constitutionally inceptive’ (Ryle 1958, p.416, cited at PS, p.120). Ryle's claim is that the judgements which end extended episodes of cognitive activity are not separable from the trains of thought which they conclude. The judgement that there are 25 primes is individuated in part by the activity of counting the primes between 1 and 100 in which it features.

To identify this assumption is not yet to give reason to reject it. But its denial opens a way of explaining the activity of thinking which does not carry over to the case of perception. It is because the judgements which conclude intellectual inquiry depend on the extended cognitive processes which contain them that we treat these judgements as active. And it is because the perceptual states which conclude perceptual inquiry do not depend on the extended cognitive processes which contain them that we treat them as passive. The active nature of judgement is to be explained in terms of the structural features of the extended cognitive process in which it occurs.12

How does this relate to the realism which underlies Brewer's objection? Realism about the domain of intellectual inquiry can seem relevant if, given the assumption of independence, there is no difference in the relations which the end points of inquiry stand to the processes which precede them. For then it seems the only place to mark a difference between the activity of thinking and the passivity of perception is in terms of how each relates to its objects. And, as Brewer makes clear, realism about the domain of intellectual inquiry poses a constraint on making this good: the fact that we are answerable to how things are in both thought and perception enforces an understanding of both thinking and perception as passive. But once we drop the assumption of independence, we can explain the sense in which judgement is active not in terms of its relation to its objects but in terms of its relation to the processes in which it occurs.

I turn now to Brewer's comments on the argument that we must have faith in ourselves as the agent of our thinking.13 I claim that self-conscious subjects are required to settle questions about the propriety of their perspective on the world, that setting this as my end requires taking a stand on whether I will settle these questions, and that this requires assent to the claim that I am the agent of my thinking. The result is practical ground for accepting that we are the agents of our thinking, as per Lichtenberg's suggestive final line.

Brewer notes that this argument assumes that it is a condition on pursuing an end that one takes it to be attainable (see PS, pp.115–117). And he objects this is obviously too strong: crash-landing into the sea in an aeroplane, I may set out to swim to a distant island despite knowing the goal to be unattainable. If there is no connection between pursuing an end and taking it to be attainable, then the argument which purports to provide practical grounds does not go through.

What should we say about Brewer's counterexample? Well, if one's views on the attainability of an end bear no relation to whether once can decide to pursue it, why does Brewer's swimmer commit only to the project of swimming to safety? Such lack of ambition! Why not commit to the project of flying to safety or of turning into a fish and swimming the distance? The natural thought is that our knowledge that these goals are unattainable precludes us from setting them as ends. The end of swimming to a distant island, no matter how remote, is not like that.

One complicating factor here is the distinction Kant draws between ends which are willed and those which are merely wished (PS, p.116). We do not always mark this division when discussing our projects. But the claim about attainability applies only to ends that we have properly decided upon. And we must be careful to ensure that our judgements about its plausibility are not swayed by the commonplace that one can wish for ends whose attainment is outside our control. For this reason, the attainability constraint is better motivated not by appeal to cases but by reflection on structural constraints governing the setting of ends.

Consider incompatible ends. Say there are two islands in opposite directions and that I know I cannot swim to both. If it is a condition on pursuing an end that we take it to be attainable, then we have an explanation for why we cannot decide to swim to one island and, at the same time, decide to swim to the other. For that would require taking it to be attainable that I both swim to island A and swim to island B. And that is exactly what we know to be impossible. In denying the connection between setting ends and attainability, Brewer deprives himself of the resources needed to explain this incompatibility. It is these structural constraints which motivate a connection between setting an end and taking it to be attainable.14

Brewer pushes a further objection. He argues that to the extent that there are cases where setting an end involves taking that end to be attainable—his ‘brief, simple projects’—these are precisely cases in which setting an end involves no commitment to cognitive agency. Perhaps I set myself the task of finding out which animal is in front of me; I open my eyes and, as Austin puts it, the question is settled. According to Brewer, no cognitive agency is involved in this project. Thus, even if I am right that setting the end of evaluating my perspective requires taking a stand on what I will do, this need involve no commitment to the claim that I am the agent of my thinking. The argument for faith remains in trouble.

