Well, thanks very much to Nathan and Petar and everyone else who's helped organise it. I'm very happy to have been invited. I think there will be a kind of, hopefully, a continuity between some of the things I say and some of the issues discussed by Alberto, or at least, hopefully, I'll try to forge some kind of connection. So, although the title of this paper is Sophistry Sufficient in Theory, I'm not going to say very, very much about sophistry, any kind of definition or kind of close analysis of sophistry. But what I really want to talk about is the relationship between philosophy and theory.
And I want to kind of, in a way, to kind of propose an account of theory as salvaging the truth implicit in sophistry. So theory in this kind of, in a sense, kind of brandished by someone like Jameson, who's the first quote on this handout. The handout features all the principal quotes I'd like to go through in this paper, and there's 13 of them. But yeah, hopefully I'll speed up a bit. So the account of theory and critical theory in its distinction to philosophy and the challenges it poses to the ideological and often delusory legitimations and rationalizations
that philosophy offers for itself, theory in this sense would be a kind of dialectical rehabilitation of the truth of sophistry. So the context, more specifically, the context of this paper is to examine a recent critique of radical critiques of rationality, specifically genealogical critiques of rationality, in a paper by Robert Brandon entitled Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity. half of the quotes on the handout come from this paper the others come from the manuscript of Brandon's book on Hegel which is called The Spirit of Trust
which is currently online the latest version is online on Brandon's website this is a book he's been working on for 20 years and it seems to be kind of undergoing perpetual revision but nevertheless I'll be kind of You know, there's a few citations from that text which I think hopefully kind of consolidate or at least kind of clarify some of the, you know, the background implicit in his critical account of genealogy. Okay. Now, I want to begin, first of all, by just going through this first quote, which is this quote from Jameson, from Frederick Jameson. It's from a 2006 review of Zizek's Parallax view.
And I mean, there's numerous kind of... Jameson, at many points in his work, does give a kind of... articulates what he takes to be the kind of distinction, what he takes to be salient in the distinction between philosophy and theory. And this is one... But I think this one is particularly interesting for my purpose. So I'll just read the quote. the dialectic belongs to theory rather than philosophy the latter is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after image of philosophy as an institution in the world as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo in the fallen ontic realm of what is.
So, theory, and the bold, I've done the bold, so it's not in the original text, because this is the really crucial passage, I think. Theory, on the other hand, has no vested interest inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its truths, indeed always itself complicit in the being of current language. It has only the vocation and never-finished task of undermining philosophy as such by unravelling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds. We may put this another way by saying that the two great bodies of post-philosophical thought, marked by the names of Marx and Freud, are better characterized as unities of theory and practice. That is to say that their practical component always interrupts the unity of theory
and prevents it from coming together in some satisfying philosophical system. okay so I think for Jameson at least on this account systematic philosophy is an avatar of theology as a discourse tending towards the fusion of reasons and causes or explanation and justification in other words the delusion the peculiar delusion of philosophy of classical philosophy is to be a self-sufficient rational discourse a self-instituting self-legitimating discourse and of course metaphysics in the Aristotelian tradition is very much the first science, science of being qua being. It quickly becomes the straightforwardly
convertible with theology. But this is the problem for Jameson. This is what renders philosophy an apologia for the status quo at best, or a rationalization of oppression at worst. So this is why Jameson and I don't have a quote to back this up right now, but often for Jameson, philosophical truth as such and philosophy's pretension to truth is always ideological. The justifications preferred by philosophy, indeed the ideal of justification, the Socratic ideal of justification at the inauguration of philosophy is inherently suspect in some sense. and practice here on this account
what Jameson called practice would be it's not just the interruption of the autonomy of the conceptual but also the non-conceptual conditioning of the conceptual such that theory in Jameson's end would relay the materialist primacy of practice so it's this Marx and Freud particularly exemplify for Jameson is this this kind of the radicalisation of the critical pretensions of philosophy precisely which undermines the self-sufficiency of reason or of rationality by appreciating how rationality itself is conditioned by economic structures, you know, libidinal
forces, etc. So, now, it's what's, you know, the three the name that's missing in the Jameson quote is obviously Nietzsche. And obviously Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were identified by Paul Ricoeur as the masters of suspicion. The triumvirate who posed the greatest and deepest challenge to philosophy, to classical philosophy. Now, the absence of Nietzsche's name from Jameson's account, I think is interesting and I want to kind of, and I think it's significant. And actually the primary target of Brandom's critique is actually Nietzsche and not Marx and Freud.
