Notes of Holderlin's fragment 'Being Judgment Possibility'

This fragment deals with the distinction between being and identity and why an ontology cannot follow from the fact the self-consciousness.

Being -, expresses the combination of subject and object.

The concept "being" must encompass all manners of existences.  Conscious states are subjective, first-person, non-extended entities.  Physical objects are objective, third-person, extended entities.  And yet both sorts of things exist.  So while we have no theory which explains how matter gives rise to consciousness, and while we have no theory which explains how consciousnesses are able to know reality, the fact remains: both sorts of things exist in the same world.  They both are, and so there's some underlying commonality.

Where subject and object simply are, and not just partially, united, such that no separation can take place without injuring the nature of that which is to be divided, only there and nowhere else can there be talk of being as such

The sense of unity implied by being is total, since it must apply equally to everything that exists, regardless of how it exists.  We might say that being implies unrelenting unity, since there is absolutely nothing it will exclude.  If something were excluded from being, and if there were separation between being and something else, then being would no longer be univocal, and so it could not be being.  It would be some particular, finite being.

the same is the case in intellectual intuition.

I take him to mean that intellectual intuition - the absolute I of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre - must also be characterized in such an infinite fashion.  Just as being must dissolve the opposition between subject and object, so too must the absolute I annihilate the distinction between itself and anything else.  There is no "outside" for absolute subjectivity any more than there is an "outside" for being.  Both are infinite.

But this being must not be confused with identity.  When I say: I am I, then the subject (I) and the object (I) are not combined in such a way that no separation can take place without injuring the nature of what is to be separated; on the contrary, the I is only possible through the separation of the I from the I.

When I reflect upon my experience, I recognize that it's my experience.  I perceive things, and in perceiving them, I'm also able to be aware that these perceptions are taking place in my mind.  So the mind not only perceives, desires, etc.  It also exists in relation to itself, and this self-relation is one of its essential features. It has subjectivity.  It not only relates to what is outside of it - objects, states of affairs, etc. - but also to itself, and it takes itself to be itself.  It identifies itself as itself.  That which appears in it appears for it.

There's a superficial similarity here with being.  Being contained the opposites of subject and object within itself.  It united them insofar as they both exist.  The subject does something similar insofar as it holds together perception of the object and reflective awareness of that perception.  Or to put the same thing another way: I perceive something, that something is other than me, but in perceiving that thing (and only in perceiving that thing) I am able to perceive myself.  The subject opposes the object to itself, but that act of opposition is  recooperated  back into the subject, just as being recooperated subjectivity back into itself.  

But the similarity with the concept of being is only superficial, according to Holderlin.  Being unites subject and object.  That's just what "to be" means.  But with the subject it's different.  The principle of subjectivity is not unity but identity.  And that identity only takes place by means of segregation.

How can I say: I! without self-consciousness?  

There's no understanding subjectivity without examining what's peculiar about its inner relation.  This wasn't necessary in the case of being, since we only had to worry about unification, not how the two things - subject and object - relate once they're brought together.  Subject and object only needed to be unified, not identified with one another.  To put it another way: subject and object were only identical qua existing things.  In every other respect they were opposites.

But how is self-consciousness possible?  By setting myself in opposition to myself, by separating myself from myself but, the separation notwithstanding, by being able to recognize myself in what opposes me.

Whatever is happening in self-consciousness, we can't understand it through the concept of unity alone.  There must be distance between myself and the object, otherwise I cannot perceive it.  And if I can't have perception, then I can't have self-consciousness.  It is only by sundering the unity of subject and object that the subject can be a subject.

But in what sense as the same?  I can, must ask this; for in another respect it is opposed to itself.  Therefore identity is not a unification of object and subject, which can take place absolutely, therefore identity is not = to absolute being.

I recognize myself as myself - I can identify myself - only because there is opposition between me and something else.  More than that: the opposition occurs within myself, not just between me and the physical world.  Therefore, the logic governing the I's knowledge of itself as I is not identical with the logic governing the unification that takes place in absolute being, and there is no way to construct an ontology on the basis of self-consciousness.