Brewer's objection here raises a set of questions about the nature of decision-making. We normally draw a distinction between two ways in which we can take a stand on what we will do in the future—one based in prediction and one based in commitment.15 Given my nervousness around condescending record-shop staff, I might predict that I will blush when browsing the new releases tomorrow. In making this prediction, I make no commitment to blushing being an instance of my agency. So the issue is not whether there are ways in which we can take a stand on what we will do without thinking of ourselves as agents—that much is without question—but whether this is possible in cases where our assent is based on our decision to pursue some end.

My reasons for thinking that there is a commitment to cognitive agency here turn on the connections between decision-making and agency more generally. When I decide to do something, I treat it as a constraint on my practical reasoning, a fixed point around which I must navigate. But it is a constraint that I can foreswear should I change my mind. In this it differs from constraints fixed by the world around me. (This is part of the reason for why we should not think of my assent to what I will do as based on evidence: see PS, pp.125–128.) We treat the constraints engendered by my decisions as different from the constraints engendered by how things are in the world—and it is in this differential treatment that we manifest an understanding of ourselves as agents. My commitment to it being true that I will do what I have willed is grounded in the role I play in making this the case.

Brewer thinks that this does not yet involve a commitment to my own agency because there are perceptual cases where what I will do is determined solely by how things are in the world. If I open my eyes, I will see a pig. That is not a result of any activity on my part. And, as we discussed above, Brewer thinks that perceiving and thinking are on a par in this respect. But the commitment to my own agency is not to be found in the relation between the world and my judgement. It is to be found in my recognition that the ends which I decide upon enforce constraints on practical reasoning which are under my own control. We need a connection between setting an end and taking it to be attainable if we are to explain the structural features that govern decision-making. And we need a connection between setting an end and an acceptance of our agency if we are to explain how our relation to our own decisions differs from our relation to those constraints enforced by the world.

I turn finally to Brewer's comments on the relation between faith and others. Brewer reconstructs the argument of The Practical Self as holding that self-consciousness requires cognitive agency, that cognitive agency is necessarily based on faith, and that faith requires engagement with others. And he objects that this argument is invalid because it is not true that faith in myself as the agent of my thinking requires engagement with others. It is compatible with all that I have said that faith in cognitive agency is sustained without any interaction with another. I agree—and indeed, emphasised in The Practical Self that the argument offered falls short of the kind of necessity which Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel aimed to secure (see, especially, PS, pp.159–164). For that reason, I never took myself to accept the final premise in Brewer's reconstruction of my argument. The claim was only that our faith in ourselves as intellectual agents is sustained by a practice which relates us to others—not that it must be.

Brewer gives some reasons to be dissatisfied with this response. He notes that I object to previous arguments which move from self-consciousness to objectivity in part by showing their failure to establish a necessary connection. But if I am allowed to avoid counterexamples by abjuring a commitment to necessary connections, why are the targets of my criticism not allowed to do likewise?

There are two possible complaints here. The first is that the arguments I criticise were not interested in establishing necessary connections and, to that extent, that the objections offered in ch.2 have no purchase. I'm not sure if Brewer intends this complaint but it would be an interesting case to make. Stuart Hampshire's Thought and Action—published the same year as Individuals—sets out in its first chapter a project which looks continuous in spirit and often in detail with what we now think of as Strawsonian metaphysics (see, e.g., Hampshire 1959, pp.1–21). But the ‘necessary presuppositions of thought and knowledge’ (p.14) which Hampshire aims to uncover are not supposed to be the ‘only possible [principles]’: ‘this would be the error of Kant, the belief that we can anticipate and set final limits to new forms of knowledge’ (p.13, cf. p.20). If the same conception of necessary conditions is at work in the arguments under evaluation in ch.2 of The Practical Self, then the criticisms made there are blunted.