So one of the things I want to make clear to kind of obviate any possible misunderstandings, like my aim here is not simply to pit philosophy against theory or to kind of do some kind of, to stage some kind of revenge of philosophy on theory. the point is not to reify the distinction between philosophy and theory but to achieve a probably dialectical articulation of philosophy and theory such that philosophy is conditioned by philosophy philosophy is conditioned by theory which challenges its autonomy but at the same time theory itself is the self-consciousness of philosophy just as philosophy would be the self-consciousness of theory so the target
now I think why is Nietzsche not alongside Marx and Freud because there's a sense in which Nietzsche's genealogical enterprise challenges the very possibility, the very conditions of theorizing as such genealogy then would be the skeptical exacerbation of theory it marks the point at which theory turns its critical resources against its own residual rationalism. So this is what pits Nietzsche against Marx and Freud. And where Enlightenment disenchanted the world through reason, and in a sense both Marx and Freud radicalized Enlightenment to the extent that they engage in a theoretical description, an explanation which critically delimits the purview of reason, genealogy is disillusionment
with reason. And the trajectory then would be from rational explanation up to and including the critical demarcation of the limits and scope of rationality, i.e. it's heteronomy in Marx and Freud to the Nietzschean unmasking of reason's explanatory pretensions. But note that the critical unmasking of rational justification as ideological rationalisation continues to presuppose the intelligibility of justification albeit as absent or unrealised. theory then would be the counter philosophical legitimation of sophistry and this is its enduring salience so the dialectical conjecture
that I want to kind of investigate is that the globalization, it's precisely the kind of what theory must resist is a temptation to globalize suspicion to the point where genealogical disillusionment turns into an illusory enchantment. And this is a problem when, in the Nietzschean account, in the Nietzschean fable, How the True World Became a Fable, I think it's called. It was in Twilight of the Idols, is that right? It's actually quoted by Barbara yesterday, is that once you do away with... is that the opposition between reality and appearance itself lapses and becomes null and void. Once you start...
I can't remember the Nietzschean formulation. Yes, yes. Basically, there was a specific formulation I had in mind. Hopefully I'll remember it. But the point is that the conditions for ideology critique lapse in a genealogical account where there's no longer anything like the distinction between, not between truth and falsity, but between reality and illusion. So, theory then aims to query the pretension to autonomy claimed by systematized propositional assertion. It challenges the autonomy and hence the authority of the logos.
And to that extent it relays the challenge that the sophist poses to the philosopher. But in order to specify the nature of this challenge, we must distinguish between asserting and asserted, or believing and believed, between act and content. So theory undermines the autonomy or the rational sufficiency of the asserted, of what is believed in, by showing how its assertion is causally conditioned by non-propositional factor, forces, whether libidinal, economic, or what have you. So this is then why genealogy is a causal etiology of rationality. And this is the second quote on the handout from Brandon. So genealogical explanations concern the relations between the act or state of believing and the content that is believed.
