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1/18/2018

Hegel Seminar—Week 1 Notes

1. Q: Why care about Hegel? A: Contemporary Anglophone situation. Sellars: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase. Rorty on me: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its incipient Kantian to its eventual Hegelian phase. What would it mean to do this?

2. I say that I am offering a semantic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Why? A: Because I see thinking about concept use and conceptual content as the center of his philosophical interests. Further, I think he has a very sophisticated account of these central phenomena—one that we can learn a lot from today. I’m going to motivate it two ways: from Kant, and from Wittgenstein.

One of the reasons my reading makes so little contact with the huge secondary literature on Hegel [Stekeler-Weithofer’s Hegels Analytische Philosophie is an exception.] is that his readers—particularly in Germany—by and large missed this central, axial concern. I think there are causes for this, rather than reasons: he left no philosophically able students whose principal concern was his logic and metaphysics. For understandable reasons, they all cared about social, political, and broadly cultural parts of the system. It is fascinating to speculate about how differently the history of philosophy would have developed if these motivating problems—which we only recovered via Wittgenstein’s lessons—had been appreciated by philosophers after Hegel’s death in 1831.

3. Kant’s normative pragmatism:

a) Kant on the framework: Kant discovered that the expressive role characteristic of some concepts (alethic modal ones being the paradigm) is not to describe how things empirically are, but to make explicit features of the framework of practices that makes empirical description possible.

b) Kant’s normative turn. Judgment as minimal unit of responsibility. Subjective and objective forms of judgment. Task responsibility is integrating into an SUA.

c) That view about pragmatics has consequences for conception of the content of judgments: they must stand in relations of material (concept-specific) incompatibility and consequence. This is a pragmatist order of explanation—explanatory primacy not of the practical over the theoretical (Fichte?) but of force over content.

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4. Three big questions are left over: a) Content 1: Two dimensions of intentionality. Need to synthesize OSUA gives that- intentionality, what about of-intentionality? Kant has two ideas: i) inferential triangulation (as in Woodbridge Lecture I) ii) invocation of immediacy of representation, in the form of intuitions. b) Content 2: Determinateness. i) In what sense do conceptual contents need to be determinate? Kant has an answer to this: Kant-Frege determinateness. In this case, it must be settled for every rule and every manifold of representations, whether that manifold can be successfully synthesized by that rule—i.e. integrated into the SUA—or whether another rule is needed, or some of the manifold must be rejected as spurious. ii) Where do the determinate conceptual contents come from? Here Kant has only some weak things to say: once things are off the ground, reflective judgments (3rd Critique) can make new concepts from old ones. But where do any empirical concepts come from? c) Normativity: What is the origin and nature of discursive normativity (Gültigkeit, Verbindlichkeit)? Here Kant does not have a good answer. Transcendental activity (instituting the discursive norms) must precede empirical activity (applying the discursive norms in endorsing judgments and practical maxims).

5. Hegel will take over Kant’s normative pragmatism, but offer new answers to all these questions. Further his answers to the three questions will be integrated into one story. (I tell part of this story in the Woodbridge lectures.)

6. Let me motivate two of these questions (the second and third) another way. For I think these are two of the big questions that Wittgenstein asks. Further, I think the general form of the answers Hegel gives is the same as LW’s. But there is a lot more structure to H’s account than to LWs. One of the big issues (partly a reflection of metaphilosophical and methodological differences) between McDowell and me concerns whether this additional level of fine-structure is a good or a bad thing.

7. A threat to the intelligibility of the determinateness (of discursive norms): This is essentially Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s problem—though it need not be set up as SK does. The

2 Brandom issue is how to understand the nature and origin of determinate conceptual norms against the background of a pragmatist order of semantic explanation. a) We can start with Quine’s version of pragmatism (even though he is blind to the normative dimension of concept-use). The slogan for my claim here is Hegel:Kant :: Quine:Carnap. Kant and Carnap have two-phase theories: First, concepts, meanings, or languages are instituted. Then, subsequently, judgments are made, beliefs formulated, theories endorsed. Quine argues that while this is fine for artificial, formal languages, it is not and cannot be how things work for natural languages. In the former case, the meanings are stipulated—in some expressively powerful metalanguage. But in the case of natural languages, languages in use, it is only the use of the language that can confer meanings on the expressions used. And the use consists in making judgments, applying concepts, formulating and endorsing theories. So the challenge is to understand how the one thing we do, use the language to make judgments, can count at once as both instituting the discursive norms and applying them. b) Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s version of this issue. How can what we actually do, namely apply concepts in actual circumstances, and exhibit dispositions to do so in others, determine (make determinate) what we ought to do in all future cases? A: If by “determinate” one means Kant-Frege determinateness, “rails laid out to infinity,” one cannot. So: what to do? Quine gives up on the idea of meaning—and in a certain sense, so does LW (as semantic nihilist). But in another sense, LW’s response is to talk us out of the feeling the need for determinateness in that (Kant-Frege) sense. What Hegel does that LW does not do is give us a new model of determinateness, according to the metaconceptual structure of Vernunft rather than the Kantian Verstand.

8. The threat of genealogy: How to understand the rational bindingness of conceptual norms, once their radical contingency (on details of our embodiment, training, and history— both communal-traditional and individual-pedagogic) is appreciated.

Hegel: From rational derivability to genealogy (historical: at once rational and causal). The issue here is that the great discovery of modernity is the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. But what attitudes individuals actually adopt is contingent on many things. How, then, can we see the norms that are instituted thereby as rationally binding on us? Those norms make us who we are (we are our commitments and responsibilities). If those norms are not rational, how are we to identify with them? This is alienation.

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3 Brandom a) A genealogy offers an explanation of why (cf. Sellars’s “becausation”) discursive norms are as they are, or why applications of them are as they are, that does not appeal to reasons why the norms are as they are, or the applications are as they are. It appeals to causes instead: contingent features of embodiment, provenance, situation, history, tradition, interests, and so on. LW often offers genealogies of our discursive practices, or describes practices for which genealogical explanations are made available. b) But for the great unmaskers (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud in the 19th century, Foucault and Derrida closer to our time), genealogy undercuts rationality, and undercuts even the idea that it is because the norms are as they are that we do what we do. The most radical form undercuts the very idea that the existence of a norm that can be explained (or details of whose content can be explained) genealogically can provide a reason for applying a term one way rather than another. c) Genealogies are in the first instance about the institution of discursive norms. They interact with the application of norms in two ways. First, one can explain why the applications are as they are by appealing to a norm governing them, and then offer a genealogy of the institution of the norm. Second, one can offer genealogical explanations of the application of a discursive norm, and then appeal to the Quine-LW claim that applying the norm must also institute it.

10. From Verstand to Vernunft: a) These are two paired threats to the intelligibility of the institution and application of discursive norms.

i. The first questions how applying those norms can institute them, can determine a genuine norm. How can actual applications settle what ought to be done in an indefinite number of novel future cases (i.e. institute a KF-determinate norm)?

ii. The second questions how norms can rationalize or otherwise justify one application rather than another, given the possibility of genealogical explanations of the institution of the norm. How can the norm explain, justify, or rationalize the applications, if it itself is explicable genealogically? b) Hegel’s response (and I think it is in the same general direction as LW’s) is i) to acknowledge the facts on which the two threats are predicated, and ii) to claim that the idea that they are threats to the intelligibility of the norm-governed character of discursive practice is based on a mistaken view of what that norm-governed character is;

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and iii) to claim that both are based on the same mistaken presuppositions: a structure he calls “Verstand,” iv) to offer a worked-out alternative structure: “Vernunft.” c) The key to his response is that in some sense, by thinking about both threats together, we see how they can neutralize each other. Each provides the key to responding to the other. They are two sides of one coin. d) Roughly, the response to the threat to the intelligibility of applications instituting determinate norms is to deny that the fact that more than one norm is compatible with prior applications means that any norm instituted is completely indeterminate. Applying the norm is determining the norm, making it more determinate, without making it wholly determinate (in the K-F sense). [Note: later on, we’ll see that this is the prospective perspective on norm institution and application.] A new notion of determinateness is required. e) Roughly, the response to the threat of genealogy is that once we see that it is precisely the genealogically explicable contingencies in the institution-by-application of the norm that are the determining of it, the rendering of it more determinately contentful, and that that is the only possible source of determinateness, we see that the idea that genealogy undercuts the normative bindingness of what it explains is based on a fantasy about norms and determinateness: the Kant-Frege-Carnap Verstand fantasy about KF- determinate norms first instituted (laying out “rails to infinity”) and then applied.