Let us take Strawson's argument from self-consciousness to objectivity as a test-case (discussed in PS, pp.35–48). I'm sympathetic to the thought that Strawson's understanding of his project does not fit neatly into contemporary taxonomies.16 But Strawson insists, in the introduction to Individuals, that his topic is that ‘massive central core of human thinking which has no history—or none recorded in histories of thought… categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all’ (Strawson 1959, p.10). This looks incompatible with a conception of the necessary presuppositions of thought which allows variation across time and culture. Strawson is much more Kantian than Hampshire's relaxed historicism allows. So if the claim is that Strawson and the others considered in ch.2 were not concerned with establishing necessary connections, passages such as this need to be explained away. A case needs to be made.

The alternative complaint is that the arguments considered in ch.2 could be weakened in ways analogous to the discussion in ch.5, and that those reconstructed arguments would fare better against the objections offered in The Practical Self than the actual arguments considered. Here the thought would be not that differential standards are being applied in chs. 2 and 5 but that the same standards could be applied to different arguments. I agree that it would be fruitful to consider whether there are alternative arguments in the vicinity which avoid the problems raised. But it is not obvious that weakening the arguments would make them more plausible: some of the purported necessary conditions do not even look central to the lives of self-conscious beings.17 And, in any case, those are not the arguments which were given.

I suspect that part of the issue here is that Brewer wants to force the argument of The Practical Self into the mould of a Strawsonian transcendental argument with its emphasis on only the properly necessary. But one can admire the ambition of these arguments while sidestepping their concerns. Kant himself allowed all kinds of ways in which the historical could be put to use in properly transcendental projects—with images, symbols, practice, and ritual.18 And Hampshire is compelling on the way in which necessities may be supported by ‘the forms of our social life… the social world of conventionalised gesture, expression and habits of co-operation’ (Hampshire 1959, p.20). The argument in The Practical Self is that our faith in ourselves as intellectual agents is sustained by a practice which relates us to others. That this is not necessary need not be cause for concern.

We must have faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking. Léa Salje gives a precise and perceptive account of the argument for this claim in The Practical Self. And she raises a set of concerns about whether the Kant-inspired account of practical assent outlined in The Practical Self can show that there is a positive epistemic basis for those claims we are required to accept on practical grounds.

When do we have practical grounds to accept some claim? In ch.4 of The Practical Self I argue that we have practical grounds to accept a claim when it is both theoretically undecidable and practically required. A claim is theoretically undecidable when we lack theoretical grounds to accept or deny it. And a claim is practically required when assenting to the claim is a rational requirement on the pursuit of ends that we are required to set. Since we cannot pursue ends without taking them to be attainable—contra Brewer, above—it follows that if we are required to set some end, we are rationally required to accept any claim which is a condition on taking it to be attainable.

This account of practical assent underwrites the practical grounds for accepting that we are the agents of our thinking. For I suggest that self-conscious subjects are required to set the end of settling questions about the propriety of their perspective on the world and that assent to the claim that we are the agents of our thinking is a condition on the pursuit of that end. It follows that we have practical grounds to accept that we are the agents of our thinking.

Salje is sceptical about whether this account can explain why it is epistemically appropriate to assent to those claims which we are required to accept on practical grounds. Perhaps there are claims which we which we need to accept if we are to make sense of our status as active, inquiring creatures, living in a world of others. It is a further step, she says, to show that we are epistemically entitled to hold those claims. This is the target of her critique. She focuses on the first part of the argument for practical grounds: that we are required to settle questions about the propriety of our perspective on the world. This is where she takes the positive epistemic status of practical assent to reside. And she raises two broad criticisms. First, that it does not provide practical assent with a positive epistemic status—the fact that practical assent traces back to a required end does not, in itself, show that practical assent is anything other than a form of wishful thinking. Second, that it is in any case false: we are not required to set ourselves the end of evaluating our perspective on the world. I take these in turn.

Start with practical assent and necessary ends. Salje notes that if we set ourselves some idiosyncratic end, we are not thereby entitled to assent to any claim which is a condition on our taking that end to be attainable. So why, she asks, should making the end compulsory somehow change the picture? Perhaps we must think of ourselves as kinder, smarter, more capable than others, in order to find our way around the world.19 That doesn't make it epistemically respectable to have an inflated self-conception. Indeed, Salje suggests, it may make it less so—for if we cannot but accept some claim, it seems, for that very reason, to lack epistemic credentials. To think otherwise is to assume that our situation cannot be tragic. Even if we cannot pursue ends without taking them to be attainable, why should the necessity of the end secure epistemic standing for assent in its attainability?