This has the further implication that, if I know I exist, original unity (being) has been sundered/lost:

Judgment - is in the highest and most strict sense the original [ursprunglich] separation of the most tight unity of object and subject in intellectual intuition, that separation which makes object and subject first possible, the judgment [Ur - theilung, original - separation].  The concept of judgment already contains the concept of the reciprocal relation of subject and object to each other, as well as the necessary precondition of a whole of which object and subject are the parts.

Judgment in the ordinary sense of the word contains separation within it.  In "S is P", "If A, then B", etc., concepts are opposed to and then related to one another.  This separation in judgment is a mere reflection of the original separation entailed by the possibility of experience itself.  If ordinary language is founded in original separation, then this explains why the Seinsfrage cannot be approached discursively.  Any statement to the effect of "Being is ______" or "The absolute is ________" presupposes the sundering of original unity, of absolute being.  And yet because the opposing terms show up for us at all, they point to the unity suggested by the concept of "being" itself.

'I am I' is the most fitting example of this concept of judgment [Ur - theilen], as a theoretical judgment [Urtheilung], for in the practical judgment it sets itself in opposition to the not-I, not in opposition to itself.

Self-consciousness is the most conspicuous case of the sundering and concealment of being itself.  It's the fount of absolute division and absolute disunity.  The idea of founding an ontology on the back of the "I" is absurd. "Being" cannot represent the goal of such a philosophy but can only be its enabling limit.

Actuality and possibility are differentiated, as mediate and unmediated consciousness.  When I think of a thing [Gegenstand] as possible, I merely repeat the preceding consciousness through which it is actual.  For us, there is no conceivable possibility which has not been actuality.  For this reason the concept of possibility cannot be applied to objects of reason, for they never occur to consciousness as what they appear to be, but only [occur as] the concept of necessity. The concept of possibility belongs to the objects of the understanding, that of actuality [belongs to] objects of perception and intuition.

Human experience is circumscribed and limited everywhere by the original sundering of being, and therefore it finds only the limited and the finite.  As Novalis exclaimed in his 1797 Miscellaneous Remarks: "We look everywhere for the Unconditional Absolute, and all we find are the conditions."  Unmediated, unified being is given only as a possibility.  Intellectual intuition is, at best, a regulative idea.  (There's ample evidence Fichte conceived of it this way.)

Comments:
Though he doesn't stick to the letter of Kant's philosophy, Holderlin is a very good Kantian philosopher.  He's picked up on the idea of finitude and has expressed it with a sublimity of prose unapproached by Kant.  The idea in this passage is that an absolute, subjective idealism - where the I posits both itself and the not-I - is stopped, not by anything external, but rather by the very conditions that allow self-consciousness to the thrive in the first place.  This is not done on the basis of the conditions of sensibility, as Kant does it.  Rather, it's done by means of an examination of the conditions of the I itself.  The elegance and brutality of this attack is unsurpassed.  I would not want to be Fichte reading this.

But is his description of subjectivity correct?  Fichte's account of the I's self-positing is strong.  This is really his great contribution to the history of philosophy.  Because what he realizes is that the subject has to be understood as subject, not as object.  Fichte was fond of asking his students on the first day to think about the wall in the lecture hall, and then to think about the I who perceives the wall.  Yes, there is the moment where the subject knows itself by reflecting upon itself.  In that moment it sunders its unity: there is the first-order mental state (e.g., riding a bicycle), and there is the second-order mental state which has the first-order mental state as its object ("I know that I am riding a bike.")

Yet Fichte was also aware that in order to have that second-order knowledge, the first-order mental state must already "be there" for me somehow.  It's the same way that you would not be able to specifically think, "I am reading a blog post," unless you already had some kind of non-specific, background awareness that you were reading a blog post.  The explicit act of knowing arrives late to the party.  It's only underlining what you already know.

And this non-explicit awareness of your own existence and what you're doing really must be a knowing.  It has to be knowledge as opposed to blind intuition.  There's no mistaking that it's me who's reading/writing the blog post.  Saying "I'm aware of reading the blog post," is a repetition of what's already there.  So by the time the I explicitly finds and calls itself out, it has long since not only been aware of itself but has known itself to be itself.

