Download Bob`s Lecture Notes for Week 1

Brandom
August 27, 2013
Hegel Seminar Introduction Notes
Overview:
I. Normativity in Kant
II. Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual, and the resulting idealisms:
CR+OI+CI =AI
III. Social theory of normativity. Recognition.
IV. Historical dimension of normativity. Post-Davidsonian temporal-perspectival theory of agency.
V. History of Normative Structures: The advent of Modernity, and the three epochs of normativity.
1. Substantive introduction should start with my Kant story:
Two main ideas we should take over from Kant:
a) Normativity of intentionality.
Concepts, conceived as rules, are the locus of normativity for Kant.
[This is the immediately relevant one.]
(I tell this story in the first of my Woodbridge lectures: “Animating Ideas of Idealism: A Semantic
Sonata in Kant and Hegel”.)
b) Categories as framework-explicitating concepts.
This is important for understanding Hegel’s “speculative”, “logical”, or “philosophical” concepts.
(Cf. “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel.”)
When Sellars says he wants to help move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian
phase, this is what I claim we should understand him as meaning: transpose these Kantian ideas
into a linguistic key.
When Rorty talks about my work as aiming to move analytic philosophy from its incipient Kantian
to its eventual Hegelian mode, what might that mean? The notes that follow begin to answer that
question.
Then follow organization of PdG:
Which means:
First concepts, then norms.
Cf. semantic reading of Hegel.
2. Introduction:
Three hylomorphic possibilities:
I. Nonconceptual objective pole, conceptual subjective pole.
In the Introduction, he argues that this Kantian picture leads to skepticism.
II. Conceptual-conceptual. (Conceptual realism.)
This is Hegel’s own position.
III. Nonconceptual-nonconceptual:
Arguing against this possibility is the first task of the Sense Certainty chapter.
This set-up demands we address the question: What should we mean by “conceptual”?
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It is because I take this to be the central, pivotal concept for Hegel’s work that I call my interpretation a
“semantic reading.”
Hegel has two big semantic ideas (and a lot of others downstream from these).
A) One concerns sense: a nonpsychological conception of the conceptual.
B) The other concerns reference or representation.
Hegelian sense/reference distinction starts with
(A) senses, conceptual in a non-psychological sense, articulated by material incompatibility, and
H’s non-psychological sense of “conceptual articulation”:
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.
A non-psychological conception of the conceptual:
a) For Kant (and for Hegel—indeed, following them, for McDowell), 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.
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
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c)
d)
e)
f)
g)
h)
determine them, because he held a kantian, rather than a cartesian concept of concepts.) This, I
think, is (one important component of) the Hegelian position.
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 cooperating 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.
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, we 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
Mere difference is not enough for determinateness. Hegel takes as his guiding thread the
Spinozist principle omnis determinatio est negatio. 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. 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.
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?
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i)
j)
k)
l)
m)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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of the objective natural world make explicit its conceptual structure, in Hegel’s sense.
n) In Perception we will see how to interpret the Aristotelian ontological structure of objects
(particulars) and properties solely in terms of determinate negation.
o) 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 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.
p) 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.
Two forms of one (conceptual) content:
a) That potentially common content (common if all goes well) is articulated by relations of
material incompatibility = exclusive difference (modal) = determinate negation.
This is a further commitment.
b) The difference of form, which defines the subjective and objective poles of the intentional
nexus, is the difference between incompatibility relations that would be made explicit by alethic
modal vocabulary and those that would be made explicit by deontic normative vocabulary.
This, too, is yet a further commitment.
c) Nonetheless, the two realms are not identical. For the sense of ‘incompatible’ is different in
the two. One and the same object cannot 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.
d) 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.
e) 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.
f) 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.
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Argument:
 GKC + hylomorphism: If we do not have a story according to which the same content can
appear, now as an objective fact, again as the content of a belief, the result will be skepticism in
the sense of the failure to satisfy the GKC. (I believe that John believes this.)
 The common content is conceptual content, which is the same as determinate content.
This much is conceptual realism:
There is a common content to objective facts and subjective beliefs, and it is conceptually
articulated.
So conceptual realism results from: i) hylomorphic response to ii) GKC, plus iii) conceptual
characterization of common content, which depends on iv) Hegel’s distinctive nonpsychological conception of the conceptual.
Reciprocal Sense-Dependence:
a) What is stated (about the objective realm) using alethic modal vocabulary and what is stated
(about the subjective realm) using deontic normative vocabulary are, as classes of utterances,
reciprocally sense-dependent upon one another, in the sense that one cannot understand (what
is stated by using) the one vocabulary unless one also understands (what is stated by using) the
other vocabulary. This reciprocal sense-dependence assertion can only be made out by
justifying two claims: i) that understanding the use of alethic modal vocabulary depends on
(presupposes) understanding what is made explicit by the use of deontic normative vocabulary
and ii) that understanding the of (a particular range of) deontic normative vocabulary depends
on (presupposes) understanding what is made explicit by alethic modal vocabulary.
This claim obviously depends on having put in place the sense-dependence/referencedependence distinction.