To address this charge, we need to be clear on why assent based on contingent ends lacks epistemic credentials. Salje suggests that it is because practical assent would otherwise be pervasive: we could bootstrap epistemic entitlement whenever we find it congenial. She gives the example of assenting to the claim that I am a whizz at learning language as a condition on attaining the end of learning Japanese in three months. But practical assent is constrained by theoretical grounds and, at least in my own case and as the tutors at the Oxford University Language Centre can sadly attest, there is a wealth of theoretical evidence that tells against my having any facility with learning languages. So it is not overabundance alone which tells against assent based on contingent ends.

No, the problem with assent based on contingent ends is its foundation: practical assent cannot be grounded in idiosyncratic desire. It is thus not the shift from the contingent to the necessary which insulates practical assent from the charge of wishful thinking but the shift from assent grounded in desire to assent grounded in obligation. It is because we are under a genuine requirement that we have grounds to accept any claim whose assent is a condition on our doing what we are required to do. Thus in order to answer Salje's charge, we need an account of why assent grounded in requirement rather than assent grounded in individual desire should endow a positive epistemic status.

The prospects of providing such an account can seem thin if one thinks of requirements as solely instrumental, fixed by an individual's desires. For then universally shared desires would serve to ground universal requirements. And there seems little reason to differentiate between desires which are idiosyncratic and those which are, of necessity, shared. Perhaps there are desires common to us all—‘the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries’ as Hume has it in The Natural History of Religion (2.5). And if these shared desires underwrite a universal requirement, then it will follow from the account of practical assent sketched in The Practical Self that we have practical grounds to accept any claim which is a condition on setting that end. The resulting assent—as Hume perhaps intends us to recognise—does not seem markedly different from wishful thinking.

But we need not think of necessary requirements as grounded in desire in this way. An alternative is to locate them in our nature as self-conscious beings (PS, pp.124–125). For if it is part of our nature that we are rational animals, then the requirement to evaluate our perspective will flow from our rational faculties. For someone sympathetic to Kant, this will be because it traces back to a categorical imperative given by reason itself (CPrR 5: 143, cf. PS, p.124). For someone more inclined towards Aristotelian naturalism, it will be because it is underwritten by the standards of good human life: the ‘activity of soul in accordance with reason’ (NE 1098a). In either case, its foundation is not some shared conative state but reason itself. A failure to accept those claims for which we have practical grounds thus manifests a kind of rational incoherence. It is this foundation in reason which distinguishes practical assent from wishful thinking and explains its positive epistemic status.

Salje might respond that this shows only that practical assent is a rational attitude not that it has a positive epistemic status. And at the end of her essay, she sketches one way in which one might decouple the two. But I worry that such decoupling has attraction only to the extent one insists on reserving epistemic status for that which is determined on evidential grounds. Kant offers us an account of assent which showcases an alternative source of good standing—when grounded in reason, when grounded in our nature, when grounded in something universal (see especially CPrR 5:143n.). The requirement to evaluate one's perspective on the world is one which flows from our status as self-conscious, rational animals. And someone who sets themselves the end of evaluating their perspective on the world but refuses to accept that they are the agent of their thinking exhibits a form of rational incoherence. The positive epistemic standing of practical assent is thus not found in its connection to evidence but in its status as reasonable, universal, natural—and secure.

Salje's second line of criticism targets the claim that we are required to set ourselves the end of evaluating our perspective on the world. She raises two questions: first, whether we do set ourselves the end of evaluating our perspective on the world, and second, whether we are required to do so. Both questions have force given the Cartesian framing of The Practical Self. For Descartes presents his project as an enormous undertaking, understandably postponed, and only needing to be performed once in a lifetime (Med. 7:17). Hence the legitimacy of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's complaint that ‘the life which I am constrained to lead does not leave enough time at my disposal to acquire a habit of meditation in accordance with your rules’ (Corr. 3:684). Why think that anyone outside of philosophical contexts actually engages in such recherché activity? Why think that anyone must do so?