A genealogy explains the advent of a belief in the sense of a believing, an attitude, in terms of contingencies of its etiology, appealing exclusively to facts that are not evidence, that do not provide reasons or justifications for the truth of what is believed. So what aspects of rationality does genealogy specifically challenge? Well, first, it challenges the Enlightenment pretension to have discovered a rational legitimation of authority. The revision of the understanding of authority as superior power, superior potency
invested in an individual person or role or object into the authority of the better reason which is impersonal and accessible by all. So genealogy queries the objectivity and universality of what Brandom calls normative statuses, entitlements, obligations, things that, the structural components of the game that he describes as the game of giving and asking for reasons. So, genealogy exposes the authority of reason as simply another iteration of the superiority of force. The pouvoir, not puissance. Force in the French term would be
pouvoirs non-puissants. So, now, I'm going to try to kind of basically resume the steps of Brandham's critique. And I want to do this in a way because in a way that brings out what is peculiar and interesting about his reconstruction, his attempted reconstruction of Hegel. Because it's actually at the end of the paper it's really this year about I want to focus on whether how and if it's possible to be a Hegelian today and what's at stake in the re-actualisation of Hegel as the greatest proponents of
the rationalistic pretensions of philosophy. What are the steps of Brandom's critique of genealogy? First of all Branham's critique Branham's reconstruction of Hegel which provides a context in which his critique of genealogy unfolds is predicated on the conceit that it's possible to reconstruct the maximally normative scope of rationality in its full-blooded Hegelian sense from a minimalist and non-normative account of inference. This is what inferentialism is. Brandom is an inferentialist. Inferentialism defends the primacy
of material inference over formal inference as the minimal or non-normative core of rationality. So what does this mean? It's an extension of Kantian's discursive deflation of metaphysical rationality. So, rationality is not an innate capacity. It's something that is embedded and incarnated in our linguistic practices. How does this basic, how is it kind of elaborated or unfolded? First of all, the base level is the conversion of causal association into logical deduction.
So in other words, the inferentialist account doesn't project logic into reality or social practices. it shows how the ability to kind of the causal conjunction or disjunction of representations or psychological states leads to the explicit representation of conjunction or disjunction. So first of all, the story is told in its most basic form in the work of Wilfred Sellers, who distinguishes types of animal representational system. So first of all, all animals have the capacity to associate representations.
Fire, smoke. If one presumes some basic neurophysiological mechanism to ensure the association of representations, then it's possible to have a higher order mechanism which will represent the relations between representations. And this is all that logic is. This is why the move is from the conjunction or disjunction of representations to the representation of conjunction or disjunction. So this is the structural kind of bedrock of inferentialism.
So what does it say that humans do? Humans engage in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Propositional assertions are inferentially articulated because to be able to give a reason, we must be able to make a claim that can serve as a reason for another claim. Hence, our language must provide for sentences that entail other sentences. And it falls in that to be able to ask for reasons, we must be able to make claims that count as a challenge to other claims. Hence, our language must provide for sentences that are incompatible with other sentences. This is why the basic inferential claim is that language is structured
by entailment and incompatibility relations. Okay, so... semantic content on this inferentialist account is individuated by the rules governing material inferences material inferences such as from it is raining to the streets are wet these rules are constitutive of the meaning of linguistic expressions they are not just something derived from or applied to pre-existing semantic units moreover purely logical or formal inference is merely the rendering explicit or the explicitation of relations of discursive commitment, entitlement and incompatibility, these being the three basic species of inferential articulation,
that are already implicit in everyday perception, reasoning and action. So in Brandon's word, logic is merely the organ of semantic self-consciousness. So it's not that you don't have a form-content distinction, you have this base level of material inference in which the basic inferential nexus is implicit and then logical, formal inference as we understand it is basically the higher order I don't want to say representation the higher order explicitation of these relations of commitment,
entitlement, and incompatibility between propositional assertions. Okay. This is to say that discursive rationality is more basic than logic, which presupposes it. It also implies that what we mean is indissociable from what we do, i.e. from our everyday practical purposes. And since these purposes are embedded in a social context, this means that our rationality, understood as our ability to give and ask for reasons for what we do and say, cannot simply be abstracted from the social practices in which this ability is embedded. This is to say that discursive rationality cannot be dissociated from practical, and which for Brandon means social rationality. So this is the kind of a... I take this to be the force of this non-metaphysical reconstruction of rationalism.
Rationality is sedimented in socially embodied discursive practices. Okay, now, okay, Brandom will try to give an account in which he thinks the genealogical critique of rationality is vitiated by an abstraction. an abstraction from this kind of social embeddedness of rational discursive practices. And he claims that this critique comes from failing to recognize the distinction between what he calls attitudes and statuses.