Here are three more specific objective 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:
i) 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.
ii) 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.
iii) The concepts law and necessity, on the one hand, and counterfactual inference on the other,
are reciprocally sense dependent.
At this point, we have reached the commitments that amount to objective idealism, which asserts the
reciprocal sense-dependence, not reference-dependence [Explain! Cf. “Holism and Idealism…”], of the
modalities (deontic and alethic) articulating the two poles of the intentional nexus.
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b) The association of practices-or-processes with the side of subjects in the intentional nexus, and
relations with the objective side of the intentional nexus is a further commitment.
c) It is in terms of this last commitment that I have formulated conceptual idealism (the last third
of the triad that adds up, I am claiming, to absolute idealism).
d) It is the idea that within the sense-dependence between the talk of norm-governed practices and
necessary relations among properties or facts, it is the practices of knowing and acting that
institute the objective relations between knowings and actings, on the one hand, and how things
are, on the other. This is epistemic-practical tracking (an objective matter, made explicit by
alethic modal vocabulary), established by norm-governance (a matter of the practices of
subjects, made explicit by deontic normative vocabulary).
e) The intentional nexus itself consists of two dimensions: epistemic-practical tracking, an alethic
modal affair, and norm-governedness, a deontic normative affair. The former is the DretskeFodor nomological locking, and the latter is the normative relation of reference or
representation, which Kant taught us to think of in terms of authority (of represented over
representing) and responsibility (of representing to represented).
This claim is a commitment independent of and additional to the prior ones.
f) It is not clear to me what the relation is between the commitment in (i) above, and the reciprocal
sense-dependence claim in (e).
g) Conceptual idealism, though, is a claim downstream from the commitment in (i). For it is the
claim that there is an asymmetry between those two dimensions of the intentional nexus. Here
there is at least a sense-dependence—or is it a reference-dependence?—between the two
elements in (i).
h) I’m thinking that the additional structure in (i) and the reading of conceptual idealism in (k)
might offer the raw materials for a response to the triviality-banality objection to conceptual
idealism.
i) Conceptual Realism, Objective Idealism, Conceptual Idealism, CR+OI+CI=Absolute Idealism.
From Sense to Reference (‘that’-intentionality to ‘of’-intentionality):
(B)
Representation: discerns representational structures of authority and responsibility by
retrospective reconstruction of development of senses under the pressure of collisions between
sense, interpreted as indicating error.
This fills in Kant’s idea of representational relations as normative, as a matter of the
responsibility of representings to what then in that normative sense of exercising authority
over those representings count as representeds.
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
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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 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
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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 (in “The Thought”): “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.
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. [I tell this story in my Munich lectures on Hegel’s Introduction, Chapters 1-3 of
the 2013 draft of ASoT.]
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
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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.
[Note: I skipped this bit in class.]
3. Consciousness Topic: Empirical Knowledge.
a) Inferentialism, anti-atomism, non-psychological notion of the conceptual = the determinate.
b) Hegel as paleo-Sellarsian: Dialectical critique of givenness = immediacy, incorporating two
central Sellarsian moves: two senses of “noninferential”, and what consideration of “sense
universals” and theoretical objects (FU) teaches us.
c) Sense Certainty tries out the nonconceptual-nonconceptual alternative from (4-III).
Sense Certainty has two lessons:
i.
Empirical authority of immediacy requires concepts: sense universals
ii.
Empirical authority of immediacy requires a diachronic, historical, anaphoric,
retrospective, recollective structure. One must be able to “hold onto” the deliverances
of demonstratives. Will see this structure
d) Perception:
Even sense universals require inferential articulation (Sellars, MoG).
Holism about properties.
Incompatibility as the structure of determinate contentfulness.
Properties must come in compatible families of incompatible properties.
Aristotelian object/property structure is generated from incompatibility.
e) Force and Understanding
Not just universals of sense (observable properties) but theoretical entities.
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That distinction, between observable/theoretical entities (the “supersensible world”) is
methodological, not ontological.
Laws codifying subjunctively robust inferences articulate an essential structure of facts (Kant).
From facts to “the Concept”: the holistic constellation of, on the subjective side, commitments, and
on the objective side, objects (and properties), facts, and laws.
Holism (starting with FU):
i. 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.)
ii.
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 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 distinctio 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 distinctio 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’).
iii. Hegel is a semantic holist because he is a pragmatic functionalist.
iv.
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.
iv) 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.
v) 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.
vi) 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
giving up the semantic atomism about the relations between concepts and judgments that had been a hallmark of Enlightenment
epistemology.
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vii) 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.
viii) 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.
ix) 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.)
f) Progression within Consciousness from
Demonstrative knowledge
Observation with sense universals
Theoretical knowledge.
Next: norms
4. Self-Consciousness Topic: Norms and Selves.
2)
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 claims and practical maxims. From
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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.
e)
f)
g)
h)
What, in the end, is Kant’s theory of normativity?
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.
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.
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.
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 demystification is always to exhibit them in the context of the social practices (“customs, uses,
institutions”) within which they acquire and display those significances.
