Luke O'Sullivan (National University of Singapore), "Categories: A Study of a Concept in Western Philosophy and Political Thought"
Edinburgh University Press, 2024
We make use of concepts to organise our world all the time, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. Very often, in fact, we are blissfully unaware of the way in which our reality is structured by ideas. Plato was the first person in the Western philosophical tradition to focus on this problem. His philosophy attempted to explain how we make sense of the visible in terms of the invisible. The famous story of the cave, in which the prisoners sit staring with rapt attention at flickering shadows on the wall in front of them, unaware of how they are produced or that there is any other way of understanding reality, has acquired lasting appeal as an image of the human condition.
But is there really a world of ideas or logical concepts that exist in some manner accessible only to the intellect? Even in the ancient world Plato attracted some important critics of this view. His greatest student, Aristotle, introduced his theory of categories as ‘not-Forms’, so to say. Aristotle argues that our way of making sense of the world around us must involve ideas that were in the things themselves rather than located at another level of reality altogether. The debate between Plato and Aristotle prefigures modern arguments for Idealist and realist theories of categories. But its ramifications go beyond these seemingly rather abstract questions about knowledge and the nature of reality, or epistemology and ontology, to use the modern terms.
The first chapter of the book argues that for Plato the ideas (or Forms, as they are commonly known) were important not just because they answered to the philosophical puzzle of how we can have reliable knowledge of the world, but because they were the key to social order. In the Republic, Plato argued that good government was only possible if those in charge had mastered the knowledge of the Forms. His ideal philosopher-rulers were an enlightened group who possessed the esoteric knowledge of reality that could only be acquired by escaping the cave and confronting the Forms directly. Their authority was directly connected to their mastery of a course of education that passed through practical affairs (including war) and mathematics to the apprehension of fundamental abstractions.
The next three chapters show that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all followed  Plato in connecting categories, knowledge, and politics, even though their theories of categories were all different from one another. Aristotle’s theory of categories as immanent in the things must be taken as a theory of categories as ‘not-Forms’; his philosophy not only continued to address Plato but preserved its linkages. Certainly, the connections that Plato had established were habits of association rather than logically necessary ones. Nevertheless, they proved capable of surviving radical changes in content. Although Christianity broke with, or at least subordinated, metaphysical rationalism in favour of revealed truth, the ability to interpret the sacred texts, and the status of theology as occupying first place in the hierarchy of knowledge, were what legitimated the supreme authority of the church in spiritual matters. In the modern world, the emphasis has been on science as the discipline that tells us about the fundamental nature of reality, and scientific knowledge is the prerequisite for expert authority, if not for politicians, then for their advisors.
In modernity, categories assumed new importance, as part of the a priori structure of subjectivity for Kant, and for Hegel as the key components of his entire philosophical system. A grasp of categories and the associated departments of knowledge no longer gave philosophers themselves any title to rule, of course, though Kant, at least (as a kind of crypto-Platonist) thought that ideally philosophers would at least be given an advisory role. But the relationship between categories and politics was preserved even though the status of metaphysics had changed, albeit in negative form. The lack of authority for philosophy in public life stemmed, indeed, precisely from the belief either that reason gave no access to the nature of things in themselves (Kant), or that such access was a purely abstract, theoretical kind of knowledge only indirectly reflected in the working out of political affairs (Hegel).
In addition to exploring how ideas about categories and knowledge have fed into beliefs about the nature and sources of authority, the book makes the case that they have also typically marginalised historical knowledge. Plato was certainly concerned with historical cycles, but not with historiography as a genre of literature; Aristotle followed him in declaring it less philosophical than poetry because it was not concerned with universals. The same prejudices are discernible in Kant and Hegel, who gave considerable attention to the historical process, but were very little concerned with the logic of historiography despite the rise of the modern historical profession in Germany during the same period. For Kant and Hegel, history was universal and necessary, theological and teleological. History was of interest for Kant because it pointed the way to a progressive future in which peace would prevail; for Hegel it was already over, freedom in the West having been achieved.
The final three chapters of the book explore categorial thought since Hegel. It argues that contemporary theories of categories are responses to Hegel’s attempt to provide a single integrated theory of categories, knowledge, and politics. The first response, which I dub ‘fragmentarian’, was to deny that any such unified account was possible. Thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodore Adorno, and Michel Foucault all embraced versions of this ‘philosophy of the fragment’ in which categories became subject to historicity, power, and perspective. Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant’s critical philosophy as a covert cloak for a religious standpoint that sought to retain its social dominance was effectively echoed by both Adorno and Foucault, who saw classical philosophical systems as elaborate cloaks for established interests. Adorno in particular drew a direct link between the categorial systems created by Kant and Hegel and systems of social domination, exclusion, and at the extreme, extermination.
The second response I call ‘subordinationism’. Subordinationists wanted to restore the singleness of perspective, or at least the presence of a single ruling perspective, that had been lost since the collapse of Hegelianism. This desire did not take a Hegelian form, however. One variety of it was logical empiricism, which championed the categories of scientific knowledge, if not to the exclusion of all else, then as the only viable means by which we could have knowledge of reality. For a member of the Vienna Circle like Otto von Neurath, politics should likewise be erected on rational and scientific foundations. Martin Heidegger developed a mirror image of this view. His philosophy of Being deliberately marginalised categorial thought in favour of pursuing the ultimate ground of existence. This totalizing vision led Heidegger into some egregious political misjudgments that made him an enthusiastic support of Hitler in the early 1930s. The book argues that the explicit mutual disdain of Heidegger and the logical empiricists for one another actually concealed important similarities between them.
The final response was categorial pluralism. The pluralists tried to find a middle ground between the fragmentarian rejection of any possibility of a determinate theory of categories and the subordinationist search for a single master category or way of knowing. Knowledge was neither endlessly different in kind nor reducible to a unitary approach. Different perspectives required different categorial assumptions, but these perspectives were limited in number and their structures were intelligible. Their liberal theory of politics, which tried to balance individual freedom against the need for authority, reflected this approach. The pluralists were also the only group of thinkers to insist that philosophy should pay careful attention to the grounds of our knowledge of the past. Ernst Cassirer in Germany, R.G. Collingwood in England, and latterly Paul Ricoeur in France are examples of pluralists who made the case for the importance of understanding the past without making it subordinate to our present interests.
The book does not aim to establish any of the three contemporary approaches as superior to the others. All of them have had their champions and defenders. The aim is rather to present a fresh way of thinking about some of the major themes in modern thought that stresses a shared set of problems and cuts across common distinctions like that between analytic and continental philosophy, for instance. It also makes plain the importance of ideas, not least with respect to the harm they can do. Adorno was not wrong to highlight the harm that unreflective categorisation can cause. He remarked in Negative Dialectics that ‘in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died but a specimen’. No-one, however, is only a type, as Hegel’s study of the role of exclusion in classification and definition had previously warned us. The study of categories reminds us both of the power and the perils involved in using categories to carve not just nature, but society, at their joints. Since we cannot avoid doing so, it befits us to be as self-conscious and responsible as possible in the way we go about it, whether we are doing philosophy or science or politics. That might be one possible contemporary answer to that old question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’
Categories A Study of a Concept in Western Philosophy and Political Thought is available here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-categories.html
Code: use NEW30 for a 30% discount!
email: luke.d.osullivan@gmail.com