This is a peculiar state of affairs, one which Holderlin never seems to take into account in his otherwise brilliant critique of Fichte.  For Holderlin, the self is an inherently dual phenomenon.  It always turns up only as the I breaking itself apart in self-consciousness.  But for Fichte, self-consciousness is an originally non-dual existence.  And unlike for Holderlin, where non-duality is something always already destroyed by the act of awareness, for Fichte, non-duality is the apparent reality of the I as I.  This isn't a matter of speculation for Fichte.  It's a matter of experience.

Holderlin's critique of Fichte, with its notions of finitude and the concealment of being, looks back to Kant and forward to Heidegger. Yet Fichte's account of subjectivity seems more enduring than Holderlin's.  His idea of the I's self-positing anticipates Sartre's concept of non-thetic self-awareness.  It also seems to jibe with other 20th century accounts of subjectivity that are similarly non-dual.

The mind as a courtship ornament

Right now I'm reading The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller. The author's thesis is that the human mind evolved for the purpose of courtship. The reason we're able to tell jokes, build monuments, compose sonatas, and follow fashion is the same reason peacocks are able to grow such magnificent tails and beetles have such elaborate markings on their bodies.

Central to the author's argument is his distinction between natural selection and sexual selection. Miller uses natural selection to denote "changes in the gene pool of a species due to differences in the ability of individuals to survive and reproduce." By contrast, sexual selection is "evolutionary change due to heritable differences in the ability to attract sexual partners, repel sexual rivals, or do anything else that promotes reproduction." While recognizing this is not the way biologists typically use these terms, he points out that Darwin himself used the terms this way, and that conflating them led to errors in the first 150 years of evolutionary science which we are only beginning to dig our way out of.

According to Miller, evolutionary psychologists have made the mistake of viewing the mind only in terms of what it contributes to our survival, treating it like a "swiss army knife" (Pinker) that evolved to deal with a harsh environment. There are several problems with this view, according to the author, amongst them: If large brains and complex minds are so essential to survival, then why did they arise so late in evolution? Why do so few species have them? Claws, wings, and eyes have evolved separately in many species; yet we're the only species that tells jokes and writes sonatas. Why is there such a long lag between the brain's expansion and its survival payoffs? We seem to have reaped the vast majority of them in only the last few thousand years.

We spend a gross number of our calories every day supporting a giant organ with no immediate survival benefits. Yet while natural selection is rather poor at explaining all the brain's abilities, sexual selection is very good at it. Like the peacock's tail, it's a large, wasteful display. And like the courting behaviors of many animals, our abilities to converse, socialize, get along, treat people with respect, charm, flatter, and know what is appropriate are all good fitness indicators. Sure, we reproduce with people who are nasty and uncouth, and we spread those genes through the population, but it's not like we go out looking to do that. People with normally functioning brains are generally socialized, and we prefer that.

I don't know if I'm wholly convinced by his argument. I read a few reviews of the book, and they repeated some concerns I have with the project. What's gotten my attention in this book is that he proposes a new way to understand evolution generally over the last half billion years.

If many innovations originate through sexual selection, we would expect most micro-innovations that distinguish one species from another to be sexual ornaments. This contradicts some traditional views of how species split apart, but, surprisingly, this is pretty much what biologists see. The vast majority of species-defining innovations seem inconsequential for survival. Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method, disparaged the seemingly pointless variety of plants and animals, calling them "the mere Sport of Nature." Darwin was equally perplexed, often wondering why there was so much variety but so little real novelty. If innovations spread through populations because of their survival benefits, why do so few innovations show the survival improvements associated with major innovations and adaptive radiation?

We tend to think of evolution as a series of mechanical "pushes" without any "pulls". Mutations arise each generation because of random copying errors at the molecular level. Most mutations are deleterious to the organism, and if they were allowed to proliferate, species would quickly go extinct. But the environment imposes pressure on organisms. Certain mutations make the organism unable to survive in the environment long enough to reproduce and pass its genes on. Rarely, a mutation will confer some extra survival benefit on an individual, and that new gene may proliferate through the population, creating many individuals who have this gene. When individuals with the new genes are no longer able to reproduce with individuals without them or with different genes, there is a new species.

In place of this purely mechanical view of the history of life where mutations arise by accident, and the environment either favors or rejects them, Miller is suggesting a story in which choice plays a much larger role in the direction of evolution. Novelties arise and survive in species, not for the purposes of survival, but for the purposes of attracting mates.