3) Reciprocal recognition as the structure of the social:
a) 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
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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’
(Anerkennung). Geist is synthesized by reciprocal (gegenseitig) recognition. The structure
of that recognitive process is for Hegel the structure of the social as such.
b) 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.
c) 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].
d) 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.)
i) Hegel introduces the idea of reciprocal recognition in connection with the normative metastatus 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.
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
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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.
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
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.
e) 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.”
f) 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
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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
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.
g) 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
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h)
i)
j)
k)
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 “Some
Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism”.]
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. Autonomy 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).
Attempting asymmetric recognition (Mastery, pure independence) and its pathologies:
example of celebrity. (Thereon hangs a tale.)
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 normgoverned (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.
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,
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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”.]
l) 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 metaphysicalconstitutive claim about selves. (Cf. Habermas). Things may not be so easy.
Summary:
a) Social Theory of Self-Consciousness, self-c as a social achievement. Anti-Cartesian view of
self-c as not happening between your ears. (Note: Comical nearly universal misunderstanding
of Hegel as keeping Cartesian notion of self-c, but locating it in suprapersonal Geist. What
Geist really is.)
b) Recognition story in brief: chess-players and philosophers.
c) From natural properties (desire) to normative proprieties via social recognitive attitudes.
Recognition as a structure of authority and responsibility:
Progression from:
i.
Subordination model of normativity (auth/resp)
ii.
Autonomy model: autos + nomos. Only the subject can bind herself.
iii.
Recognition model.
Conceptions of normativity: from Autonomy to Reciprocal Recognition. (As in Woodbridge#2)
d) Master-Slave dialectic, and pathologies of asymmetric recognition. Mastery as authority
without co-ordinate responsibility. Cf. celebrity.
In class I skipped this bit:
5. Reason: Topic: Rational Agency. “Reason is purposive action.” [22]
a) Davidson:
1) One and the same event can be described or specified in many ways.
2) One important way of identifying or singling out an event is in terms of its causal consequences.
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3) Some, but not all, of the descriptions of an action may be privileged in that they are ones under
which it is intentional.
4) What makes an event, performance, or process an action, something done, is that it is intentional
under some description.
5) What distinguishes some descriptions as ones under which a performance was intentional is their
role as conclusions in processes of practical reasoning.
b) Hegel’s ‘Tat’ refers to the deed done, with all of its accordioned descriptions, and that his
‘Handlung’ is that same deed as the agent’s doing, that is, as specifiable by the restricted set of
descriptions under which it is intentional.
c)
Absicht : Vorsatz :: Tat : Handlung
d)
How does Hegel understand the difference between the different kinds of what I have
been calling ‘descriptions’ or ‘specifications’ of the deed?




It is a distinction of social perspective, between the agent, who acknowledges a specifically
contentful responsibility, and an audience, who attributes and assesses it.
That difference of social perspective is a normative one in a dual sense. What they are
perspective on is a normative status: a question of the imputation of a specific responsibility.
And the perspectives are defined by distinct seats of authority concerning the
characterization of what the agent is responsible for.
The ultimate determinate identity (unity) of the content of the action—what we should
understand as common to its inner form and the outer form that translates, actualizes, and
expresses it—is the product of a process of reciprocal specific recognition, in which the
competing complementary socially distinct authorities negotiate and their claims are
adjudicated and reconciled.
It is structured by a distinction of temporal perspective, between the prospective Vorsatz
and the only retrospectively determinate Absicht.
e) Post-Davidsonian conception, transposes it into a matter of social normative perspectives of loci
of authority.
f) Hylomorphic story concerning language-exits, rather than language-entries: action simply
translates something implicit into something explicit. Content as what is the same in these two
forms.
Next: History
6. Spirit Topic: The Advent of Modernity
a) Spirit offers a large-scale, systematic history of structures of normativity.
i)
Hegel thinks there have been two large constellations of practical conceptions of
normativity.
ii)
They define what I’ll call the great epochs he discerns: traditional and modern. He thinks
there is also a third incipient such structure.
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iii)
iv)
v)
vi)
He thinks the sea-change from the traditional to the modern practical construals of
normativity—from the objective to the subjective—is the single biggest event in human
history.
That these are practical conceptions means that they are institutionalized, and that they
shape the kind of individuals (particulars infused by universals=culture) in the communities
with institutions of these characteristic shapes.
In the first stage, norms are conceived as objective, and normative attitudes are
conceived as one-sidedly responsible to them.
In the second stage, norms are conceived as the products of the activities of subjects,
individualized. Normative attitudes are understood as authoritative w/res to normative
statuses.
vii)
Within each of these epochs, Hegel rehearses various more specific forms the underlying structure
can take. That is, he offers a botanization of those more specific forms.
viii)
Further, he claims that the botanizations he offers are complete. That is, he claims to rehearse all the
possible forms the epochal structure (traditional or modern) can take.
ix)
Beyond that, the botanization he offers has a rational recollective form. The structure that generates
it, the elements implicit in the epochal structure as such, are arranged so that those features become
explicit in an expressively progressive development, which passes through every possible form.