So in the pre-modern social formations, according to Brandon, which are governed by ethical life, normative statuses are taken to be objectively real. And they have an authority over the attitudes, the beliefs that we have towards them. So, this is the third quote on the handout. What Brandom calls cyclicite, which is obviously his reconstruction of this Hegelian term, cyclicite requires a particular kind of acknowledgement of the authority of the norms over the normative attitudes of practitioners. The willingness to sacrifice, and take it that others ought to sacrifice, attitudes and inclinations that are out of step with the norms.
That is identifying with the norms. So to identify with norms is to claim that norms are real, are objectively real. If you believe in natural law, this is what you're committed to. You're claiming that reality has a normative structure. What happens in the transition from the pre-modern to the modern philosophical kind of understanding of normativity is that the objectivity of norms is undermined by the realization that these norms are fundamentally constituted by our beliefs and desires, by our attitudes towards them.
So in other words, modernity begins with the primacy of subjective normative attitudes over these allegedly objective normative statuses. And this is quote four on the handout. One cannot properly understand normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, authority and correctness apart from their relation to normative attitudes. Recognizing others by taking or treating them as committed, responsible, authoritative or acting correctly or incorrectly. that practical realisation is the motor of modernity this is a very very strong claim in other words it's the realisation that norms we create or we manufacture norms
they are not metaphysical entities existing independently of us it falls down on Brandon's account that alienation is the structural denial that subjective attitudes are responsible to norms which as authoritative count as independent of those attitudes. In other words, that we can't be held responsible to normative statuses that we have not instituted. So the problem then becomes the articulation of authority and responsibility. Okay. The logic of Branham's account is about understanding the dialectical interplay between authority and responsibility.
What does this mean? What has authority is a normative status. What you're committed to, entitled to, etc. or obliged to do. and in that regard you are responsible to that which exercises authority over you so the relationship is one of dependence the normative status is independent but your obligation renders you dependent upon that norm and in modernity you've got a switch such that the subjectivism of modernity proceeds from the realisation that in fact we, it's our
own attitudes that constitute these norms. So the norms are dependent upon our attitudes. And then the question is, are these attitudes themselves independent or not? And the genealogy says no, they are not. So norms are dependent, are constituted by attitudes. Normative status are constituted by attitudes. So you've got the relation of dependency is switched. It's now norms are dependent on attitudes. But attitudes themselves can either be taken to be independent, self-legitimating, or they can themselves be taken to be conditioned by non-normative causal factors.
So this is why the problem is on quote number five now on the handout. So the problem then becomes, as Branham says, of understanding how can the responsibility of subjective normative attitudes, what is acknowledged as correct, to normative status, what really is correct, be reconciled with the authority of subjective normative attitudes over normative statuses. Any social, institutional, or conceptual context that forces a choice between these is an alienated one. So, alienation is being forced with the choice of absolutizing some, of being unable to kind of adjudicate the relationship between dependence and independence.
and he takes and Brandon now takes Hegel to be posing a fundamental challenge to this dichotomy and I'm going to read quote 6 which is a lengthy quote which I think is quite important Brandon takes Hegel to be demolishing Kant's two-stage theory of conceptual content. Kantianism is vitiated by a dichotomy of content and application, or semantics and epistemology. So, Branden writes, Hegel reads Kant as having a two-stage story. Transcendental activity is the source of the conceptual norms
that then govern empirical discursive activity. So, in other words, if you want to explain what generates these norms, there has to be some kind of... It's either an empirical source or a transcendental source. Kant opts for the transcendental source. And the empirical self, accordingly, already finds itself with a stock of determinate concepts. And the transcendental processes by which discursive norms are instituted are sharply distinguished from the empirical processes in which those discursive norms are applied. In the 20th century, Rudolf Carnap provides an index example of this Kantian two-stage semantic epistemic explanatory strategy. In his version, the two stages correspond to beginning by fixing meanings and only then fixing beliefs.
