(part 2 here)

There are at least three ways we can go from here.

If we’re pessimistic or bold enough, we may very well be fine with an infinite regress of criteria. Our inability to get a hold of a correct conceptual scheme would at the very least guarantee philosophy a spot in academia for all time to come. The endless working-through of different conceptual schemes may lead us, if not to a fully adequate conceptual scheme, then at least to one less objectionable than that which we began with. No surprise that our intellectual faculties, limited as they are, fail to let us see sub species aeternitatis. At best we tug at the robes of Klee and Benjamin’s angel of history:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

But let’s say we’re really, really bold. In our concept-generation we’ve seen not just the possibility of a better conceptual scheme but have glimpsed, as though rays of light cutting through the dark and looming canopy, some final judgment which might be rendered upon us. One need not articulate what this judgment consists in, but only point out that some trend or feature of our conceptualization pushes us toward a determinate conclusion of thought. Given enough knowledge about certain mathematical series (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16…), though certainly not an exhaustive listing of all of its members, one can after all ascertain that it yields a determinate sum (in this case, 1). In this case we stand with Hegel, who took it that reasoning would yield some Absolute which fully justified its own grounds. This Absolute would constitute a conceptual scheme fully adequate to a criterion of adequacy derived from itself.

In either case, regress plummets us from extravagant heights. We may not wish to take the leap. Denying the regress means denying that the adequacy of our conceptual schemes derives from other conceptual schemes. In other words, it involves accepting the primacy of the non-conceptual in determining the success of the conceptual. Such was the critique Marx levelled against his fellow Young Hegelians: they took the realm of thought to be independent of the material context in which it took place, believing genuine progress (philosophical or otherwise) to be possible merely by thinking through the concepts involved. Rather, Marx argued, critique must refer theories to the conditions of their genesis. Regardless of how a given theoretical position conceived of its goals and commitments, what was essential was to examine the actual ends to which its theory was put – the actual social function it played, or could play – as well as how its specific positions and arguments were made possible by and expressive of the real social conditions which produced them. It is not that our concepts are the means by which we make the world intelligible – quite the opposite. The world renders our concepts intelligible and provides them with a criterion of adequacy.

Take, for example, divine command theory as a conceptual schema for organizing political life during feudalism. Political authority flows from the king, as the representative of God’s will on earth, down through the princes and lords and knights all the way to the serfs who comprise the mass of society. Such a model of political organization, patently absurd to contemporary ears, was in its time legitimated not for its intellectual merits but for its plausibility to lived experience. Those in positions of power who each day made decisions governing the lives of those below them must indeed have found it plausible that their will on earth, functioning as it did like God’s in heaven, must have derived from the divine. Correspondingly those serfs who toiled for their masters due to happenstance of birth could at least make sense of their interminable labors as willed, if not by them, then by God. Feudalism as a conceptual scheme was overturned not (just, or fundamentally) because theorists discovered the possibility of a more equitable, secular society, but because the world it made intelligible had passed out of existence.

Whereas with the positions accepting regress we fell from lofty heights, with Marx’s position we seem not even possessed of a chance to attain them. For if conceptualization just reflects in thought the givens of material reality, then it becomes tempting to condemn it as a redundant fatalism. Thought, which from its outset strove to act as mirror to nature, finds itself always-already condemned to a derivative role. Its epistemic virtue – that thought might accurately describe the world – reveals itself an ontological vice, the crippling realization that wherever it looks it cannot but help stare unblinking at its double.