These are bold and implausible claims. How should we understand them?
x)
I understand them as limning the structure of rationality, construed under categories of Vernunft, not
Verstand. They constitute regulative ideals for what counts as understanding phenomena such as
these. One has understood them only and insofar as one can present the epochal structures (both
within epochs and between them) in this form: horizontally comprehensive and vertically
(diachronically-developmentally) as recollectively expressively progressive of the structure of
implicit aspects that become explicit through the process.
xi)
In his discussion of the traditional epoch, what we really see is its beginning, and what is botanized
is the process by which the modern epoch emerges. Within the modern epoch, characteristically, the
botanization is the development of modernity.
xii)
The process which eventuates in modernity is the gradual coming to self-consciousness (both
individually and communally-institutionally) of the traditional form of normativity.
xiii)
Modernity is then its own process of becoming self-conscious, which results in its overcoming,
yielding the incipient third epoch: Self-conscious Sittlichkeit.
xiv)
All of this should be seen as a deepening and development of Kant’s normative insight.
xv)
Hegel sees that Kant’s dichotomy between two forms of normativity, heteronomy and autonomy, is
far too crude to do justice to the phenomenon. It cannot even account for the transformation that it
was enacting: the transition from subordination models of normativity to autonomy models.
xvi)
I should use this thought to move on from my initial discussion of Kant. Consciousness, SelfConsciousness, and Reason look at different aspects of the normative structure of individuals:
discursive entry practices, self-constitutive practices, and discursive exit practices, respectively.
Emphasize the passage from Religion on gathering the threads together.
b) Philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant helped give theoretical shape
to new attitudes toward the nature and significance of subjectivity that can, in retrospect, be
seen to be characteristically modern. But Hegel was the first major philosopher to take the
advent of modernity as an explicit theoretical topic.
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Descartes to Kant and the scientific revolution were changing our ideas, but Hegel takes what
they are doing (Enlightenment) and the social, political, and economic changes that went with it
(from the breaking up of the ancient regime through to incipient industrial revolution) as all
aspects of one titanic transformative process. It is the single biggest thing that ever happened
in human history. It is the shift from traditional objectivism about norms, embodied in a
distinctive kind of self and community, to subjectivism about norms, from seeing normative
statuses as authoritative w/res to normative attitudes to seeing normative attitudes as
authoritative w/res to normative statuses.
c) Indeed, as the chapter on Spirit makes clear, in an important sense that is the topic of the
Phenomenology. The principal aim of the book is to articulate, work out, and apply a way of
understanding the transition from pre-modern to modern social practices, institutions, selves,
and their immanent forms of understanding. It is a Bildungsroman for our culture. ‘Geist’ is
Hegel’s collective term for everything that has a history rather than a nature—or, put
otherwise, everything whose nature is essentially historical. Geist as a whole has a history, and
it is Hegel’s view that in an important sense, that history boils down to one grand event. That
event—the only thing that has ever really happened to Geist—is its structural transformation
from a traditional to a modern form.
Hegel offers us a vocabulary in which to understand that titanic transformation, and the new
kind of selfhood it brings with it. For coming to understand the transition to modernity is the
achievement of a distinctive kind of self-consciousness: historical self-consciousness. Geistig
beings are to be understood in terms of their becoming, their present in terms of their past, their
states and statuses in terms of the processes that produced them. By reading the
Phenomenology we are to become self-consciously modern, conscious of ourselves as the
products of an unprecedented revolution in human institutions and consciousness.
 Things that have natures vs. things that have histories.
 The latter are things such that what they are for themselves is part of what they are in
themselves.
 A special kind of development through self-transformation is possible for the latter.
4) Three epochs of Spirit:
a) Hegel’s history of Spirit distinguishes three great epochs. Chronologically, these correspond to:
i) The ancient world: Greek civilization, Roman civilization, and feudal civilization.
ii) The modern world, from the Scientific Revolution through Hegel’s own time.
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):
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“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.
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.”
c) Philosophically, Hegel thinks that there have been just two large kinds of constellation of kinds
of selves, self-understandings, knowledge, agency, and social institutions. He thinks that by
thinking hard enough about the transition from the first to the second, the advent of modernity,
we can see the possibility of another such great transformation, from modernity to something
that stands to it as it stands to traditional society. Describing that transition is the large task of
the Phenomenology. This structure means that one can divide what Hegel has to teach us into
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d)
e)
f)
g)
two parts: his account of the transition to modernity, and his account of the transition from
modernity to something better.
Under the first heading, Hegel is the first philosopher to see that as only one aspect of a larger
transition, which included the Protestant Reformation as well as the Enlightenment, and huge,
structural changes in economics (the rise of the bourgeoisie), in civil life, and in political
institutions. When forty years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century Sir Henry Sumner
Maine wrote about the transition from status societies to contract societies, it was an indication
of the level of penetration of Hegelian ideas. Hegel thinks that modernity involves us being a
different kind of self. Very roughly, where the Greeks thought of the normativity in which we
live and move and have our being as objective—what is fitting and proper is just as much given
as any feature of the natural world—we moderns think of it as subjective—what is fitting and
proper is the product of our activities, something made by us. The realization of our role in
making the norms is a genuine advance. But it brings with it a cost having to do with the
practical conception of the rational bindingness of those norms. We are, as the Greeks were
not, alienated from our norms. (See below.)