The first semantic stage is selecting a language, the second epistemic stage is selecting a theory, a set of sentences couched in that language that are taken to be true. His student, Quine, objected to Carnap that while this two-stage procedure makes perfect sense for formal or artificial languages, it makes no sense for natural languages. all speakers do is use the language or as Kant would say make judgments that use must somehow determine both what their expressions mean and which sentences they take to be true and the vocabulary I used to talk about Kant the use of language to express judgments must be understood as affecting both the institution of conceptual norms and their application ok so it's this
so Branham's argument is really very simple he just says the globalization of genealogy is mortgaged to this two stage account of semantic this two stage semantics basically which assumes that you can there's a way of like that you can somehow dissociate the fixation of semantic content from the epistemic adjudication of whether or not these contents apply to the world, to the empirical domain. And this is what he calls semantic naivety. So semantic naivety consists in, has three aspects. First, the assumption that the determination of semantic content is prior to
and independent of the application of that content in the exercise of epistemic judgment. Secondly, it assumes that what things mean is independent of how things are. And more fundamentally, it assumes that meaning or semantics is independent of use or pragmatics. So these are the three facets of semantic naivety, according to Randall. So Hegel's fundamental achievement is to be the first to recognize, to overcome this crippling dichotomy. and to acknowledge the reciprocal constitution of application and institution,
of the application of concepts and the institution of concepts. It's not the case you cannot institute a concept and then apply it. The institution coincides with the application and vice versa. And this is Hegel's great insight, according to Brandon. So therefore, this is quote number seven. Our discursive activity does not consist either in simply applying conceptual norms that are somehow given to us, nor in distinct and separable activities of first instituting or establishing those norms and then applying them. Rather, our discursive practices of judging and acting intentionally must be seen as both the application and the institution of determinately contentful conceptual norms.
The immediate consequence of this Hegelian insight, according to Brandon, is acknowledging the reciprocity of responsibility and authority, or the dialectical articulation of dependence and independence. So Hegel asserts the co-constitution of attitude and norm, or responsibility and authority, in the form of the reciprocity between individual and community, such that the individual's responsibility towards the community, her dependence, her dependence on a community which is independent, whose authority is independent of her, is also, and at the same time, the community's responsibility towards the individual. The community's dependence on the individual
and the individual's independence. So, and here's a quote from Hegel from the phenomenology that brand the marshals to kind of, you know, to consolidate this claim. So this is Hegel here. What appears here as the power and authority of the individual exercised over the substance, and what substance here is the spiritual substance, you know, the community itself, which is thereby superseded, is the same thing as the actualization of the substance. For the power of the individual consists in conforming itself to that substance, i.e. in externalizing its own self and thus establishing itself as substance that has an objective existence. Its culture and its own actuality are therefore the actualization of the substance itself.
Okay, so this is so, on Hegel's account then, as reconstructed by Branham, every description of an attitude towards a semantic content, i.e. a normative status, presupposes the normative responsibility of that very description. Otherwise, not only would it remain indeterminate whether or not the description is correct, it would not even be possible to characterize it as the description of an attitude, i.e. a belief. So, this is simply to say that it's impossible. In other words, you need to have some account of semantic content to be able to describe the attitudes that believers have towards those contents.
This is the reciprocal constitution of the propositional attitude of the believing and the believed. In fact, they're both aspects of a single indissociable unity on this account. and here, okay, and now I get so this is the crux of Brandom's critique of genealogy so this is quote number nine global genealogical reductive explaining a way of norms in favour of attitudes in other words the claim that all norms are conditioned by attitudes attitudes which are themselves just kind of embedded in the causal order presumes that it is intelligible for the contents of propositional attitudes to stay in place after normative reason relations amongst their judgeable contents are relinquished.