11. Story of “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel” Part I: a) Distinction between i. Ordinary, ground-level, determinate empirical, practical, and theoretical concepts, and ii. logical, philosophical, or speculative meta-concepts, whose distinctive expressive job it is, on my reading, to let us make explicit the use, contents, and development of ordinary determinate concepts.  In both Kant and Hegel, I think the measure of our understanding of them is the story we can tell about their views on (i), and secondarily, how their versions of (ii) helps them do it. But the measure of their differences in (ii) is the very different stories they tell about (i). Pursuing their work from this direction is difficult, however, since both of them say a lot more about (ii), which they think of as the core of their philosophical contributions, than they do about (i). b) H thinks that determinate and logical concepts ((i) and (ii) above) are different with respect to their potential completeness and finality: i. logical concepts can be (and at least arguably are [though vide the incompleteness of H’s magisterial tour de force discussion of the forms of inference in WL: inferences involving iterated quantification are notable by their absence] and can be known to be complete,

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correct, adequate, and final. Their metaconceptual role (as metavocabulary) can be fully and finally carried out. [This interpretive claim about Hegel is not controversial.] ii. determinate concepts cannot be (and hence, a fortiori, cannot be known to be) complete, correct, adequate, and final. The march of empirical science has no end in principle. Herein lies a very interesting story: Hegel’s version of Kant’s (and both pre-Kantian empiricists and rationalists agree) version of the conceptual inexhaustibility of the sensuous lies not (just) in its always outrunning any finite set of judgments, but also in the (holistic) instability of the concepts. [see SPCRH] c) H thinks determinate and logical concepts are alike in that their content can in principle be specified or conveyed only genealogically: by a rational reconstruction of a possible history of their development. He does this for some general and abstract determinate concepts in his Realphilosophie. And both the PhdG and the WL do it—each in its own way—for the logical, speculative metaconcepts. d) My overall critical philosophical claim in the vicinity ((a), (b), and (c) are interpretive claims) is that Hegel is wrong about both (b) and (c): both in his claim about how determinate and logical concepts are different, and in his claim about how they are alike. e) He is wrong about (b), because any set or system of logical concepts, too, must always fail to make explicit everything about the use and content of ordinary determinate concepts. The conceptual, no less than the sensuous, is (meta)conceptually inexhaustible. Here I invoke the expressivism about logic (itself a Kantian-Hegelian, as well as Fregean, claim) that is built on my inferentialism about semantic content (an Hegelian theme). [Tell my story about a] distinguishing various sorts of ‘ought’s on the normative- pragmatic side: prudential, legal, moral; and b] the expressive roles of various conditionals: classical, intuitionistic, modally strict, relevant.] f) And H is wrong about I because although he is right about the necessity of genealogical specification of the contents of determinate concepts, the distinctive metaconceptual role of logical, philosophical concepts makes another route available to convey them. We can say directly, in other terms, what they help us say about the use and content of determinate concepts. That is what I aim to do for the PhdG and the WL: say what they end up teaching us about determinate concepts, and how their vocabulary helps us do that, but doing that in other terms.

12. On the issue of systematicity, and the potential viability of “cafeteria Hegelianism,” contra Rolf-Peter Horstmann. He claims that Hegel’s commitment to philosophical systematicity—a kind of holism at the level of metasemantics—specifically, explicitly, and unavoidably forbids picking out some of his philosophical claims (a proper subset) for endorsement, while rejecting others. My response is that the holism that matters is for ground-level semantics: the semantics of non-philosophical, non-speculative, non-logical concepts. He is just wrong to think that it holds also of his metaconcepts. Various features that he lumps together under the heading of “Vernunft” are actually separable, and separately intelligible claims, which ought to be assessed for their viability and plausibility individually (retail, not wholesale assessment). That is, the first of Hegel’s claims that I deny is the systematicity claim on which Horstmann relies.

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Part II:

What would it be to make the Hegelian move from this Kantian perspective?

Outline of Hegel’s Big Ideas:

1) HBI #1: The social nature of the normative

2) HBI #2: Reciprocal recognition as the structure of the social

3) HBI #3: A conception of the conceptual

4) HBI # 4: Semantic/Conceptual Holism

5) HBI # 5: Idealism: objective, conceptual, absolute

6) HBI #6: Intentionality: expressive and representational, and the relations between them.

What follows is some discussion of each of these points:

HBI #1) The social nature of the normative: a) Kant’s master idea, I claimed, is his normative turn: his identification of us as creatures who live and move and have our being in a normative space of acknowledging, attributing, and assessing commitments, obligations, responsibilities, authorities. He reconstrues concepts as rules that determine what we have committed ourselves to, and what would entitle us to those commitments, by applying those concepts in judging and acting. b) In taking this line, he sides with his rationalist predecessors, against the empiricists, with respect to their claim that in order to be aware of anything in a cognitiviely significant sense, in order to have any potentially cognitively significant experience, one must already have concepts. For that awareness and experience consists in making judgments (the minimal unit of cognitive responsibility or authority), which is applying concepts. If that is right, then one cannot intelligibly envisage a situation in which one already has experiential awareness, but not yet concepts—which are to be understood as arising subsequently, by processes such as association and abstraction. c) The problem the rationalists notoriously faced is then to say where the concepts come from. How is it that a potential knower has access to concepts in advance of the experiential awareness that, it is claimed, presupposes them? d) This problem is no less pressing for Kant than for Leibniz. What is his response? The pure concepts, the categories, are a priori—effectively, innate. But what about ordinary empirical and practical concepts? In the third Critique we hear a bit about “judgments of reflection”, by which such concepts are said to be formed. Although we are not given much in the way of details, such judgments are judgments, and seem to presuppose that one can at least already use concepts, if not, perhaps, the very ones being formed. So a question would seem to remain about how the whole thing gets going. The general picture seems to be that empirical activity (both theoretical and practical) consists in the application of norms (concepts) that are made intelligible by some underlying noumenal activity, which does not consist in endorsing empirical

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claims and practical maxims. From this point of view, Kant appears as having gotten a good grip on the essentially normative character of cognition and action, but as having no very definite story to tell about the nature and origins of normativity as such. Those questions can be seen as having been punted into a noumenal realm beyond and behind our mundane empirical concept- mongering activity. What, in the end, is Kant’s theory of normativity? e) One of Hegel’s big ideas is that normativity is an essentially social phenomenon. Normative statuses such as obligation, commitment, responsibility, and authority are social statuses. To be able to undertake commitments and responsibilities, to acknowledge obligations and authorities, is a social achievement. In particular, the notion of being responsible is unintelligible apart from its connection to the possibility of being held responsible. Having authority is unintelligible apart from its connection to the possibility of someone’s acknowledging that authority. In general, normative statuses such as commitment and obligation make sense only in the context of practices of taking or treating people as committed and obliged. f) A terminological point: Hegel seldom uses explicitly normative terms such as (the German analogues of) ‘authority’, ‘responsibility’, ‘commitment’ and so on. (Though the Kantian ‘Pflicht’ does play a prominent role.) But I think his invocation of these concepts is ubiquitous. For as I read him, Hegel’s way of talking about authority and responsibility is to use the terms ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’. I think these elastic terms always appeal to this underlying normative sense in his writings, and that looking for how this core sense is appealed to is an important step in understanding the more general point of many of his allegories. g) In taking this social line about the normative, Hegel brings Kant back down to earth. The origins of normativity in noumenal activity presupposed by empirical activity are now found in our social surround. In a slogan coined (for another purpose) by John Haugeland, on this view “all transcendental constitution is social institution.” Kant’s normative insight is in an important sense naturalized (not a term often associated with Hegel’s project) by being socialized. h) In this regard, Hegel belongs in a box with the later Wittgenstein. For the Wittgenstein of the Investigations is driven by the Kantian insight that intentionality is an essentially normative phenomenon—that agency, for instance, is a matter of our authority over what happens and our making ourselves responsible to what happens (for the success of our doing). And he fully appreciates and brilliantly presents the perspectives from which such distinctively normative significances of our performances can come to seem mysterious and magical. His recipe for de- mystification is always to exhibit them in the context of the social practices (“customs, uses, institutions”) within which they acquire and display those significances.