Sexually selected novelties of this sort could be called "courtship innovations." Most will be nothing more than a slightly novel design for a penis, a minor variation in mating coloration, or a different style of courtship dance. But from these humble origins, a small proportion of courtship innovations and their side-effects may turn out to have some survival benefits in addition to their courtship benefits. They may then become favored by natural as well as sexual selection. Of these survival adaptations, a small proportion may prove significant enough to allow a species to invade many new environmental niches. They produce adaptive radiations, proving themselves over time as major innovations. The ecological success of major innovations may hide the fact that many of them originated as courtship innovations.

And then he goes on to tell a story in which wings may have originated, not for the purposes of flying and evading predators, but as sexual displays for dinosaurs. There is a similar story to tell about the evolution of large brains in hominids.

If this is true, it explains just as much as natural selection does and more. It explains why there is so much novelty in nature, and it explains why this novelty first arises with the invention of sexual difference. For the majority of its time on Earth, life has consisted in single-celled organisms no larger than a millimeter across. We're still outnumbered by them. There are at least 10 times as many bacterial cells in your body as human cells.

But there probably aren't as many species of bacteria as there are of more complex creatures. Considering how few in number more complex creatures are relative to single-celled organisms, it's amazing how much difference we exhibit. Most of the macro-level differences are color of fins, facial hair, feathers, or other sexual displays that confer no obvious survival benefit. Indeed, there appears to be a sublime abundance of types of life above and beyond what mere necessity would predict but which we would expect if sexual selection takes the lead over from natural selection.

The "pushes" (natural selection) may have the final say, but only if the "pull" (sexual choice) egregiously contradicts the demands of the environment. Between what life whimsically craves and what the environment unconsciously rebukes, there appears to be a lot of wiggle room.

And of course sexual selection involves choice. It's minimal with a pair of earthworms, but it becomes quite complex when you get up to insects. Is there something that it's like for a female beetle to be excited by the colorful display of a male beetle? We'll never know, though that display, which is wasteful and dangerous because it attracts predators, plays a function in beetle courtship.

As one moves to more complex forms of life, the choices are also more complex. It's doubtful a male bird of paradise is just exciting a female. I don't think it's excessively anthropomorphic to say he's trying to impress her. There may be no difference between those two things from a purely physical point of view. It's all just neurons firing. But the courtship ritual is more complex and has greater texture of meaning, and the female has to take more things into consideration, so her act of choosing is more complex.

I wrote earlier about Teilhard's law of complexity/consciousness, according to which "mind" is present in all matter, but it increases proportional to the complexity of the arrangement of matter. I think what Miller is arguing might add some depth to that idea. The invention of sexual difference allows choice (a proto-subjective state) to arise for the first time, and it allows for the evolution of greater complexity (and hence more complex and varied distinctions between "inside" and "outside"). That's why life really takes off half a billion years ago.

Did this revolution—call it the original Sexual Revolution—have to take place? Would any planet with life on it have to eventually invent sexual difference? I don't know. However, it's intriguing to think that, given the Sexual Revolution, complex minds had eventually to evolve.

I have to think about this and develop it more, but I'll end with this quote from Miller:

We can see that, once sexually reproducing animals evolved the capacity for mate choice, every animal species would then evolve some sort of fitness indicator; and that some indicators might be costly, exaggerated body parts, and others would be costly, ritualized courtship behaviors. But we could not have predicted that courtship behavior would reach an especially high degree of sophistication exactly 535 million years after the Cambrian explosion (when multicellular animals proliferated) in our particular species of bipedal ape. Nor could we have predicted that the courtship behavior would take the precise form of interactive conversations using arbitrary acoustic signals (words) arranged in three-second bursts (sentences) according to recursive syntactic rules. Perhaps it could have happened in an octopus, a dinosaur, or a dolphin. Perhaps it was likely that it would happen sometime, in some species of large-brained social animal. Rewind the tape of evolution, and the human mind would probably not have evolved, because sexual selection would have taken a different contingent route in our lineage of primates. But I suspect that in any replay of evolution on Earth, sexual selection would sooner or later have discovered that intelligent minds similar to ours make good courtship ornaments and good fitness indicators.

Emphasis mine.