International Journal of Philosophical Studies

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Comments on Danielle Macbeth’s Realizing

Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing

Ray Brassier

To cite this article: Ray Brassier (2017): Comments on Danielle Macbeth’s Realizing Reason:
A Narrative of Truth and Knowing, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, DOI:
10.1080/09672559.2016.1275333

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International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2016.1275333

Comments on Danielle Macbeth’s Realizing Reason: A

Narrative of Truth and Knowing
Ray Brassier
American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

Here is Realizing Reason’s (henceforth RR) principal claim: reason is a power of

knowing, but ‘only after reason is realized as a power of knowing is it possible
to recognize the process of its realization as such’ (RR 1, my emphasis). What
is required for this recognition, according to Macbeth, ‘is a narrative of our
intellectual maturation and growth, one that, if successful, will change a reader’s
way of looking at things’ (RR vii). I think the book has succeeded: it has cer-
tainly changed my way of looking at things. I will try to give a brief summary
of the decisive turning points that punctuate its narrative before asking about
the nature of the afterwardness implied by reason’s necessarily retrospective
recognition of its own power of knowing.
The process of maturation narrated by Macbeth unfolds through three
successive stages of cognitive directedness towards the world, each of which
encapsulates a distinct version of the part/whole, mind/world relation. The first
stage is the ancient Greek paradigm according to which knowing is a power
of perception proper to rational animals as distinct forms of life endowed with
characteristic powers. Thought is in touch with the things themselves via per-
ception because mind and world form an essential unity, ‘the parts of which can
only be understood relative to the whole’ (RR 295). Thus what is puzzling for
the Greeks is how perception can fail to perceive rightly, not how it can succeed.
But this equation of knowledge with perception generates a difficulty when it
comes to accounting for mathematical knowledge. Just as it is obvious for Plato
that mathematical knowledge involves the perception of supersensible objects,
it is equally obvious for Aristotle that mathematical objects do not exist other
than as intellectually abstracted from sensible substances. The difficulty is that
of accounting for intelligible truth in terms of a model of knowledge modeled
on sensory perception. Macbeth puts the difficulty as follows:
Plato is right: no adequate account of mathematical truth can be achieved unless
we recognize that mathematicians in their practice somehow transcend the

CONTACT Ray Brassier [email protected]

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2  R. BRASSIER

sensory world of ever-changing things. But so is Aristotle: no adequate account

of mathematical knowledge can be achieved by talk of mathematicians transcend-
ing, in their practice, the sensory world of becoming. (RR 104)
This problem, Macbeth maintains, will only be resolved with the full realiza-
tion of reason’s power of knowing. The Euclidean diagram is the first decisive
step towards this realization, prefiguring the solution that will only emerge
fifteen centuries later. Macbeth discerns in Euclid’s diagrams a provisional
attempt to overcome the rift between sensible knowledge and supersensible
truth: constructing the intelligible within the sensible, the diagram bridges
the gap between the sensible and the supersensible, providing a medium for
reasoning that does not picture objects but rather formulates the content of
concepts. The Euclidean diagram does not present instances of kinds but icons
with inherently general, non-natural meanings: it ‘does not instantiate content
but formulates it’ (RR 86).
The second stage of Macbeth’s narrative is inaugurated with the early mod-
ern paradigm of knowing as a power of understanding proper to the mind,
now defined by Descartes as a thinking substance. The immediacy of sensory
perception is deemed unreliable vis-à-vis the clarity and distinctness of mental
representations that are judged to be true through an act of will. Objects are no
longer instances of kinds but outward manifestations of underlying intelligible
laws:
The law is independent of the objects it governs, something in its own right that
can be expressed, using two or more unknowns, in the symbolic language of
algebra; and it is grasped in pure thought. The law in this way both underlies and
explains the appearance of, say, circles, their characteristic symmetries. (RR 140)
The new paradigm overturns the ancient conception according to which places
make up space. With Descartes, space becomes an ‘antecedently given whole of
possible positions within which objects, landmarks, may but need not be placed,
each independent of all the others’ (RR 136). The conceptual understanding of
relations between independent magnitudes, now encoded in the purely sym-
bolic language of algebra, supplants the diagrammatic exhibition of intelligible
properties. In this new paradigm, at once mechanicist and reductionist, mind
and world form a merely accidental unity, ‘the parts of which are fully intelli-
gible prior to and independent of the whole’ (RR 295). This is the beginning
of what Macbeth, following McDowell, calls the ‘sideways on’ view, in which
the meaningful interiority of mind, or space of reasons, is juxtaposed against
the meaningless exteriority of matter in motion, the realm of causes. While the
contrast between inside and outside, reasons and causes, is perfectly intelligible
from within this modern paradigm of understanding, it is also (and paradox-
ically) irreducible since there is no reason from whence to deduce inside from
outside, reasons from causes, or vice versa. Here Macbeth diagnoses the incep-
tion of an intractable dichotomy that continues to stymie much contemporary
philosophizing. As we shall see, the question is whether it can be overcome
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES  3