Under the second heading come all of the large-scale transformations that sum up Hegel’s
diagnosis and therapy. On the side of theoretical understanding, what is required to move to the
next stage is to stop conceiving of ourselves and Spirit under the static, atomistic categories
of Verstand, and replace them with developing, holistic categories of Vernunft. On the side
of practical self-constitution, what is needed is to move from selves and institutions exhibiting
the structure of independence to those exhibiting the structure of freedom. For this the
intellectual change from Verstand to Vernunft is necessary, but not sufficient. For one can only
be fully free in the right sort of institutional setting. On the other hand, one of the things we
learn when we achieve Absolute Knowing is that we have been implicitly free all along—in the
sense that our thinking and acting as though our concepts had determinate contents implicitly
commits us to, constitutes an implicit acknowledgment of the necessity of, the genuine
recognitive reciprocity that is freedom. That is why the development of Spirit is the “history of
the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” Having moved from an era of objective norms
to an era of subjective norms, we are now to move to one in which objectivity and subjectivity
are seen as reciprocally dependent aspects of a single, idealistic whole, in which the sense in
which norms are found (as binding on us) and the sense in which they are made (binding on us
by our own activity) are and are seen as two sides of one coin.
The first stage in the development of Spirit is immediate Sittlichkeit. It is sittlich because of the
relation of the Sitte, the customs, the mores of the community to the self-consciousness of the
members of that community. They see themselves wholly as creatures of those norms. The
communal norms constitute and articulate who they really are. They are fully at home in them,
and identify with them. The Sittlichkeit is immediate because of the nature of the norms.
They are understood as given, or found, as objective. What their content is, and that they are
binding on us and that we are constituted as and by being bound by them are permanent,
unchanging features of the way things are and must be. The selves constituted by those norms
are objective, communal self-consciousnesses.
Immediate Sittlichkeit: Traditional, objective-ontological conception of normativity.
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Fittingness for the Greeks, God’s command for the medieval.
Sittlichkeit is the authority of normative statuses over normative attitudes.
The norms with which practitioners identify are thought of as brutely given facts about how
things are. “What observation knew as a given object in which the self had no part, is here a
given custom [Sitte].” [PG 461] The mediation that is denied by this practical conception of
norms as immediate is mediation by the attitudes of those who are bound by them.
The immediacy that is the fatal structural flaw in pre-modern Sittlichkeit is a running together
of the normative and the natural. On the one hand, this means that normative proprieties are
treated as natural properties: as simply there, part of the furniture of the world, independently of
the human practices they govern. On the other hand, it means that merely natural properties are
treated as having intrinsic normative significance.
The problem is not that natural distinctions are given or taken to have normative significances,
but that they are understood as already having those significances independently of the practices
or attitudes of those for whom they are normatively significant.
h) The second stage in the development of Spirit is alienated individual self-consciousness.
Alienation is not in the first instance a psychological state, but an ontological structure
exhibited by selves and the communities that comprise them. One is alienated insofar as one’s
self is constituted in a community exhibiting the asymmetric recognitive structure of
independence. (When it becomes theoretically explicit, this structure is expressed in the
independent, atomistic understanding of concepts characteristic of the metaconceptual
framework of Verstand.) A new kind of subjective self-consciousness arises at this stage, whose
self-understanding centers on the Enlightenment realization that we make the norms; they
are our products. Apart from our attitudes of taking and treating people as committed,
responsible, or authoritative, there are no such normative statuses. We institute them by
our activities. This is a genuine advance over the naïve assimilation of the normative to the
natural of the first stage (which Hegel takes to be epitomized in the worries in Sophocles’
Antigone about merely natural categories of gender being taken to have un-get-overable
normative significance for what roles it is proper to play in the life of the community.) But
Sittlichkeit—identification of oneself as bound by shared norms and with oneself as constituted
by those norms—has been shattered. (The self-consciousness that comes from eating the fruit
of the tree of knowledge means expulsion from the care-free paradise in which one had been at
home.)
i) The cost of insight into our own role in the institution of norms is alienation.
j) Modernity for Hegel consists in individual self-consciousness claiming a distinctive kind of
authority for its own attitudes and activities. This claim of authority has shown up in two
forms: the rights of intention and knowledge in agency, and the idea that the norms we are
bound by are not just there, antecedently to and independently of our doings. The latter thought
also involves the authority of subjective attitudes over norms—which accordingly can no longer
be thought of as wholly given, natural, and objective. The difference is that in this case, the
norms in question are ought-to-bes rather than ought-to-dos.
k) Much more radically, Hegel also thinks that the modern rise of subjectivity culminates in the
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realization that not only the force, but also the contents of conceptual norms are dependent upon
the attitudes and activities of the individuals who apply them in judgment and action.
l) The characteristically modern insight is that norms are not, as traditional forms of life
implicitly took them to be, independent of the subjective normative attitudes of concept users.