HBI #2) Reciprocal recognition as the structure of the social: i) Hegel’s term for the normative realm—for the dimension of our activities that is articulated by norms in the sense of being open to normative assessment, our commitments and entitlements, responsibilities and authorities, everything that can be correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate—is ‘Geist’, spirit. Hegel sees Geist as an essentially social phenomenon. For someone to be a self in the Kantian sense is to be a subject of normative statuses: commitment, responsibility, authority, and so on. To say that Geist is an essentially social phenomenon is to say that talk of selves and talk of communities are two sides of one coin. [Not just in the sense that the concepts self and community are reciprocally sense-dependent, but in the stronger sense that they are reciprocally reference-dependent.] Talk of someone as having authority or responsibility, as committed or entitled is always implicitly talk of that individual as a member of a community. Normatively characterized individuals and their communities are brought into being and sustained as aspects of one process: the process Hegel calls ‘recognition’

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(Anerkennung). Geist is synthesized by reciprocal (gegenseitig) recognition. The structure of that recognitive process is for Hegel the structure of the social as such. j) Recognizing someone is taking that individual to be a self in the Kantian sense: a subject of normative statuses. Recognizing someone is adopting a practical stance or attitude. It is taking or treating someone in practice as a subject of normative statuses: as someone who can undertake commitments and responsibilities and exercise authority. Holding someone responsible and acknowledging them as authoritative in some regard are specific forms of recognition. The basic idea develops a theme familiar from earlier Enlightenment approaches to specifically political norms. It is that normative statuses such as responsibility and authority are creatures of our practical attitudes towards each other. There were no statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority before we started taking or treating each other as committed, responsible, and authoritative. Normative statuses are to be understood as instituted by socially articulated normative attitudes. k) The claim that the normative attitudes in question are socially articulated expresses the requirement that in order to institute normative statuses, recognitive attitudes must be reciprocal. To be a self is to be taken to be (recognized as) a self by those one takes to be (recognizes as) selves. Here are some representative passages: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged….The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition.” [PG §178].

“But according to the Notion of recognition this [that a self-consciousness’ certainty of itself have truth] is possible only when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in its own self through its own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure abstraction of being-for-self.” [PG §186]. l) Here is an example that may help in getting a sense of the idea. (I’m not here talking at all about the arguments that justify this way of thinking.) l.i) Hegel introduces the idea of reciprocal recognition in connection with the normative meta- status of being a self, in the sense of being the subject of any normative statuses. But I will argue (in discussion the Reason section of the Phenomenology) that he extends the notion from this sort of general recognition to specific recognition—which is attributing determinate normative statuses such as being a good chess player or being committed to achieve some goal. l.ii) Consider the normative status of being a good chess player. I can recognize or acknowledge others as having that status (attribute it to them), and that is a practical attitude others can adopt as well. I might desire to recognize myself as having that status. But what is it for me not just to attribute that status to myself (adopt an attitude), but in fact to have that status, to be a good chess player? The thought is that it is for me to be recognized as a good chess player by those I recognize as good chess players. For my self-recognition to be true, it must be seconded by the recognition of others. Which others? Not just anyone counts. The ones who matter are the ones I recognize. (Compare: being a good philosopher.) In effect, I constitute a community by recognizing some and not others in the respect in question. And that community can then make me a member by taking me as a member: by recognizing me in turn. l.iii) A nice feature of this example of a particular normative status is that the standards for being a good chess player are elastic. One might set the standards so low that any woodpusher

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who can play a legal game counts. Or one might count only certified Masters as good chess players. I may aspire to be a good chess player in any sense along that long sliding scale. But however high or low my ambition reaches, it is made concrete, definite, given a determinate sense, by the others whom I recognize as having the status I aspire to. And by exactly the same token, the standards I must meet to achieve that goal, to satisfy that ambition, to deserve the self-recognition to which I aspire, are set by what it takes to earn the recognition in that same sense by those I recognize in that sense. If I set my sights low, then that reciprocal recognition will be easy to achieve, and with it the status in question. If I set my sights higher, then the recognition of those I recognize in that demanding sense will be much harder to earn, and the status of being a good chess player in that sense harder to achieve. But if it is achieved, one then is something more than one would be had one set one’s sights lower. m) I attributed to Kant the paradoxical-sounding conception of freedom as consisting in the capacity to bind oneself by norms—to undertake commitments and responsibilities, and so to open oneself up to normative assessment as having fulfilled or failed to fulfill those commitments and responsibilities. On this conception, selfhood and freedom are two inseparable aspects of one normative phenomenon. On Hegel’s social, recognitive conception of the normative, freedom as constraint by norms is not something one can achieve all on one’s own. It takes a village—in the sense of a community. (In fact, it takes a lot more institutional structure than that. As we learn in the Philosophy of Right, it requires a state.) Being free, in the sense of being the subject of normative statuses instituted by reciprocal recognition, requires the recognition of the others one recognizes. Where recognition does not achieve full reciprocity, where it remains asymmetric, only defective, not fully free selves are instituted. The Phenomenology is, inter alia, the story of the different forms of unfree selves we have instituted throughout history, culminating cumulatively in the Absolute Knowing that is the realization that all along we were always-already implicitly committed to reciprocal recognition and so to constituting ourselves and others as fully free selves. It is, as Hegel says elsewhere, a “history of the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” n) I also attributed to Kant a criterion of demarcation distinguishing normative constraint from merely natural constraint. What I called the “Kant-Rousseau autonomy thesis” is the claim that genuinely normative constraint is always self-binding. One is normatively bound only by those authorities and responsibilities that one acknowledges as binding. One’s status as bound depends upon one’s attitude of taking or treating something as binding. (Only one aspect of this thesis is expressed by saying that selves as such are bound not by rules—as in laws of nature— but by conceptions of rules.) As I told the story, it is because his conception of the normative includes this criterion of autonomy that normative self-hood can be equated with freedom. (Notice that in this sketch, no work needs to be done by the further claim—common to Kant and Hegel, but not, for instance to Dewey or the early Heidegger, or the later Wittgenstein—that all norms are conceptual norms, that is, norms articulating what is a reason for what.) In adding the doctrine of the social institution of normativity by reciprocal recognition, we have seen, Hegel makes freedom and self-hood in the normative sense something one cannot achieve all on one’s own. One is dependent on the recognition of others. In giving up individual independence, is Hegel also giving up the insights of the Kant-Rousseau autonomy thesis? I think it is important to see that he is not. It is true that there is an apparent tension between demarcating the normative by autonomy, on the one hand, and understanding it as having the essentially social structure of recognition, on the other. And it is true that one of the overarching lessons that Hegel seeks to teach us is to conceive ourselves (our selves, hence normativity generally) under the category of freedom rather than of independence. (So, for