without regressing to the pre-modern fusion of reasons and causes; a fusion

which would require leveling the modern ontological rift between subjective
intention and objective causality. Macbeth’s stance is modernist (commendably
so) precisely insofar as she proposes rationally overcoming the rift between
inside and outside without re-infusing objectivity with subjectivity.
Kant is a Janus-faced figure at this second stage of Macbeth’s narrative. On
the one hand, he completes Descartes’ tentative separation of thinking from
sensing by firmly distinguishing between sensibility, the source of intuited
particularity, and understanding, the source of conceptual generality, as the
two sources of knowledge. Only concepts applied to sensible intuitions yield
knowledge of objects. On the other hand, and unlike Descartes, Kant sees that
the spontaneity of conceptual understanding is fulfilled by the receptivity of
sensible intuition: the understanding’s active power of knowing can only be
actualized through the passivity of sensibility: ‘Spontaneity, the active power
of judgment […] is […] a kind of expressive freedom, the power not to make
something into something but fully to actualize something that already is,
to make manifest what is otherwise latent’ (RR 192). But for Macbeth this
Kantian insight, straining against Descartes’ dualism of thought and exten-
sion, is limited because Kant’s distinction between transcendental form and
empirical content retains something of the ‘sideways on’ view: since sensory
experiences are caused in us by things outside us that we cannot experience,
we cannot be directly answerable to the things that cause our experiences, only
to our representations of things as they appear to us. As a result, the power of
judgment to actualize knowing and to put us in touch with things as they are
is hindered by Kant’s transcendental idealism. Newton’s mathematized nature
is nature for us, not in itself. The content of mathematical propositions can be
decomposed into an intuitive component deriving from the forms of sensibility,
and a universal component deriving from the concepts applied to those intu-
itions. Mathematical construction is the application of conceptual generality
to sensible intuition. Macbeth summarizes Kant’s account of mathematical
reasoning as follows:
Reasoning in mathematics, on Kant’s account, involves the two-dimensional dis-
play of the contents of mathematical concepts, concepts such as that of a triangle
or circle in a Euclidean diagram, and that of a sum of squares or a product of
sums in Descartes’ symbolic language. And because such displays can be com-
bined into larger wholes that can in turn be reconfigured, either perceptually as
in Euclid or by rewriting as in Descartes’ algebra, new relations among concepts
can be discovered in the course of mathematical reasoning in these systems of
written signs. Such results are synthetic, that is, ampliative, real extensions of
our knowledge, and also a priori, necessary and strictly universal, just as Kant
says. (RR 165)
The synthetic or ampliative component of mathematical knowledge ultimately
derives from sensibility, while its necessary and universal component comes
from the understanding. It is this perceptual constraint on knowledge that
4  R. BRASSIER

reason is compelled to overstep. Kant limits the grasp of the concept to the
empirical, barring it from reality in itself. Pure reason, unconstrained by sensi-
bility, is demoted, becoming the source of transcendental illusion. But Macbeth
argues that Kant’s compromise was shattered in the course of the nineteenth
century when both mathematics and physics began to systematically relinquish
sensible intuition: the former to become a pure ‘thinking in concepts’ with
Riemann and Dedekind, the latter to transform the relative into a portal onto
the absolute with the advent of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The third stage, and the proper culmination of scientific modernity accord-
ing to Macbeth, is knowing as a power of reason exercised in and through con-
cepts alone. Reason is purged of the recourse to intuition and realizes itself as
a pure ‘thinking in concepts’. Macbeth credits Frege with forging the resources
required to achieve this purification. By making a ‘distinction of distinctions’
between sense (Sinn) and signification (Beudeutung) on one hand, and con-
cepts and objects on the other, Frege overcomes Kant’s opposition of concept
to intuition and of logical form to semantic content as well as his conflation
of objects and objectivity. Sense is objective, but not object-bound. Logic is
concerned with content, not just form. Thus, on Macbeth’s account, Frege’s
mathematization of logic is not only the mathematization of sense but also its
ontologization: ‘Fregean sense (Sinn) is that through which, as the medium or
vehicle of awareness, we are in direct cognitive contact with reality’ (RR 448).
Since concepts have referents as well as senses, we need to acknowledge their
reality and objectivity as well as that of objects. Reason allows us to uncover
different dimensions of sense just as perception allows us to uncover different
features of objects.
The sense/signification, concept/object pairs of distinctions are put to work
in Frege’s ‘concept-script’, a mathematical language that permits the ampliative
and discursive elaboration of the content (sense) of concepts, now conceived
as intelligible unities. An intelligible unity, says Macbeth, is ‘something that
possesses independently intelligible parts but is also a whole that is not merely
reducible to its parts’ (RR 291). Frege’s concept-script allows us to express ‘the
inferentially articulated content of concepts in a way that enables deductive
proofs’ (RR 378). Proofs employing linear and joining inferences are essential
unities; they employ the laws of logic alone to move from one proposition
to the next. For Macbeth Frege’s proof of theorem 133 in his Begriffschrift is
precisely such an intelligible unity: ‘The proof is a whole, a unity, because its
steps are necessary, deductively valid. But because some of its steps are not
logically necessary, the proof also has real parts’ (RR 399). The necessity at
issue is not just logical because it involves rules depending on the definitions
(i.e. the senses) of concepts.
Thus Macbeth’s contention is that logic does not just pertain to form; it is a
contentful science: the science of concepts qua concepts. Moreover, Macbeth
suggests, acknowledging the objectivity of sense allows us to understand how
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES  5