The dependence of norms on attitudes is a dimension of responsibility on the side of the norms
or statuses, and of corresponding authority on the part of the attitudes. It is because that
authority of attitudes over norms is construed on the model of independence-as-Mastery that the
insight into the normative role of subjectivity shows up in its distinctively modern, alienated,
form. For what is distinctive of the atomistic conception of authority that is epitomized by the
Master is precisely that authority (independence) is construed as ruling out any correlative
responsibility (dependence). It follows that if norms are dependent on attitudes, there can be no
intelligible reciprocal dependence of attitudes on norms. Alienation is the structural denial that
subjective attitudes are responsible to norms which, as authoritative count as independent of
those attitudes. The claim is that traditional and modern practical understandings are alike in
taking it that if norms exert authority over attitudes, then attitudes cannot exert authority over
norms, and vice versa. Either norms are independent of attitudes and attitudes dependent on
norms, or attitudes are independent of norms and norms are dependent on attitudes.
m) The claim is first that when the hyper-objectivity about norms characteristic of immediate
Sittlichkeit is shattered by a practical realization of the essential role played by the normative
attitudes of individual subjects in instituting norms, the result is a complementary hypersubjectivity: alienation. And second, that what drives that pendulum from the one extreme to
the other is failure to appreciate the mediated structure of reciprocal sense-dependence of the
concepts of dependence and independence, that is, responsibility and authority. In short, it is
retaining the immediacy of the conception of normativity that dictates that appreciating the
dependence of norms on attitudes precludes retaining a sittlich appreciation of the dependence
of attitudes on norms, and so entails alienation.
n) Not only does the culture make us, we make the culture.
o)
p) The final transition is from alienation to differentiated (as opposed to immediate), selfconscious Sittlichkeit. The objective bindingness of norms characteristic of Sittlichkeit is to be
combined with the subjective institution of norms characteristic of modern self-consciousness.
Doing that subjectively or intellectually (achieving the standpoint of Vernunft) is Absolute
Knowing. Living a social, institutional form of life that embodies that understanding is
freedom.
5)
Alienation:
a) The adjudication of the claims of competing, because incompatible, commitments is the process
by which determinate conceptual contents are both applied and instituted. But at the metalevel,
that process can show up practically in two different forms. It can be a matter of the
acknowledgment of the authority of norms—what really follows from and is incompatible with
what, what one is actually obliged or committed to do—over attitudes. Or it can be a matter
merely of the collision of attitudes, where the norms the attitudes are attitudes towards are
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b)
c)
d)
e)
f)
g)
demoted to something like adverbial modifications of the attitudes. The former is a sittlich, the
latter an alienated structure. Only attitudes, not genuine norms, are visible in alienated Geist.
I think the issue about normativity that Hegel is addressing under the heading of ‘alienation’ is a
deep and genuine one. It has been brought to some sort of consciousness for us by the later
Wittgenstein—though how many readers see it as a problem he bequeathed us is a good
question. One who has is Sabina Lovibond (a student of McDowell’s at Oxford), though what
follows is my characterization, not hers.
One of Wittgenstein’s central themes is the essentially normative character of intentional states.
Whether they have the normative direction of fit characteristic of beliefs, or the opposite one
characteristic of intentions, the intentional content of the state plays the role of setting a
standard for assessment of the correctness or success of the state, depending on how things are
in the world the state thereby counts as being about or directed at. Wittgenstein is concerned to
break the hold on us of pictures that make this normative directedness seem metaphysically
mysterious.
Intentional states also serve as our reasons for believing and acting as we do. The relations
between this as it were horizontal function of intentional states as reasons for others, on the one
hand, and the vertical function of intentional states as expressions of, because answerable to,
how things objectively are complex. This is one of the issues about which I think we have the
most to learn from Hegel.
Wittgenstein emphasizes the contingency of the contents of our actual concepts. They reflect
contingent features of our embodiment, in the sense that if we were differently embodied, our
concepts would have to work differently. They reflect contingencies in the history of our
practices, in that had things developed differently, we would have had different concepts. They
reflect contingencies in the social nature of our practices, in that if we got along with each other
differently, we would have had different norms. That contingency is evident, for instance, in
what sorts of practices it turns out are teachable in the sense that as a matter of contingent fact,
practically every one of us who is given a certain sort of training will be disposed to “go on in
the same way”. And Wittgenstein vividly illustrates how much the contents of the concepts that
are actually available to us depends on such contingencies of teachability for creatures with
bodies like ours, wired up like us, with the sort of history, community, and training that we
actually have.
The massive contingency of the contents of our concepts reflects the sense in which they are
ours: instituted by us because deployed and applied by us. We are made into intentional
systems, concept users, by the norms that govern our doings, that articulate our reasons. But
those norms are in turn made by us. They have the contents that they do because of contingent
facts about us and our actual attitudes and activities. As William James said: “The trail of the
human serpent is over all.” We have met the norms, and they are ours. This is the insight that
Hegel sees as distinctively structuring modernity in all its manifestations.
Alienation is the result of the tension that this fact about the dependence of the contents of
our conceptual norms on contingencies of our actual doings puts on the intelligibility of
the force of those conceptual norms. For it seems to undercut both of the dimensions of
normative force that are crucial for understanding intentionality: rationality and objectivity.