Salje presses the first question through worries about over-intellectualisation. She distinguishes the beliefs and experiences which (partly) constitute our perspective on the world, the evaluative stances we take towards those beliefs and experiences, and the decision to engage in evaluative activity directed towards those beliefs and experiences. And the presentation of these phenomena as constituting three distinct levels of psychological attitude can make it seem as though there is an additional complexity at each stage: that there can be creatures who have a perspective without being able to step back and reflect on it, and that there can be creatures who can reflect on their perspective without deciding to engage in that activity.

In The Practical Self, I allow a gap between Salje's first and second levels: there are conscious creatures who have a perspective on the world but lack the ability to step back and evaluate that perspective. Does it follow that there can be a gap between Salje's second and third levels? As she notes, that will depend on how much is built into the setting of ends. The more that is required—expressly ridding my mind of all worries, arranging for myself a clear stretch of free time, for instance (Med. 7:17)—the less plausible it will be that anyone sets this end, the peculiarities of philosophical reflection excepted. And that can make it seem as if there is a gap to be bridged between Salje's second and third levels.

But there is something odd about the thought that one could reflect on one's perspective without ever deciding to do so. We do sometimes find our attention grabbed from without, as when a light flashes in the corner of our visual field. But to will an end as opposed to simply wishing it is to commit to taking some sort of action to bring it about. This is why the distinction has importance for both Kant and Aristotle: it captures a difference in the way desires relate to motivation which is relevant to ethical evaluation.20 We set ourselves the end of evaluating our perspective whenever we purposefully engage in reflection. The commitment involved in setting it as our end thus involves no more than choosing to bring it about. So to the extent that reflection is something undertaken, it is something we have chosen to do, and thus set as our end.

This doesn't mean that human beings actually set this end, for one might think that reflection itself is more limited or circumscribed than I suggest. But drawing out the connection between willing an end and acting so as to bring it about may ease some of the concerns about over-intellectualisation. Setting oneself the end of evaluating one's perspective need not involve a moment of high drama; it does not require that the end be set under that mode of presentation; it is not something which needs to be affirmed and reaffirmed each morning. Rather, to the extent that reflection is something in which we purposefully engage—that we choose to stand back and reflect on whether our perspective on the world is appropriate—then the gap between Salje's second and third levels is blurred.

These considerations concern only whether people actually set themselves the end of evaluating their perspectives. Are they required to do so? Salje forcefully pushes back against this suggestion by emphasising how neurotic, self-alienating and exhausting it would be to constantly reflect on one's perspective on the world. It is often hard enough to navigate the world. Now add continual reflection on one's perspective! As Susan Wolff puts it in a related attempt to take seriously the prospects for a life lived in accordance with some purported norm: these ‘are not ideals to which it is particularly reasonable or healthy or desirable for human beings to aspire’ (Wolff 1982, p.433).

Salje's criticism is a helpful reminder of the way reflection brings with it risks of neurosis and narcissism. This is a preoccupation for Iris Murdoch whose writings are continually attentive to the way reflection gives way to self-involved concern.21 A full response to the charge should not deny these dangers. It needs rather to show the value of the reflective life, the importance of self-understanding, and the way in which reflecting on our perspective enlarges not just the domain of self-knowledge but also its structure. That will require situating reflection within the broader life of a human being.22

Absent that wider story, I'll point to two threads which connect to some of Salje's wider concerns and suggest ways in which a requirement to reflect on one's perspective is integral to a flourishing human life. First, intellectual virtue. Salje expresses sympathy at the end of her comments for a virtue epistemological framework which emphasises the epistemic benefits of well-functioning intellectual traits. But the competences involved in these virtues plausibly involve the kind of monitoring and assessment enabled by reflection on one's perspective.23 So we would expect someone who cares about the intellectual virtues to be attentive to whether her perspective is appropriate and to take deliberate steps to ensure that it remain so. When situated in a story about the value of the intellectual virtues, the requirement to evaluate one's perspective can start to seem part of a well-ordered human life.