mathematics can have cognitive purchase on reality. Thus Frege’s logical work
reconnects with the Aristotelian model of science as pertaining to domains of
being. Indeed, as Macbeth shows, Frege explicitly espouses the Aristotelian
model of science, according to which a system of concepts and judgments
constitutes a science just in case:
• All those concepts and judgments concern a certain domain of being(s).
• Among the concepts, some are primitive and the rest are defined by appeal
to those primitive concepts.
• Among the judgments, some are primitive and the remainder are proven
as theorems from those primitive judgments.
• The judgments of the science are true, necessary, and universal.
• The judgments are known to be true, either directly or through proof.
• The concepts are adequately known, either directly or through definitions.
(RR 386)
Interestingly however, on Macbeth’s account it is precisely this pre-modern
Aristotelian model that provides Frege with a criterion of cognitive fallibility
consonant with the modern post-Kantian conception of reason as a ‘self cor-
recting enterprise’. For Frege, it is
only by adhering to the [Aristotelian] model and thereby making as explicit as
one can just how one understands things to be that one is put in a position to
discover that one does not know something one had thought one knew. (RR 375)
Moreover, Macbeth continues,
we discover those imperfections in our understanding by reasoning on the basis
of concepts insofar as we understand them, that is, grasp the senses through
which they are disclosed. But such a process of reasoning can reveal imperfections
[in Frege’s words] ‘only . . . if the content is not just indicated but is constructed
out of its constituents by means of the same logical signs as are used in the
computation.’ (RR 377)1
Interestingly, this form of logical fallibilism is importantly unlike the brand
of skepticism inspired by the ‘sideways on’ view. The objectivity of concepts is
independent of objects. Moreover, because conceptual senses are the condition
of access to objects, concepts cannot be held accountable to objects as though
these directly indexed non-conceptual reality. Thus, unlike skepticism, fallibi-
lism does not hold concepts accountable to a notion of ‘things being otherwise’
that is simply a vacuous possibility abstracted from the way we take them to be.
The upshot is that mathematical language is not an empty formalism; yet nor
does it derive its content from sensible intuition. It is a priori yet fallible, and it
yields ‘knowledge of concepts of various sorts of entities; it is most immediately
the medium of our cognitive grasp of mathematical concepts’ (RR 448). As
deployed in fundamental physics, Macbeth insists, those concepts enable us to
discover how things are for all rational beings, not just how they appear to us.
In general relativity and quantum mechanics, the relative is that through which
6  R. BRASSIER