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h) For the first, or rational dimension of normative force: how are we to understand the rational
force of conceptual norms, once the contingency of their content has been acknowledged. How
can they be seen as providing genuine reasons for belief and action? When we say “We reason
this way rather than that, because as a matter of contingent fact creatures like us (in biology,
history, sociology) can be trained all to respond the same way to one sort of training, but not to
another,” the ‘because’ is a causal, not a rational ‘because’. How can we then see the particular
determinate conceptual norms that result from these contingent causal processes as articulating
genuine reasons for belief and action? As a homely parable—not wholly alien to Hegel’s
thought in the vicinity (cf. his discussion of Faith and Enlightenment, in Spirit)—think of the
plight of the serious young child raised in an organized church of some particular flavor, say,
Baptist, upon the realization that she is a Baptist because her parents were. She realizes that if
she had been born in Italy, her parents and so she, would have been Catholic, it in Scotland,
Presbyterian, and so on. Again, these are causal ‘because’s. That aetiological realization of the
contingency of the content of her religious commitment undercuts the conviction that it is a
rational commitment, one for which one can give good reasons. Is it just a lucky coincidence
that one was raised in the truth, though one might not have been? And the reasons that one
would now give turn out, on closer inspection, to exhibit the same contingencies. “We are right
because the essence of our faith is the inerrancy of the Bible.” But our belief in that is similarly
contingent, and anyway, there are other Bibles. And so on.
I consider the ways in which genealogy can come to undercut reason, in my 2013 Howison
lecture:
“Reflecting the Abyss: Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity.”
i) Another possibly illuminating example concerns the way jurisprudential theory acknowledge
the force of the alienating tension between law being judge-made, and its articulating
normatively binding reasons. Legal realists acknowledge the infection of law by contingency
(“what the judge had for breakfast”), but bemoan it as at best an unfortunately necessary evil, a
shameful failing of the process, always to be minimized to the extent possible. The law, the real
law, is the rational core that remains uninfected by such contingencies. And the later judge’s
job is to discern that objective law amid the subjective accretions and distractions that have
been contingently attached to it. In Hegelian terms, legal realists express an essentially premodern conception of law, corresponding to the epoch of immediate Sittlichkeit. Their
distinctively modern counterparts are the legal positivists, who revel in a conception of the law
as our product, as essentially judge-made (I’m leaving the statutory dimension aside.), as our
subjective product. They pooh-pooh the worry about this acknowledgment undercutting the
force of legal reasons, urging us to make do with a less grand (more realistic in a deflationary
sense) practical notion of what it means to be a legal reason. A properly Hegelian
jurisprudential theory would overcome both the naïve understanding of normativity the legal
realists see as the price of objectivity and the alienation the legal positivists see as the price of
self-consciousness about the role of subjectivity in instituting legal norms.
j) For the second, or objective, dimension of normative force: How can we understand what we
now see as concepts whose content is thoroughly contingent as objectively correct about the
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world? How can they be seen as expressing or representing the way things really are, what is
really incompatible with what and what really follows from what, once the contingency of their
content, its dependence on contingencies of our doings (attitudes, actual applications of
concepts, mere coincidences)?
k) Wittgenstein does not think these are insoluble problems. If we can sufficiently free ourselves
of a bad metaphysics of rationality and objectivity, the contingency of the genealogy of our
commitments need not be seen as undercutting either their reasonableness or their objectivity.
But I think it is fair to say that Wittgenstein does not give us much in the way of explicit
directions for how we should think about these issues, so as not to see the contingency of causal
explanations for our commitments as undercutting the normative force of the reasons we give
for them. In a real sense, Wittgenstein leaves us with this problem.
l) By contrast, Hegel addresses it head-on. It is, he thinks, the central, structuring problem of
modernity. It is what his philosophical theory is supposed to solve. If we think about reason
and the normative answerability of conceptual commitments to how things objectively are with
what we in virtue of that answerability count as talking and thinking about in the terms he crafts
for us—if we articulate them in the metaconceptual categories of Vernunft, rather than
Verstand—then we will be able explicitly to explain why the universal availability of massively
contingent genealogies for the contents of our concepts in no way undercuts their rational or
objective force. On the contrary, his main contribution is to give us an account of the content of
conceptual norms according to which that very contingency of their genealogy becomes visible
as a necessary condition of their determinateness, and hence of their rational and objective
force.
m) This is the truth that shall (when we follow it out) make us free, and hence point the way
forward, not just philosophically, but ethically and politically as well. For among the things we
will understand when we are able to approach from standpoint of Vernunft the issue of the
nature of the determinate contents and normative force of the concepts that articulate reasons is
that in practically treating our commitments in thought and action as determinately contentful
we are always implicitly acknowledging commitment to being members of a community with a
certain kind of reciprocal recognitive structure: the structure he calls ‘freedom’. This is the Big
Idea of Hegel that is the culmination, result, and point of all the others.
n) Tell the story here of the three conceptions of individual agency:
i.
Heroic (“I do what happens.”) Oedipus
ii.
Modern, acknowledging the rights of knowledge and intention
iii.