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instance, Judith Sklar’s book on Hegel’s political thought is called From Independence to Freedom.) But in fact his understanding of freedom in terms of reciprocal recognition is a sophisticated way of working out the Kant-Rousseau autonomy criterion of demarcation of the normative. For it is true according to Hegel, too, that we are only bound by what we bind ourselves by. (As for Kant, it will turn out that by explicitly binding ourselves by conceptual norms, we are implicitly acknowledging various commitments that come with being in the space of reasons. But that part of the story should come in at the end, not at the beginning.) But Hegel wants to look more closely at what is required in practice in order for something we do to be properly understood as having the significance of binding ourselves by a determinately contentful norm, of undertaking a definite responsibility. And what is required, he thinks, is a practice exhibiting the structure of authority and responsibility distinctive of reciprocal recognition. o) Consider once again the toy example of the would-be good chess player. We may notice to begin with that, at least in this case, the original commitment is up to the individual involved. He commits himself to that goal. We saw that the goal becomes definite insofar as the player recognizes some, and not others, as having the status he is committed to achieving. He exercises his authority over the commitment he is undertaking by adopting those practical recognitive attitudes—thereby setting the standards for goodness of chess playing higher or lower, accordingly as his practical recognitions are more or less restrictive. (In this example, there is a pretty strict hierarchy of inclusiveness. Not every specific sort of commitment would have this feature.) But in exercising that recognitive authority, the individual also thereby binds himself, in the sense of making himself responsible to those he recognizes. For fulfilling his commitment, achieving his goal, now requires eliciting corresponding recognitive attitudes from those he recognizes. And that lies beyond his authority. He is normatively independent (authoritative) as regards his own recognitive attitudes towards others, but then is reciprocally dependent (responsible) as regards their recognitive attitudes towards him. Being responsible (having normatively bound oneself—a normative status) is intelligible only in a context in which one can be held responsible (a normative attitude). That social context is what connects taking oneself to be responsible (adopting an attitude) to making oneself responsible (exhibiting a status). It is making oneself responsible to others (in that sense, recognizing them) that makes it possible for one to bind oneself. (This is the same thought Wittgenstein expresses when he says “If whatever seems right to me is right, then there can be no question of right and wrong.”) [This point is expounded in greater detail in Chapter Two of A Spirit of Trust: “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism”.] p) Conceiving norms under the category of ‘independence’ is seeking to have authority without correlative responsibility. Conceiving norms under the category of ‘freedom’ is seeing that authority without responsibility cannot be determinately contentful. The reciprocal recognition model of necessarily correlative authority and responsibility is not incompatible with Kant- Rousseau autonomy insight, but is an attempt to work it out. Auto-nomy has two parts: the nomos or law, and the fact that one subjects oneself to it, that becoming subject to it is one’s own doing. The model of independence focuses on the second, at the cost of making the first unintelligible. The model of reciprocal recognition is invoked to make sense of both halves: that one binds one’s self—in the sense that it is one’s self that is doing the binding—and that one is bound. The first is the dimension of authority, and the second of responsibility. Hegel thinks that only a social (recognitive) division of labor can both keep these from collapsing into each other (“If what seems right to me is right…”) or being driven too far apart (if what I’m bound by swings free of my attitudes).

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q) Hegel saw that the best way to exploit Kant’s transformation of the concept concept from something thought of as grasped by us to something thought of as gripping (binding, constraining, obliging) us is to stop thinking of concepts as in any sense in our heads. I said above that a fundamental question Kant, like any rationalist who rejects the empiricist order of explanation, must answer is: how do concepts become available to us to apply (use to commit ourselves) in judgment and action? Hegel’s answer is social: they are there in the language: “Language is the Dasein (existence) of Spirit” [PG 652]. ‘Spirit’ is the totality of norm-governed (that is, since for Hegel all norms are concepts, conceptually articulated) activity. Each of us comes into language as an always-already up-and-running enterprise. It makes concepts available to us, and we avail ourselves of them. (Compare Sellars—unkantianly phrased— remark: “Grasp of a concept is mastery of the use of a word.”) The words that are available to us to use already express concepts. Their normative significance—what one would be committing oneself to by applying them, and what would count as entitling one to those commitments—is already settled by the practices (Sitte: customs, uses, institutions) in which they play a role. That is why we can use them to make moves in the antecedent, on-going game in which they have that significance. Normative significances are socially instituted. Hegel’s ferocious language is devised so as to express the metaphysics of such normatively articulated concepts. r) One last remark about this structure of reciprocal recognition (at this point, necessarily at most suggestive): The expressive task distinctive of logical or philosophical vocabulary for Hegel is, I think, making explicit what is otherwise implicit in the use of ordinary empirical and practical concepts. Hegel takes over from traditional logic the terms ‘particular’, ‘universal’, and ‘individual’. But, of course, he uses them in his own distinctive, idiosyncratic way. I think that the master idea that structures that use is the model of the synthesis of selves and communities by reciprocal recognition. Individuals are particulars as characterized by universals. The model is individual selves, which are particular natural organisms as members of recognitive communities—which are a kind of universal they fall under. If we ask “Where do the norms come from?” or “How does Geist arise out of nature?” Hegel’s answer is that the normative realm of Geist comes into being when natural creatures start adopting recognitive attitudes towards each other. [This story is told in more detail in Chapter Six of A Spirit of Trust: “The Structure of Desire and Recognition”.] s) Have we yet worried enough about the Hegelian claim that the modal logic of recognition is S5? That is, that recognition must be (on pain of the “causality of fate”, the metaphysical irony of mastery) an equivalence relation: reflexive (self-consciousness) only if transitive and reflexive? The alternative is to allow much more complex algebras, with respects of recognition, and different algebraic features of them. (Cf. recognizing someone as an ambassador iff and only if he/she is appropriately recognized as such by one’s we recognize as heads of state, whose recognitive status is quite differently constituted.) The worry is that good, liberal political consequences come too quickly and easily if we accept this metaphysical-constitutive claim about selves. (Cf. Habermas). Things may not be so easy.

HBI #3) A conception of the conceptual: a) For Kant, all norms are conceptual norms, which is to say that they articulate what is a reason for what. In that sense, all norms are rational norms—not in the sense that they can be derived from the requirements of Reason, but in the sense that they are norms for reasoning. Since being free is being able to bind oneself by norms and norms are concepts—norms for reasoning —the Kantian normative realm of freedom is also the realm of reason. Hegel takes all this Kantian structure on board. But he combines it with a distinctive notion of the conceptual.

12 Brandom b) Conceptual norms concern what is a reason for what, which is to say that they are inferential norms, norms of inference. Following up on Kant’s insight concerning the centrality, ubiquity, and ineliminability of modality, Hegel identifies rational relations with necessary relations. That is to say that concepts underwrite counterfactually robust inferences—the ones that are expressed explicitly in the form of laws. Recall Sellars’s title “Concepts as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable without them.” Sellars’s own response to Quine’s challenge in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” to say what practically distinguishes concept-(content-, meaning-)constitutive inferential relations from inferences underwritten by matters of fact is that it is all and only the counterfactual- supporting inferences that are underwritten by the contents of concepts. (He was comfortable accepting the non-traditional consequence of this view that because they depend on what the laws really are, one cannot know the contents of one’s concepts—what one means—just by introspecting, but may need to go into the laboratory to determine them, because he held a kantian, rather than a istincti concept of concepts.) This, I think, is (one important component of) the Hegelian position. c) As we will see, Hegel is also a holist about concepts. Individual concepts are to be understood in terms of their function within an extended but unified process of conceptual activity (experience) that includes applying whole batteries of concepts in disparate, concretely situated judgings and actings. To be entitled to talk about a determinate concept, rather than the Concept (indeed, the Idea), one must be able to analyze the whole, breaking it down into co- operating elements, so as to distinguish that determinate concept from others by its relations to other concepts. The core of Hegel’s concept of the conceptual consists in his view of how we should understand the relations that articulate the contents of determinate empirical and practical concepts. I said above that those relations must at least include inferential relations—indeed, modally robust, counterfactual-supporting ones. But Hegel sees something deeper. Behind inference (and therefore, reason), as essential structure, he sees negation. d) The point is essentially logical, in his sense of ‘logical’: a matter of the metaconceptual apparatus we use to make explicit the implicit articulation of determinate conceptual contents. When, in following out our holistic methodology, be carve up some experiential process analytically, the results we achieve count as determinate concepts only insofar as they are distinguishable from one another. One of the paradoxical-sounding consequences of Hegel’s holist-functionalist philosophical methodology is that the identity of functionally individuated components of a larger whole consists in part in their differences from one another. (That is one of the lessons of the comparative method of analysis establishing a istinction rationis mentioned above.) But, though this way of putting the point does loom large in Hegel’s writings, mere difference is not enough for determinateness. Hegel takes as his guiding thread the Spinozist principle omnis istinctionn est istinct. For an essential, defining property of negation is the exclusiveness codified in the principle of noncontradiction: p rules out not-p, they are incompatible. For Hegel, it is this exclusiveness that is the essence of negation. He abstracts this feature from the case of formal negation, and generalizes it to include the sort of material incompatibility that obtains between the properties square and triangular. (Formal negation can then reappear as the shadow of material incompatibility: not-p is the minimal incompatible of p. It is what is entailed by everything materially incompatible with p.) That is, in thinking about the sort of difference implicit in the notion of determinateness, it is important to distinguish between two different kinds of difference. Properties (for instance) can be different, but compatible, as square and red are. We might call this “mere” difference. But properties can also be different in the stronger sense of material incompatibility—of the impossibility of one and the same thing simultaneously exhibiting both—as square and triangular are. We might call this “exclusive” difference. In Sense Certainty Hegel argues that the idea of a world exhibiting definiteness or determinateness as mere [gleichgültige, translated by Miller as “indifferent”] difference, without exclusive [auschließende] difference, is incoherent.