Second, community. The mindfulness proponent who only ever lives at Salje's first level can seem like an attractive prospect given her attunement to the world around her. But part of that world will include others who disagree with her take on things. That alone will put rational pressure on her to reflect on the propriety of her perspective. And once collective projects are in the offing, policies for recognising, monitoring, and resolving disagreement will need to be in place—the participants to the common endeavour will need to reflect on their own perspectives in a deliberate and controlled manner. Salje has persuasively argued elsewhere that conversation has a cognitive value in enabling the articulation of our thoughts and ensuring they are rationally answerable.24 Maximising that value will often require sensitivity to the compatibility of one's perspective with that of one's conversational partner—a sensitivity facilitated by reflection, again in ways which can help us see the requirement to evaluate one's perspective as part of a well-ordered life.

This last connection is not intended to justify the claim that there is a requirement to evaluate the propriety of our perspective, not least since it would raise concerns about circularity given the argument in ch.5 of The Practical Self. The aim is only to make plausible that there is such a requirement by showing how a life lived in its light need not be self-alienated, neurotic, and exhausted. It might instead be an intellectually virtuous life lived in communion with others: one aspect of a life lived well.

Kant's views on self-consciousness, practical reason, and religion are a touchstone for the arguments set out in The Practical Self. Carla Bagnoli argues that they depart from Kant in ways which are detrimental to its project. Kant is a better guide to the connections between agential thinking and a social world of other thinkers than I allow.

The Practical Self argues that self-conscious subjects must have faith in themselves as the agents of our thinking and that this faith is sustained by a set of practices which relate us to a world of others. Bagnoli thinks this an odd pairing. Her expansive comments centre on two main charges: that there is a much more direct connection to be found in Kant between our status as agential thinkers and a social world of other thinkers, and that, contrary to the suggestion in ch.5 of The Practical Self, a focus on practices and group-identities has the potential to undermine, rather than support, any connection to objectivity. The interleaving of faith and practice is both unnecessary and insufficient.

Start with the more direct connection between self-consciousness and objectivity. Bagnoli argues that there is a social dimension to practical assent which is independent of practice—or at least, independent of the practices which are the focus of ch.5 of The Practical Self. (I return to this distinction below.) This line of thought accepts that we have practical grounds to recognise ourselves as the agents of our thinking, contra Madden above. But it insists that no further step is needed to establish a connection to a world of other thinkers who are independent of me. There is a social dimension to practical assent which already connects self-conscious agents to a world of others.

How does sociality enter practical assent? Practical assent is introduced in The Practical Self as a mode of assent which is determined by practical grounds. And there are practical grounds to accept a claim when it is both theoretically undecidable and practically required. I use the term ‘faith’ to pick out this mode of assent—as Kant does at e.g. CPJ 5:471—but it is compatible with this that there are distinctions to be made within the class of practical assent. Bagnoli suggests one which is important for establishing a direct connection between self-consciousness and sociality: the distinction between faith and hope.

Hope has a central place in Kant's account of human reason. All interest of human reason, he tells us, is united in the questions: ‘What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?’ (A805/B833). The last connects to faith, because it is answered by religion (JL 9:25). Some readers have accordingly treated hope and faith as equivalent.25 But Bagnoli thinks this is mistaken. She suggests that they are to be distinguished in terms of their intentional objects. Faith is directed at a world in which happiness and virtue are harmonised; hope at the realisation of an ethical community. This means that the object of hope already involves a social dimension: to hope is to recognise that the object of your practical assent is a collective project requiring the involvement of others.

Does this help with the establishment of a direct connection between self-consciousness and objectivity? If the content of hope already involves a social dimension, then it may seem as if we can sidestep the appeal to practice by establishing a link between self-consciousness and hope. For if self-conscious subjects are required to hope rather than have faith, we will already have shown that they are related, at least intentionally, to a community of others.