Otherwise, what is being explained genealogically can no longer be understood as believings, as attitudes of taking things to be, or representing them as thus and so. If our attitudes were not genuinely conceptually contentful, then we would not even be purporting to represent things as being thus and so, and things would not even seem to us to be thus and so. So, if this illusionment about the reality of norms of reasoning entails semantic nihilism, then it is self-defeating. The genealogist's claims would entail that her own claims are senseless. Okay, so now, I'm going, okay,
this account is not this will turn out to have problematic implications but at least I'll follow what immediately follows from this according to Brandom is a kind of objective idealism objective idealism being quote number 10 the tag for the claim that there is a reciprocal sense dependence relation between the concepts that articulate our grasp of the objective world object, property, fact, law, incompatibility. And here he means objective incompatibility. Incompatibility amongst objects. On the one hand, and the concepts that articulate are grasp of the practices of knowing and acting subjects. Singular term, predicate, asserting, inferring,
incompatibility, subjective. So this is what objective idealism means, according to Brandon. It means that the conditions of objectivation and therefore of theorization, including the critical articulations of reasons and causes, including saying that a subjective attitude is causally determined by an object in the world, presuppose the relationship between asserted and asserting, presuppose this double articulation of believing and believed. Okay, I'll move on. I'm going to move. It's taking quite long. I'm going to try and speed up a bit and just move to the final stages of Branham's critique.
So the next quote on the handout is that, Understanding genealogical analysis as undercutting the claims of reason, the rational bindingness of conceptual norms, depends on assessing the rationality of discursive practice solely on the basis of the extent to which the application of concepts, whose contents are construed as always already fully determinate, are responsive exclusively to evidential concerns. responsiveness of concept application to any factors that are contingent relative to the conceptual norms already in force which is the phenomenon genealogical diagnosis highlight is accordingly identified as irrationality but the idea that assessments of rationality are appropriately
addressed only to the application of already fully determinate concepts is the product of a blinkered semantic naivety. It ignores the fact that the very same discursive practice that is from one point of view the application of conceptual norms is from another point of view the institution of those norms and the determination of their contents. So, I'll cut, you know, I won't read the final sentence, it's just a reiteration of what I've already said. He occludes the genealogy of taking a one-sided, of adopting a one-sided perspective on the relationship between believings and believed, or between attitudes and norms. So, what then follows from this?
If one thinks in terms of a radical kind of holism, a radical semantic holism, in which what we call truth, truth could only be the true is the whole as the processional unity of the application, institution and determination of these three moments which are indissociable. And the consequence, and I think ultimately the problematic consequence of this account, is that it seems, at least on Brandham's account, a culture becomes a minimum unity, a linguistic community, becomes the minimum unit of interpretation insofar as it provides
the substantial form in terms of which assertions are recognizable as acts. Now, what is this... How does reason make progress? Or rather, how does reason come to kind of incorporate if the false is a moment of the true, how does reason come to retrospectively incorporate what was contingent, inessential and false into the conceptual determination of what is necessary, ineluctable and true. And Brandom chooses I think a very kind of
an instructive but also problematic paradigm. The paradigm he identifies is common law, the practice of common law, as exemplifying what he calls the rationalization of contingency. This is quote number 12. Rational or rationalizing processes of this sort, exemplified by common law, are responsible to the contents of the conceptual norms they apply and they exercise authority over the development of those conceptual contents. They are processes of determining conceptual contents, both in the sense of finding out what they are, manifested in the essentially retrospective rationale judges supply for their decisions, and in the sense of making those contents what they are, manifested in the essentially perspective shifting and sharpening of the norms each new interpretation proposes.
This is, and what Branham calls it, this hermeneutic practice gives contingency the normative form of necessity, and by incorporating those contingencies infuses determinate content into the developing norms. It is of the essence of the kind of rationality distinctive of this sort of concept determining process to be articulated by these complementary perspectives. Retrospective determining as finding and perspective determining as making. Responsibility to the tradition one inherits and authority over the tradition one bequeaths. So, okay, so dialectics then is the internalization of exteriority or the conversion of contingency into necessity to the constructive extension of a rule to incorporate what seemed to be an anomaly.
and it's the rationalisation of the contingent determination of acts of assertion which becomes integral to the rationality of what is asserted to the rationality of the content of the assertion I'm going to skip the final quotes just to focus on simply because it doesn't really add much. I don't want to talk for too much longer. Now, what is the... What can we conclude from this account?