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This is why compatibly different properties always come as members of families of exclusively different ones. When Hegel talks about negation, it is exclusive difference that he is invoking. e) One of the more notorious theses attributed to Hegel is the denial of the law of noncontradiction. A mere denial would, of course be silly—in the sense that there could not in principle be a reason for it. As Kripke says “Why give up the principle of noncontradiction? Why not just keep it too?” But a reconstrual is something else. As I read him, Hegel takes noncontradiction, in the sense of exclusion, to be the essence of negation. And that principle is at the very center of his logic, semantics, and metaphysics. Far from rejecting noncontradiction, he radicalizes and extends it. f) Hegel’s term for exclusive difference is ‘determinate negation’ [bestimmte Negation]. I take it to mean material incompatibility. The material incompatibility of red and green is related to the formal incompatibility of red and not-red as Sellars’s material inference from scarlet to red is related to the formal inference from not-not-red to red. Determinate negation, material incompatibility, is the basic structure of distinctively conceptual articulation. g) It is a modal relation. Red is a (not the) determinate negation of green (is materially incompatible with it) insofar as it is not just not true that some monochromatic patch is simultaneously both red and green, but insofar as it is impossible that it be both red and green. h) The content of a concept or property can be thought of as articulated by the concepts or properties it modally excludes. One could represent the content by the set of contents materially incompatible with it. i) Contents so identified and individuated meet the conditions both of holism, since they are identified and individuated only by their relations of exclusive difference from other elements of the Concept comprising them, and of determinateness, since they are so identified and individuated. But why should content so articulated this be thought of as specifically conceptual? The conceptual we said, for Hegel as for Kant, is what determines what is a reason for what, in the sense of underwriting counterfactually robust modal inferences. One of the key observations on which my reading of Hegel rests—an observation that Hegel himself nowhere makes—is that relations of material incompatibility underwrite modally robust relations of material inference. To say that the property being a dog entails the property being a mammal, in the modal sense that it is impossible for something to be a dog and not be a mammal, is just to say that everything materially incompatible with being a mammal is materially incompatible with being a dog. Hegel’s term for inferential articulation is ‘mediation’. The term derives from the role of the middle term in a specifically syllogistic inference—the role of ‘man’ in the syllogism in Barbara: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. (The German word ‘Schluß’, inference—formed from ‘schließen’, to conclude, the root of ‘ausschließen’, to rule out—is also the standard translation of the Greek word ‘syllogism’.) Mediation is the structure of reason-giving, hence of the conceptual. For Hegel, the conceptual is articulated by relations of mediation (modally robust material inference) and determinate negation (modally robust material incompatibility), and, I claim, it is articulated by relations of mediation because it is articulated by relations of determinate negation. Thus for Hegel, negation is the essence of the conceptual. j) According to this conception of the conceptual, the objective world is conceptually structured, quite independent of any activity by rational knowers or agents. For even if there had never been thinkers, the fact that A is wholly copper would rule out (be incompatible with) its being wholly silver, and would entail that it is less dense than a wholly silver object. To say that there is some way the world is, that the objective world is determinate, is to say that some states of affairs (ways the world could be) rule others out, and (so) entail still others. The laws of the objective natural world make explicit its conceptual structure, in Hegel’s sense. k) And thought, too, is conceptually structured. The claim, judgment, or thought that A is wholly copper is incompatible with the claim, judgment, or thought that it is wholly silver. A

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cognitive commitment to one of those contents rules out a commitment to the other, in the sense that a reason for one is a reason against the other. l) Here, then, is a notion of conceptual content that can structure both objective facts and subjective thoughts or commitments. (‘Subjective’ not in the Cartesian sense, but in the sense of being the thoughts of a subject—thoughts a subject is responsible for, commitments of and by a subject.) In the favored case of genuine knowledge, it is the very same conceptual content that shows up on the subjective side of certainty in the form of a commitment and on the objective side of truth as a fact. m) Nonetheless, the two realms are not identical. For the sense of ‘incompatible’ is different in the two. One and the same object can not simultaneously exhibit incompatible properties—it is impossible. By contrast, one and the same subject merely ought not to undertake incompatible commitments—it is forbidden or inappropriate, but not impossible. n) It is possible to move from talk of the subjective perspective of certainty and the objective perspective of truth (which are perspectives on conceptual contents) to talk of subjects and objects. For they are each units of account with respect to their respective sorts of incompatibility relation. An object is just what cannot simultaneously exhibit incompatible properties, and a subject is just what is obliged not simultaneously to be responsible for incompatible commitments. In the Perception chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel says that objects ‘repel’ incompatible properties. That repulsion is natural. The sense in which subjects ‘repel’ incompatible commitments is normative. If and when one finds oneself with incompatible commitments, one is obliged, rationally, to do something: to give up one or both, to amend one’s collateral commitments, or the conceptions that articulate them. That process of revision is experience. It is the determining of the content of our subjective conceptions, to try to bring them better in line with the relations of objective incompatibility and consequence that conceptually articulate the objective world.

HBI #4: Holism: a) Hegel is the first philosopher to whose thought is thoroughly holistic. (‘Holism’ is not his term. It was not introduced until the late nineteenth century.) Hegel explicitly and systematically pursues holism both generally in his methodology and more specifically in his semantics. One of the principal reasons he finds it necessary so radically to recast the philosophical terminology he inherited is because of his holist convictions. He sees previous philosophers as crippled by their semantic atomism: the view that one can make sense of the contents of concepts (whether ordinary, determinate, empirical and practical concepts, or the metaconcepts in terms of which one understands their functioning) one by one, each independently of the others. One of Hegel’s master ideas is that to see things aright we must shift from atomistic to holistic conceptions of concepts. His way of talking about this is to say that what he has to teach us is how to move beyond the standpoint of Verstand to the standpoint of Vernunft. (His appropriation and transformation of the use of these Kantian terms is a paradigm of the sort of thing Hegel does with the conceptual raw materials he inherits from his predecessors.) b) In Hegel’s story, Kant is the avatar of Verstand: its final, most sophisticated exponent. But Hegel’s holism is the result of generalizing and radicalizing what he properly sees as one of Kant’s fundamental philosophical moves. Kant criticized the empiricists and rationalists alike for postulating a single continuous dimension that had sensations at the bottom and concepts at the top. One of his insights is that sensations and concepts are substantially and essentially different kinds of things. One must distinguish more sharply between sensibility and understanding. On the other hand, one thing he agreed with these traditions about is that one cannot understand empirical knowledge by construing sensibility and understanding as wholly independent faculties, and then somehow bolting them together to get judgments. His solution is a (locally) holist one. Start with a

15 Brandom conception of judgment (the unit of cognitive responsibility), and understand sensibility and understanding solely in terms of the contributions they make, the roles they play, in judgment. Neither of the two ‘faculties’ can be understood independently: in isolation, or antecedently to considering their role in judgment. We come to the conception of the two faculties only by analyzing an antecedent unity. (And that unity, too, is ultimately to be understood in terms of the role of judgments in a higher unity: the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.) Here one thinks of the medieval distinction between two kinds of distinction. Two items exhibit a istinction realis (a real distinction) if they can actually be separated—as, say, dogs and cats can be put in different rooms. Two items exhibit a istinction rationis (a distinction of reason) if they can be separated only by comparison. Thus the shape and the substance of a wooden sphere cannot actually be separated. But they can be distinguished if we lay the wooden sphere alongside a wooden cube and a stone sphere. Just so, we can grasp the distinctively different contributions made to judgment by sensibility and understanding if we consider different conceptualizations of the same sensory situation (say, construing what we see now as a dog, now as a fox, or a statue), and applying the same concepts to different sensory situations (say, calling both this and that ‘foxes’). c) This move is indeed one of the most important and distinctive of Kant’s philosophical contributions. But Hegel thinks it epitomizes a methodology that should be applied much more widely than Kant did. d) For instance, Hegel thinks that Kant should have seen that this holistic approach to the relations of what Kant understands as conceptual form and sensible content in cognition requires a corresponding holism about the relation of form to content and particular to universal in logic. Yet Kant takes over the traditional logic in most respects, making only the very smallest conceptual adjustments to it in the light of his insight about the primacy of the propositional. Hegel will insist that we start with the notion of an individual—intuitively or presystematically, a particular as characterized by a universal—and work our way to notions of particular and universal by analyzing individuals. In fact his model of the relations between these logical categories is of an individual self as constituted by reciprocal recognition. The recognitive community in which there are such selves is the paradigm of a universal, and the creatures whose recognitive relations constitute both selves and communities are the paradigm of mere particulars. e) Even in thinking about the relations between sensibility and understanding, Hegel takes it that Kant was insufficiently radical in following through on his holist insight. Hegel’s account of the relation between immediacy and mediation will be thoroughly holistic. The lesson of the opening Sense Certainty section of the Phenomenology is the Sellarsian one that the immediacy of the deliverances of non-inferentially arrived at sensory impressions is unintelligible apart from consideration of its mediation, in the sense of its inferential articulation and relation to other possible judgments. f) One of the clearest applications of Hegel’s holist methodology concerns his new understanding of the relations between judgments and concepts. Kant, like all his predecessors, had thought of concepts as having their contents independently of and indifferently to what judgments articulated by those concepts subjects actually endorse. Hegel is a holist on this point in the same sense that Quine is. Altering the judgments one makes alters the contents of the concepts involved. (Because making judgments using determinate concepts will always lead one to commitments that are mutually incompatible by one’s own lights—even if one applies the conceptual norms correctly. And that experience of error is what obliges one to change, not just one’s judgments, but eventually also one’s concepts. See below.) From Hegel’s point of view, Kant should have seen that his insight about the primacy of judgment over intuition and concept requires