But this is no shortcut. Faith and hope, as attitudes, are distinguished solely in terms of their intentional objects. It is thus the content of practical assent which licences us in classifying an attitude as one of faith or hope. I do not want to insist that there are no cases in which differences in content alone are perspicuously represented by distinguishing the attitude we stand towards that content. But marking the distinction in this way means that we cannot argue directly for a connection between self-consciousness and hope and thereby take ourselves to have secured a connection to others. We must argue first for the necessity of a social content to practical assent and this will then allow us to characterise the connection as holding between self-consciousness and hope. That is to say, the issue is not whether self-consciousness requires faith or hope—it is whether the content of practical assent is necessarily social in the way required for hope.

The question of whether there is a more direct route to sociality thus turns on the content of practical assent. In ch.4 of The Practical Self, I argue that we have practical grounds to accept that we are the agents of our thinking. Bagnoli's direct connection must go further: it must show that we have practical grounds to accept that we are in community with others. What is the argument for this claim?

In broad terms, the line of thought sketched by Bagnoli takes agential thinking to bring with it answerability to various norms. Some of these are epistemic and concern the truth or falsity of our assertions. Others are more broadly moral and concern the relation we stand in to others. In both cases, we can comply with the structural norms only in the context of a community of other thinkers. So to the extent that we have practical grounds available for taking ourselves to be the agents of our thinking, we also have practical grounds for accepting—hoping—that there is a community of other thinkers who face these challenges together.

If Bagnoli's thought can be made good, the content of practical assent is more expansive than I suggest. But there are two grounds for concern. First, there is a question about whether the content of this hope alone would suffice to establish a connection between self-consciousness and sociality. As I tell the story in ch.2 of The Practical Self, the twentieth century saw a retreat from the worldly ambitions of Descartes and Kant to the claim that self-conscious subjects are only intentionally directed onto an objective world (PS, pp.36–37). If hope is an attitude we can stand in to objects without being genuinely related to them, then Bagnoli's suggestion gets us no further than twentieth-century diffidence.

Second, and more importantly, the proposed extension of practical assent from cognitive agency to community turns on the claim that the structural norms of thinking can only be realised in a community of others. But even if thinking is governed by the norms which Bagnoli suggests, why think they can only be realised in communion with others? This is stronger than the claim that the norms which govern thinking concern others. For norms which concern others may be realisable solely through my own efforts—or, if not mine alone, at least supplemented only by divine assistance. Kant's argument to the stronger conclusion starts from an assumption about our propensity for evil (Rel. 6:97–98). Why think that anything similar holds true of the norms which govern our thinking? There is a gap between the claim that thinking is subject to norms which concern others and the claim that these norms require realisation in a community.

I turn now to Bagnoli's second charge: that, far from sustaining a commitment to objectivity, the practices appealed to in The Practical Self actually undermine it. How should we understand this concern? One might think that the directness of Bagnoli's route to sociality turns on its renunciation of practice and that this is the context in which to understand her concerns about the ways practices undermine objectivity. But consider the Kantian resources which she takes to underwrite practical assent. There is the practice of attributing responsibility, understood not in the Strawsonian form in which it appears in ch.5 of The Practical Self but as part of the fundamental structure of human interaction and the basis for all social agency. There is the particular way that moral agency shows up in sensibility as the feeling of respect. And there is the relation of reciprocity which places a normative constraint on deliberation.

How do these compare to the resources marshalled in The Practical Self? Bagnoli's Kant finds a foundation for practical assent in practices, feelings, and constraints on decision-making, all of which involve a relation to others. The Practical Self focussed primarily on the role of practices in scaffolding practical assent. But it also noted the way in which a commitment to the reality of others shows up in our experiences, when we disagree (PS, p.159), and in our decision-making, when we attend to diachronic considerations about the persistence of practices (PS, p.161). The difference between the direct and circumambulatory routes is not a difference in resource.

Bagnoli's objection to the argument in The Practical Self is thus not to its invocation of practice but to its claim that social practice is mere scaffold: something which aids practical assent but is strictly unnecessary. Her Kantian resources are instead supposed to be the very basis for intellectual agency, a social foundation for practical assent. The result is more recognisably Kantian, at least in as much as one takes Kant to care only about the properly necessary. Practical assent, by its very nature, involves others because it has its foundation in a practice of attributing responsibility, a feeling of respect, and a constraint of reciprocity. These practices, feelings, and constraints are not optional extras for those who need the additional support: they are part of the structure of human relations which underwrites the social agency involved in practical assent. Bagnoli's Kantian route is direct not because it foreswears practice but because it insists on its necessity.