First of all, that if the task of philosophy is to render explicit the conceptual norms implicit in discursive practice and to identify contradictions at the level of theoretical discourse, then it's also bound to expose the contradictions or incompatibilities between theoretical norms and practical norms, as well as incompatibilities pitting various practical norms against each other. So because rationality, according to Brandon, is indissociably conceptual and social, theoretical rationality is inseparable from practical rationality in the broadest sense. which encompasses every variety of human practice, whether material or intellectual. And this is what could be called the counter-normative thrust
of critical rationality on this kind of brandomian account. But the consequence is that philosophy cannot hold sociocultural norms accountable to an allegedly superior tribunal of pure reason. All it can do is hold these norms accountable to their own implicit criteria of rationality by rendering explicit both their conceptual inconsistencies and their practical incompatibilities. And in doing so, according to Brandom, it would exert the minimum degree of discursive pressure required to initiate the process of revising and ultimately transforming both social and cultural practices. Okay, now, here is where the obvious problem with this account, I think, manifests itself.
This is a form, if you think about this, so this is a form of holism, of semantic and epistemic holism, where a form of life then becomes the basic unit of understanding. Only someone who is, and in the example that Brandon gives, the obvious thing one starts to worry about is that, yes, the judge, there's this retrospective rationalization of decisions, this attempt to identify a rule or a principle that is implicit in the contingencies of these previous cases. and Brandon says that this is actually kind of the dialectical articulation of necessity and contingency this is the sense in which
contingency is only ever a moment of necessity but the problem is that implies a fundamental conservatism it seems to rule out the possibility of challenging the discursive practice or the rule the practice by which you identify the relevant precedence. It seems that this is kind of highly dubious on the face of it. Because it implies the conservatism of what Branden calls the hermeneutics of magnanimity. Precisely insofar as Vernunft a reason then becomes a form of life. And it's the wholeness of Vernunft that becomes a problem.
For it precludes us challenging the form of life in this allegedly integrated wholeness. So, in other words, the problem with this account of rationality is that it's attractive because of its minimalism, because of the way in which it seems to kind of give an elaboration, an understanding of the interconnectedness of reason and practice. So that practice in this sense is no longer something that is external to the game of giving
and asking for reasons. But the problem then is this, it seems to me, the excessive organicism of this of understanding the way in which the dialectical interpenetration of dependence and independence. And it seems fundamentally to rule out the possibility of any kind of you know, so it limits the degree to which you can call into questions, you can call into question the complicity between instituted
the institutions that are constituted of a form of life and various forms of injustice. Very simply, it just seems to entail a kind of reformism at best. Now this is where I think the problem then I think that Badiou is interesting in this regard because I think that what is interesting in Badiou's kind of Hegelianism or his residual Hegelianism is an attempt to kind of understand the conditions under which you can have rationality
can compile, can recognize the dysfunctioning in the structure, the transcendental structure that conditions these various forms of practices. In other words, it would allow you to identify a dysfunction in the consistency of the totality. Okay. Now the question then is whether it's possible to kind of to identify a criterion of recognizability that would allow you to identify these moments of dysfunction. And actually, I had something written about this, but I've just realised that there's a missing paragraph here.
So it's kind of annoying. So, okay, what I simply mean to say is this, is that here, Branham's account seems, in spite of its scrupulousness as regards avoiding the metaphysical inflation of rationality, doesn't seem to avoid the seduction of the sufficiency of philosophical rationality, precisely because it acknowledges the interconnectedness of rationality and sociality, but only at the cost of turning integrated social forms into the condition of rationality.
and this is problematic because first of all it assumes a problematic continuity between wholeness or unity or consistency and rationality and it precludes the kinds of ruptures that I think Badiou rightly associates with the most radical potencies of rationality the problems I see being that Badiou then doesn't give a kind of a metatheoretical account of the conditions of rationality because he tethers it to this kind of mathematical condition. So I think that what I take to be, or rather
what I'm interested in doing, what I'm basically interested in doing is seeing whether it's possible, what Badiou calls the articulation of being an event is a way of articulating, and in fact, you know, philosophy's conditioning by evental truths is actually kind of an acknowledgement of the way in which philosophy depends upon its own sophistical subversion in order to prevent it from simply, you know, ratifying and consolidating what is the existing state of things. I'll stop here.