16 Brandom giving up the semantic atomism about the relations between concepts and judgments that had been a hallmark of Enlightenment epistemology. g) Along another dimension, Hegel thinks that Kant should have adopted the same holistic strategy toward the distinction between theoretical and practical activity that he did toward the distinction between sensibility and understanding. Accordingly, in the Reason section of the Phenomenology, which discusses practical agency (we are told that “reason is purposive activity” at PG §22), the topic is addressed first in terms of “the cycle of action…the unity of the world as given and the world it has made” (PG §308). This is a cycle of perception (of what is in that sense immediately given), thought, action, and perception of the result of that action (a new given that is also what was made). Empirical cognition and intentional action are to be understood only as aspects of this developing process. The official name for this process is ‘experience’ (Erfahrung), and the point of Hegel’s philosophical enterprise is an expressive one: to give us (meta-)conceptual tools to understand that process. (That is why the original title of the Phenomenology of Spirit was The Science of the Experience of Consciousness.) It is to take the form of a functional decomposition of that process, analyzing it into components distinguishable by the different roles they play in that process. h) The resulting account is a conceptual holism because it is the result of a methodological functionalism. But the functional system in question is to be as large as possible: all of it, everything—humans, their activities, and their environment. i) The later figure who most closely follows Hegel in this holistic thought is John Dewey. His most important theoretical work is Experience and Nature, whose relentless pursuit of Hegel’s holist, anti-reductionist, methodology led Rorty to characterize it as “using the term ‘experience’ as an incantatory device to blur every conceivable distinction.” In this regard, at least, Dewey—though vastly less powerful and systematic a thinker—is true to the thought of his first master, Hegel, whom he saw himself as naturalizing and de-intellectualizing. (His other important theoretical work is his Logic, which again in good Hegelian fashion, aims to be an organon developing conceptual tools to express the interaction of various aspects of experiential processes.) j) Perhaps most centrally and importantly (this is the thought with which he opens the Introduction to the Phenomenology), Hegel thinks that one will never get an intelligible account of the relations between conceptual activity and the world that is known about and acted in if one attempts to start with independently intelligible accounts of subject and object, and then attempts to bolt them together afterwards. Thus, rather than talk about subjects and objects, Hegel wants us to start with a notion of content, as something that can be common to its subjective form in thought and its objective form in fact. (Compare one of McDowell’s favorite quotes from Wittgenstein (PI §95: “When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this-is-so.”) When all goes well, the content of my thought that I have two hands is the fact that I have two hands. Hegelian contents are Fregean thoughts. (Frege: “A fact is a thought that is true.”) Hegel’s terms for a content in its objective manifestation is truth, and in its subjective manifestation, certainty. The insoluble problem of understanding how two kinds of things, subject and object, characterized independently of one another (perhaps as Cartesian mind and Newtonian world) can be related in knowledge is replaced by the problem of understanding the possible relations between the truth-aspect and the certainty- aspect of one unified kind of conceptual content. Of course, actually entitling oneself to talk this way requires a lot of work. Hegel’s distinctive philosophical vocabulary is crafted with an eye to doing that. k) Hegel’s term for holism about the relation of subjective and objective (which he develops in the context of his holism about the theoretical and the practical, the

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immediate and the mediated, recognizing and being recognized…) is ‘idealism’. (The Idea in the Science of Logic is “the unity of Thought and Being”, as well as of the theoretical and the practical.)

HBI #5: Idealism: a) I said above that Hegel’s idealism is a kind of holism about the subjective and the objective. The whole that must be analyzed is the whole constellation of objective relations of material incompatibility, on the side of truth, and subjective processes of experience driven by subjective incompatibilities, on the side of certainty. b) The basic claim of Hegel’s idealism is that the objective relations of incompatibility that articulate the conceptual structure in virtue of which the world is determinate and law-governed are unintelligible apart from their relation to the subjective processes of acknowledging and repairing incompatible commitments. It is not that there could not be a determinate objective world without such processes. It is just that we cannot explain what we mean by saying that there is one without invoking also the experiential processes that are our acknowledgment of constraint by objective incompatibilities and entailments. In the jargon I introduce in Chapter Five of A Spirit of Trust (and in Chapter Six of Tales of the Mighty Dead), the objective and subjective notions of incompatibility are reciprocally sense dependent, but not reference dependent. c) Here are three more specific idealist theses that Hegel argues for (though not quite in these modernized terms) that I think one can respectably and responsibly maintain today. Each involves the reciprocal sense dependence of a fundamental category we use to express our understanding of the objective articulation of the world and a corresponding feature of our use of language:  The concepts object and singular term are reciprocally sense dependent. One could not count as grasping the concept object unless one could use singular terms.  The concepts fact and declarative sentence are reciprocally sense dependent. Nothing could count as mastery of the concept fact except what is implicit in the use of declarative sentences to make assertions.  The concepts law and necessity, on the one hand, and counterfactual inference on the other, are reciprocally sense dependent.

HBI #6: Intentionality: a) The fine structure of Hegel’s idealism is worked out in his account of intentionality and representation. For it is here that we see how the process of resolving incompatible commitments in experience, on the side of subjects, is to be understood as normatively governed by the over-arching goal of correctly representing how things objectively are. I have already indicated that the direction of explanation of his account of intentionality, like Kant’s, will be from conceptual content—something that can be grasped in the sense that it articulates commitments subjects can undertake—to aboutness or semantic directedness on objects. I’ve said something about how he thinks about conceptual content in terms of (subjective and objective) incompatibility. One of Hegel’s key moves is the route he lays out to explain what it is to make ourselves responsible to objects for the correctness of conceptually contentful commitments—that is, the way he explicates a normative sense of aboutness, and so the representational dimension of thought—in terms of what it is to be responsible for commitments whose conceptual content is (holistically) articulated by relations of incompatibility. b) Conceptual contents articulate both ways things could be (objective states of affairs, among which are facts) and ways things could be taken to be (states of subjects, normative