This helps to spell out Bagnoli's concern about the way the two parts of the argument in The Practical Self fit together. The odd pairing is not faith and practice but the necessity of faith and the optionality of practice. Bagnoli worries that if practice is understood as anything less than the fundamental structure for human agency, it will mediate, weaken and distort our relation to others. Why would scaffolding have this consequence? Bagnoli's thought is that since the practices appealed to in The Practical Self are relative to particular forms of life (see e.g. PS, pp.138–141), the support that they provide is exclusive and independent. The result is a plethora of communities whose practices may, as it happens, sustain faith in the same content but whose structures are independently authoritative. And she takes this to be a undermine any strategy aiming at objectivity.

How seriously should we take this worry? Bagnoli is right to emphasise the dangers of group identities and the way in which distinguishing between those who are in and those who are out can inculcate hostility towards those on the outside even as it creates community among those on the inside. And she is right too that the practices involved in holding one another accountable are shaped by imbalances of power and authority in ways that I did not discuss. Social practices can constrain as much as they sustain and it is good to recognise this.

But why should this have any implication for objectivity? Bagnoli's thought seems to be that a proliferation of practice would undermine the norms involved in thinking of oneself as an autonomous thinker. For if the support provided to practical assent comes from a specific form of life, then I cannot take its support to generalise to all instances of thinking, even in the case where the distinct practices support the same norms. Convergence may allow an overlapping consensus on the model of Rawls's Political Liberalism. But Bagnoli insists that this falls short of universal authority. And it is this subversion of universal norms of thinking which is supposed to undermine any claim to objectivity.

But this is not the notion of objectivity at play in The Practical Self. I distinguish there two broad notions of objectivity—the ontological and the perspectival (PS, pp.12–16). According to the ontological notion of objectivity, something is objective when it doesn't depend for its existence on minds and subjective otherwise. According to the perspectival notion, something is objective when it is independent of a subject's point of view and subjective otherwise. The threat which Bagnoli finds in a proliferation of practices is a threat to the idea of universal norms which govern thinking—that is, to norms which apply independently of one's parochial perspective on the world. If she is right, there may be a threat to a perspectival notion of objectivity in the vicinity. But my concern in The Practical Self was the objectivity of things which don't depend for their existence on my awareness of them. And we don't yet have a threat to objectivity in this sense.

Consider a world of mutually independent practices, all of which centre on other thinkers, distinct from us and our mental states. It may be that we cannot take part in each practice without foreswearing the others. And it may be that Bagnoli is right to worry that the norms which issue from each practice can only ever aspire to local recognition, even when they overlap so as to allow consensus. This is no threat to the ontological notion of objectivity so long as each practice relates its participants to things which don't depend on minds. A plenitude of practices does not denigrate the objectivity of that to which they relate.

I don't see, then, that the optionality of practice threatens objectivity of the sort that was at issue in The Practical Self. Nor do I see that her Kantian route is more direct. Both lines of argument hold that self-consciousness requires practical assent and both think that assent is supported by practice. Bagnoli takes the content of the assent to be communal in a way that goes beyond the argument of The Practical Self. And she takes the connection between practical assent and practice to be necessary rather than central. I have expressed scepticism about the first claim and denied that the second is needed to secure a connection to objectivity. But even granting both, these are emendations to the approach set out in The Practical Self rather than its rejection.

There is still a difference of view about the scope and nature of the practice of accountability which is supposed to sustain faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking. Bagnoli thinks it cannot be merely central but must be rooted in the structural and universal features of being human. But even if the practice of accountability is universal in the way that Bagnoli insists, this is not yet to show that it must relate us to other thinkers. It might be that we centre the practice on future selves, an imaginary other, or God (see PS, pp.159–161). I share with Bagnoli the thought that these practices could only ever be peripheral, a pale imitation of the joyful conversation which pervades our ordinary lives. But their possibility does not undermine the connection to others present in the ordinary case: our practice is enough.26