we have access to the absolute. These theories are not mathematical models
representing an underlying physical reality: the mathematics are disclosive of
the structure of reality as such, ‘not what matter is “made of ” but what it is in
its own nature’ (RR 442, my emphasis). Thus, ‘the mathematics of Einstein’s
relativity directly discloses to pure thought a fundamental aspect of reality,
namely, the space-time field that is the cosmos’ (RR 433). Similarly, Macbeth
suggests, quantum theory discloses ‘evolutionary time’ as another fundamental
aspect of reality. A process in evolutionary time is such that ‘there is no fact of
the matter regarding what is now going on except in the light of what will be,
how things in fact turn out’ (RR 443). To say that quantum processes occur in
evolutionary time is to say that
what state a system is in now is a function not only of the past, including past
measurements on it, but also of the future, what measurements will be made, how
things will turn out. By measuring we thus can bring it about that something in
particular was true in the past in much the way the emergence of some species
brings it about that it was the case in the past that the evolution of that species
was taking place. (RR 445)
This speculative proposal, coming as it does in the book’s final section, forges
an extremely suggestive link between natural and historical being. Evolutionary
time is the time in which we can determine what has been only once we know
how things will have turned out. Only once a potential has been realized can the
process of its actualization be retroactively traced. It is the book’s confidence in
the actualization of reason’s power of knowing that provides the condition for
its reconstruction of the process through which that potential came to be real-
ized. Moreover, although this involves a critical reconstruction of modernity’s
‘sideways on’ perspective on mind and world, it is equally critical of attempts
to abandon the project of modernity and recover a more authentic relation to
the world by returning to Aristotle:
We cannot merely turn our backs on the practice of science, directly recover a
more Aristotelian conception of our being in the world, because we know as
Aristotle did not that we (and other living beings) are not natural in precisely
the way that non-living things are natural. (RR 447)
That the book repurposes the critique of Cartesianism to serve the realization
of modern reason is among its most striking achievements.
I will conclude with two questions suggested by Macbeth’s narrative. The
first is about the link between potentiality and nature. In Aristotle, potentiality
is circumscribed by essence: what something can become depends upon what
it essentially is: this is its nature. But this essential being is its actuality; essence
is what substance always already has been. One of the things that Heidegger
does in Being and Time is propose a notion of potentiality unconstrained by
any essence understood as a past actuality: this is Dasein’s existence as ‘pure
potentiality to be’ (Seinkönnen), which Dasein realizes by relating to its future
in a way that transforms both its past and its present. This rearticulation of
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES  7

past, present, and future – transforming what has been into what will have
been – is the key to historical being for Heidegger. It is also what distinguishes
historical being from natural being: the human potentiality to be is historical
precisely because it is unnatural. To exist historically is to exist in a state of
perpetual ‘afterwardness’, in which what has been depends on what will be.
Is the account of evolutionary time sketched in Realizing Reason one way of
reconnecting nature and history? If so, is the afterwardness through which
reason retrospectively establishes its own history natural after all? This would
mean that science transforms our understanding of history as much as history
transforms our understanding of science.
The second question is about concepts and history. Given its rejection of
Kantian transcendentalism and its defense of the objectivity and reality of con-
cepts, Realizing Reason seems sympathetic to Hegelian rationalism, wherein
subject and object are reciprocally articulated to achieve a ‘mediated imme-
diacy’ (a phrase Macbeth reiterates throughout the book). Some of Macbeth’s
formulations are certainly redolent of Hegel: ‘The radical otherness of the world,
its full objectivity, completes the spontaneity of thought, in just this way that
the spontaneity of thought and the objectivity of the world form an intelligible
unity’ (RR 451). However, for Hegel, this unity is never permanent because of
the irreducible dissonance between spontaneity and objectivity. Their relation is
marked by a negativity which is the source of their difference, but also of their
identity. This dissonance fuels history (Hegel’s ‘highway of despair’). Moreover,
Hegel inscribes concepts into history while injecting becoming into concepts,
so that while his Phenomenology charts the successive shapes of spirit, his Logic
charts the internal development and transformation of concepts. This stands
in stark contrast to Frege’s anti-historicism, which Macbeth emphasizes using
Frege’s own words:
A logical concept does not develop and it does not have a history . . . If we said
instead ‘history of attempts to grasp a concept’ or ‘history of the grasp of the
concept’, this would seem to me much more to the point; for a concept is some-
thing objective: we do not form it, nor does it form itself in us, but we seek to
grasp it, and in the end we hope to have grasped it, though we may mistakenly
have been looking for something when there was nothing. (Frege, ‘On the Law
of Inertia’, quoted in RR 377)
Although both Hegel and Frege espouse forms of conceptual realism, Frege’s
anti-historicism about concepts is more Platonic than Hegelian. My question is
whether Macbeth’s apparent endorsement of Frege’s anti-historicism conflicts
with her claim that reason becomes, that it needs history to realize its own
power. I take Macbeth’s fundamental contention to be that the realization of
reason is an evolutionary process. Recall that for Macbeth, an evolutionary pro-
cess is one such that ‘there is no fact of the matter regarding what is now going
on except in the light of what will be, how things in fact turn out’ (RR 443). If
reason unfolds in evolutionary time, if its realization takes time, then the truth
8  R. BRASSIER

about what concepts are and have been is indissociable from what they will be.
More precisely: if reason’s self-understanding (or self-consciousness) is decisive
for its self-realization, can one cleanly separate the objectivity of concepts, i.e.
what concepts are, from the history of the senses through which we grasp them?

Note
1. 
Macbeth here quotes from Frege’s ‘Boole’s Logical Calculus and the Concept-
Script’ in Posthumous Writings, edited by H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, and F.
Kaulbach, translated by P. Long and R. White (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979), pp. 9–46.