18 Brandom statuses, the contents of commitments). They are the contents both of how things are in themselves (objectively) and how they are for consciousness (subjectively). Another way of talking about how things are for some consciousness is as phenomena: appearances. Another way of talking about how things are in themselves is as noumena: realities. As appearances, the phenomena present purported realities. They are representings, and the noumena are representeds. c) What is it about conceptual contents, articulated by relations of modally robust material incompatibility (determinate negation) and (so) modally robust material inference (mediation), in virtue of which they so much as purport to represent (for or to consciousness) how things are in themselves, i.e. to be (for consciousness) representings of representeds? This is a kind of question Descartes, for instance, never asked. (And the point goes through as well for successors such as Locke and Hume. The rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz, I claim, did have this as an explicit question, and offered worked-out theoretical answers. See Chapters 4 and 5 of Tales of the Mighty Dead.) That is, Descartes never asked what it was in virtue of which my rabbit-idea was a rabbit idea —as opposed to one representing lemurs, or robots, or nothing. He took the representational purport of ideas, their semantic content, for granted (dividing the world metaphysically into those things that are by nature representings, and those things that by nature can only be represented), and asked only an epistemological question arising downstream from that one: what is it for that representational purport to be successful, for things in fact to be as my idea represents them as being. We owe the deeper, antecedent, semantic question to Kant. That is Hegel’s question, too. He saw in Kant this advance from epistemological to semantic questions, as perhaps no-one did again until Wittgenstein. Hegel offers a much more systematic, explicit, and worked-out answer to that question than Kant does. (Which is not to say that it is all that easy to recover from his texts. But then, where in the first Critique would one say that Kant is clearest and most explicit about his answer?) d) The book we are reading is a phenomenology in no small part because Hegel is committed to explaining the concept of noumena solely in terms of phenomena. (We’ll see below why it is a phenomenology of Spirit. But I claim that the point of this large-scale metanarrative is to make explicit how ordinary conceptual contents develop, and in what their semantic properties consist. That story, too, I claim, deserves to be called a ‘phenomenology’.) He wants to say what it is about how things appear to us, the conceptual contents that articulate our commitments, in virtue of which it is correct to understand them, and they can appear to us as, subjective commitments regarding how things objectively are, how they purport to represent things as they are in themselves, and so are intelligible as being how those things (the ones represented or thought about) are for a consciousness. This is to say what it is about them in virtue of which they are correctly understood as representings of some representeds, appearances of some realities, phenomena corresponding to some noumena. e) In discussing Hegel’s account of the conceptual I’ve already pointed out, in effect, that phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality, are the same kind of thing for Hegel. As Frege said: “A fact is a thought that is true.” If that is right, facts are kinds of thoughts. Not, of course, kinds of thinkings, but kinds of thinkables. Facts, ways the world really, objectively, is, in itself are conceptually structured by their relations of incompatibility (and so inference) to other possible states of affairs. Their contents can be the contents of commitments, which are conceptually structured by their relations of incompatibility (and so inference) to other possible commitments. The way things are in themselves can be a way they are for consciousness. Noumena are a kind of phenomena. The challenge of a semantic phenomenology is then to say what distinguishes the phenomena that are noumena (the ways things can be for consciousness that are the way they are in themselves) and what it is for all phenomena as such to purport or aspire to have that distinction, and to do that while appealing to nothing outside the realm of phenomena.

19 Brandom f) Hegel’s strategy is to explain the representational purport of phenomena as a feature of the experiential process by which they develop: by which they arise, mature, decay, and are replaced. The basic idea has already been introduced. It is in practically acknowledging an obligation to do something, to change something to alter one’s commitments when they turn out to be incompatible that subjects in practice take or treat their commitments as answerable for their correctness and acceptability to a structure of objective incompatibilities, and so as being about, being for consciousness presentations or appearances of some way things are in themselves. Experience is the experience of error and failure. For that “manifestation of negativity”—finding oneself with commitments that are by one’s own lights incompatible—is the motor of the process of selecting, revising, and grooming one’s commitments that is Erfahrung. Acknowledging error (on the theoretical side, and failure, on the practical side) is taking the erroneous commitment to be about something, which it gets wrong. It is to take that commitment to be a way things were for consciousness that was subject to assessment accordingly as it did or—as it turned out—did not present how things actually are in themselves. g) This representational aspect that turns out to be implicit in judgment (a kind of commitment) can be made explicit by offering a certain kind of rational reconstruction of a previous stretch of experience. Hegel calls this an ‘Erinnerung’: a recollection. It is what turns a past into a history. As I understand it, an Erinnerung traces out a trajectory through past experience, selecting index episodes where finding one’s current commitments to be incompatible has led to changing them, so as to yield a monotonic, cumulative series of expressively progressive discoveries, culminating in one’s current view. One’s current view, how things are for one, is how one now takes things to be in themselves. The recollection is an account of how one (takes oneself to have) found out how things actually are, in themselves. Doing this is presenting one’s experience as having a certain form: as the gradual unfolding into explicitness of what now appears as having been all along already implicit. The commitments one now has—the whole, holistically construed constellation of judgments and concepts—is seen as presenting how things are in themselves, in the sense of having all along been the standard that earlier constellations were assessed according to, and found wanting in various respects. h) The model of this process that I find it most useful to keep in mind (though it is not one Hegel ever suggests) is the development of concepts of common law by precedent. Common law differs from statute law in consisting entirely of case law. It is not the interpretation of explicit founding laws, rules, or principles. All there is to it is a sequence of applications of concepts to actual sets of facts. It is for this reason often thought of as judge-made law. The only justification that a judge is allowed to offer for a judgment consists of appeals to previous judgments. That appeal postulates a principle, which, it is claimed, can be discerned as having been implicit in previous decisions, guiding them, or at least codifying them. The precedents must be presented as sequentially revealing different aspects of the principles, distinctions, and applications the judge now enunciates. They are, the judge claims, what this tradition in common law all along was really about, what it was getting at. A commitment to justifying one’s current decisions by always telling a story of this shape is what in practice taking it that the tradition is the revelation of an underlying set of principles, distinctions, and so on consists in. i) I have already talked about the social dimension of Hegel’s understanding of conceptual norms, in terms of recognition. And I have also already talked about the inferential dimension of Hegel’s understanding of conceptual norms, in terms of incompatibility. What we see here is the historical dimension of Hegel’s understanding of conceptual norms, in terms of recollection (Erinnerung). It is introduced already in Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology (discussed in Chapter Three of A Spirit of Trust), and reappears at other crucial junctures such as the

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discussion of how to understand the notion of an intention as guiding and being progressively but imperfectly revealed in action, in Reason (discussed in Chapter Seven of A Spirit of Trust), and (I claim) is important in understanding the significance of the final form of reciprocal recognition, confession and forgiveness, discussed at the very end of Spirit (and in Chapter Eight of A Spirit of Trust). j) I have already discussed modality in connection with Hegel’s understanding of conceptual articulation in terms of material incompatibility (determinate negation). The final understanding of what is expressed by modal vocabulary (which I discuss in Chapter Eight of A Spirit of Trust) is couched in terms of the historical-recollective process (that turns out to have the structure of reciprocal recognition in the form of confession-and-forgiveness) whereby contingent content is given the form of necessity. Mere facts, which could have been otherwise, are incorporated into the contents of concepts, and the norms those concepts embody are seen (retrospectively) as having always-already been in play, implicitly governing the development of the Concept all along. Conceptualization, which is giving the contingent the form of necessity, is the process of determining (making determinate) conceptual content by incorporating contingency into it. This is the process of experience that is at once the application of conceptual norms in judgment and intention and the instutition of conceptual norms. This pragmatist point (intimately connected with the Quinean holism of concepts and judgments mentioned above) is that all there is to constitute conceptual content is the actual attitudes (in Fregean terms, a matter of force) of those who undertake and assess commitments articulated by those contents. There is an apparent tension between this point and the claim attributed to Hegel above that the boundaries of conceptual content and the investment of force (endorsing a judgment) must come from different sources, if the content is to be intelligible as providing a normative standard for assessment of the correctness of the commitments undertaken by applying those concepts in judgment and intention. This second point is the one that at (2f) above was argued to be reconciled with the Kant-Rousseau autonomy thesis by the model of reciprocal recognition. The tension between the tight connection between force and content required by the pragmatist point, on the one hand, and the distancing of force from content required if what is right is not to be equated with whatever seems right is resolved by the historical account of concept formation and reformation through experience, as retrospectively rationally reconstructed.

HBI #6: Modernity: a) Though all of our philosophical heroes from Descartes through Kant were important players in producing the theories that rationalized and articulated the practical and institutional achievements of modernity: secularization, science, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the rise of the modern state, and so on, Hegel was the first to take this titanic transformation in all of its aspects as his explicit topic. In this sense, he was the first theorist of modernity as such. He thought, roughly, that only one big thing had ever happened in the history of the world, and that was the transition from traditional to modern societies, selves, and thought. He wanted to understand that grand change, why the old ways hung together as they did, and the sort of unity becoming visible for the emerging constellation of practices, institutions, and concepts. In this thought was the germ, inter alia, of what would become over the course of the nineteenth century, modern sociology, and indeed, the social sciences more generally—which still have at their theoretical core the aspiration to understand this transformation. b) And Hegel aspired, further, to discern the shape that a second such transformation might take, and the kind of unity that such an equally radical and progressive third phase of human development might take.

21 Brandom c) One large division between Anglophone and Contintental European philosophy is drawn precisely by whether one takes this problem to be a, perhaps the, central philosophical topic, or not. d) See (15) below.

13. The structure of the Phenomenology:

a. The big book can be thought of as consisting of three apparently self-contained books: a.i. The long (72 paragraphs, 45 pages) Preface was written, like most prefaces, some months after the body of the book was done, in early 1807. It characterizes the project and achievement of the Phenomenology in terms that are not indigenous to it. In many ways, it points toward and forms a bridge to Hegel’s subsequent great systematic work, the Science of Logic of 1812. a.ii. Roughly the first half of the book: Introduction, Consciousness, Self- Consciousness, and Reason. a.iii. Roughly the last half of the book: Spirit, Religion, and Absolute Knowing. Spirit is itself in 3 parts: True Spirit (the Ethical Order=Sittlichkeit), Self- Alienated Spirit (Culture), and Spirit that is Certain of Itself (Morality). b. One structural interpretive controversy concerns whether Hegel changed his mind in mid-stream, setting out to write (ii), but then taking the opportunity to write (iii) as well. Michael Forster’s The Idea of the Phenomenology is a very judicious discussion of this issue. c. The Introduction discusses the relations between phenomena and noumena, historical development of conceptual contents, precipitation of the representational dimension of conceptual content; d. I think that the first half of the book divides up its topic by aspects of conceptual activity (Spirit), and the second half pulls those discussions together to discuss the development of Spirit as a whole. The aspects are: d.i. Consciousness: empirical knowledge, language-entry transitions in non- inferential reports, and the relations between immediacy and mediation. This is a paleo-Sellarsian discussion, which makes an anti-Given point in Sense Certainty, an anti-atomism in semantics point in Perception, and insists on the merely methodological difference of theoretical from observable objects in Force and Understanding, all within the compass of a broadly Sellarsian two-factor picture of non-inferential reports and inferential content. It turns out that to understand these commitments and concepts, we must understand the selves who undertake and deploy them. (Consciousness is discussed in Chapter Four of A Spirit of Trust, and the transition to Self-Consciousness in Chapter Five.) d.ii. Self-Consciousness: normativity, selves, recognition, and self- consciousness. It turns out that in order to understand them, we must look to their practical activity. (Discussed in Chapter Six of A Spirit of Trust.) d.iii. Reason: A paleo-Davidsonian discussion of action, intention, language- exit transitions. Social perspectives on action (intentional/consequential),

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historical perspectives on action (context of deliberation / context of assessment), and the relation between Hegelian sense and Hegelian reference. (Discussed in Chapter Seven of A Spirit of Trust.) e. The tradition takes it that these three sections should be read as mapping onto sequential historical eras. I think that is a confused projection of the order of exposition into the subject-matter. The exposition is sequential and cumulative. Within each of these chapters, the development discussed is also sequential and cumulative. But across the chapter boundaries, the topic discussed is simply changed. Indeed, the developments within each chapter are parallel, lining up with one another. Spirit then pulls them all together, to discuss the one development they all partake of, not now from the point of view of empirical language entries, practical language exits, and the selves who mediate them, but from the point of view of the whole constellation that comprises those aspects. Here is a key retrospective passage (which, unfortunately, from my point of view confuses the issue it is seeking to clarify by its placement of “immediate Spirit”, but ignore that for now): “When self-consciousness and consciousness proper, religion and Spirit in its world, or Spirit's existence, are in the first instance distinguished from each other, the latter consists in the totality of Spirit so far as its moments exhibit themselves in separation, each on its own account. But the moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit —Spirit, that is, as immediate Spirit, which is not yet consciousness of Spirit. Their totality, taken together, constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally; Spirit as such contains the previous structured shapes in universal determinations…. The course traversed by these moments is…not to be represented as occurring in Time. Only the totality of Spirit is in Time, and the 'shapes', which are 'shapes' of the totality of Spirit, display themselves in a temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality and therefore the form of pure freedom in face of an 'other', a form which expresses itself as Time. But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence in separation from one another.” [Phenomenology §679]

14. On allegory: a. Throughout the book, but much more obviously starting with the Self- Consciousness chapter, Hegel’s way of expressing the semantic considerations he is raising and the lessons he thinks we should learn from them takes the form of allegories. An allegory, dictionaries tell us, is “the representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form.” In this case the characters are what Hegel calls “shapes of consciousness” (and of self-consciousness, and reason, and Spirit) such as the Master and Slave, the honest consciousness, the beautiful soul, and the hard- hearted judge. b. Methodologically, taking Hegel to be presenting us with semantic allegories requires us to distinguish two tasks we as readers must pursue: b.i.1.a.i.1.a.i. Figuring out what is going on within the allegory; and b.i.1.a.i.1.a.ii. Reading the allegory, by figuring out what he is using what goes on in the allegory to say about what it is an allegory for.

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Too often, I think, readers have settled for (i). But since what ties the different stages of his exposition together happens at level (ii), such a restriction means that a lot of what is going on is missed, and many features of the book remain obscure.

15. Three epochs of Spirit: a. Hegel’s history of Spirit distinguishes three great epochs. Chronologically, these correspond to: a.i. The ancient world: Greek civilization, Roman civilization, and feudal civilization. a.ii. The modern world, from the Scientific Revolution through Hegel’s own time. a.iii. The world to come. b. This structure provides a canvas on which Hegel paints his philosophical picture. It is a very common structure in Romanticism, and one would do well to start out as suspicious about it. The nicest description of it for these purposes that I know is by Simon Blackburn (from his review—entitled “Enquiverings”—of the new translation of Heidegger’s late “Enowning”, in New Republic 10/30/2000): “To understand what is going on in Heidegger, you need to know a story. Perhaps it is the story, the primal story. It tells of a primordial golden age, when man was united with himself, with his fellow man, and with nature (home, hearth, earth, fatherland, paradise, shelter, innocence, wholeness, integration). Then there was a fall, when primitive innocence and unity were destroyed and replaced by something worse (separation, dissonance, fracture, strife, estrangement, alienation, inauthenticity, anxiety, distress, death, despair, nothing). To cure this condition, a road or journey is needed (pilgrimage, stations, way or Weg, Bildung, action, will, destiny). The way will need a leader, and the leader is the philosopher of Plato's myth, who first ascends from the shadows of the cave to the sunshine above (seer, prophet, poet, hero). There is a crisis, and then a recovery of primordial unity itself (encounter, epiphany, authenticity, transcendence, apocalypse, consummation, marriage, jubilation). This may end the story, back at its beginning, or the path may spiral on upwards, its travelers fortified by the necessary sufferings of the journey.

In the story, the world and life itself need interpretation because they are the unfolding of a historical script, the writing of the world-spirit (tidings, message, hermeneutics). And the whole drama is figured not just in the life of an individual, but in universal history, or at least in the history of the race. The story is a history of Prometheus, or Hyperion, or the Prodigal, or the Pilgrim, or the Artist. It is also a history of the evolution of Man, or of Dasein, or of the Geist.

This is only the template of a story, of course; or to change the metaphor, it is a music that needs different orchestration at different times. It can be given a conventional religious tone, or a purely subjective tone, as with inner-light Protestant mysticism, or for that matter with Shelley or Blake. It can take a nationalistic political setting, or a private and personal setting. The fall may come with knowledge, which involves naming and separating and introducing differences. It can come as it came to ancient Israel, through other lapses, such as the breaking of a covenant, or some may think it came through the invention of capitalism. [BB: For Hegel, it is the advent of self-consciousness of our role in the institution of norms.] The hero who leads to the light may be Augustine or Rimbaud, a saint or a decadent.

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This music was played loudly more than a century before Heidegger, by Schelling and Schiller, Novalis and Hegel. England took it in through Coleridge and the Romantics; America took it in through Emerson, Whitman, and eventually Hollywood. Even in one artist expressions of the theme can range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from "Tintern Abbey" to what a critic of Wordsworth called the namby-pamby of the Lesser Celandine. It takes genius to play the Romantic music without falsifying it, and perhaps even greater genius to play it with a religious tremolo.”

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