Third epoch: Re-attaining heroic agency, but only because we all
take responsibility for what each of us does (for what happens when we do what we do).
Second transformation: to Trust and Absolute Self-Consciousness.
One way in which the model of language helps us think about the possibility of overcoming
alienation, then, is that it exhibits an unalienated combination of authority of individual
attitudes and their responsibility to genuinely binding norms. For linguistic practice exhibits a
social division of labor. It is up to each individual which speech acts to perform: which claims
to make, which intentions and plans to endorse. The original source of linguistic commitments
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is the acts and attitudes of individual speakers. In undertaking those commitments, those
speakers exercise a distinctive kind of authority. But in doing so, as an unavoidable part of
doing so, they make themselves responsible to the norms that articulate the contents of the
concepts they have applied. Committing oneself in asserting or expressing an intention is
licensing the rest of one’s community to hold one responsible. The speaker and agent’s
authority is not only compatible with a co-ordinate responsibility (that is, authority on the part
of the norms, administered by the community), it is unintelligible as determinately contentful
apart from such responsibility.
Didn’t get to all the rest of this stuff in class. Should at least have done the material from “Sketch of a
Program…”
7. Absolute Knowing Topic: The Final Form of Semantic Self-Consciousness
a) The recognitive structure of trust: confession, and forgiveness.
b) Distinction between two kinds of concepts: OED and logical-speculative-philosophical.
c) Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel.
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).
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, 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]
o) 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. Ii. And
both the PhdG and the WL do it—each in its own way—for the logical, speculative metaconcepts.
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p) 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.
q) 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.]
r) 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.
d) Necessity as Retrospective (the owl of Minerva)—contra the great myth of Hegelian historicism
as invoking a kind of destiny.
Stray bits from second half of 2010 notes:
6) The structure of the Phenomenology:
a) The big book can be thought of as consisting of three apparently self-contained books:
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.
ii) Roughly the first half of the book: Introduction, Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and
Reason.
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 midstream, 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:
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
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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.)
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.)
iii) Reason: A paleo-Davidsonian discussion of action, intention, language-exit transitions.
Social perspectives on action (intentional/consequential), 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 subjectmatter. 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]
7) Two contemporary Wittgensteinean problems concerning conceptual or intentional normativity (cf. Kant’s big move):
a) Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s problem: determinateness.
b) use must determine content (pragmatism). Hegel:Kant :: Quine:Carnap in the late middle period of neoKantianism, thought of as having 4 phases:
 Kuno Fischer and Friedrich Lange, followed by Trendelenburg and Vaihinger
 one culminating in Cohen, Natorp, in Marburg, and (Windelband and Rickert), followed by Cassirer,
[I actually think that there is something that Cohen and Windelband each had a piece of, that no-one
has since put together, and that their successors missed almost entirely. It is very close to my reading
of Hegel, though they don’t put it that way.]
 one in Carnap and the Vienna Circle and C.I. Lewis, hence Quine,
 and one contemporary, initiated by Sellars and Strawson, and continued by me and McDowell, among
others.
8) Verstand (Kant-Frege) determinateness  Vernunft (Hegel), as metametaconceptual frameworks.
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a)
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.
9) On the issue of systematicity, and the potential viability of “cafeteria Hegelianism,” contra RolfPeter Horstmann.
10) I will be offering a kind of translation manual for Hegel’s ferocious vocabulary.
a) Example: H’s ‘independence’/‘dependence’ are usually (and not unnaturally) read in terms of
alethic modalities: a matter of what is (conditionally) possible and necessary. But one of the
central elements of my reading is to understand these terms normatively, as a matter of deontic,
not alethic, modality. Compare: empiricist alethic readings of free will with Kantian deonticnormative ones.
11) The semantic reading I offer attributes to Hegel an account that has a nested structure:
a) My reading of the PhdG focuses on the notion of conceptual content. That is why I call it a
“semantic” reading.
b) In his pragmatist way, Hegel understands conceptual content, and intentionality more generally,
in terms of a particular way of thinking about the Test-Operate-Test-Exit cycle of perception,
thought, and action, followed by the perception of the results of action, and so on.
c) That notion of individual understanding-and-agency is, in virtue of its normative articulation
(the way it essentially involves the exercise of authority and the acknowledgment of
responsibility), embedded in social recognitive structure at once of individual selfconsciousnesses and their recognitive communities. These are particulars (living, desiring
organisms) who become self-conscious individuals (particulars as characterized by universals)
constituting a universal in the form of the recognitive community by their practical recognitive
attitudes towards one another.
d) Understanding how conceptual content is both conferred and determined by community
members engaging in both recognitive and cognitive-practical (cycle of perception-and-action)
practices requires seeing both in their historical-developmental context, that is, genealogically.
e) It is that historical dimension, and the genealogical perspectives that reveal it, that ultimately
make sense of the representational dimension of intentionality, and so the relations between the
subjective and objective aspects of our thick practices –what Hegel calls respectively the side of
“certainty” [Gewißheit] and of “truth” [Wahrheit].
12) 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
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distinguish two tasks we as readers must pursue:
i. Figuring out what is going on within the allegory; and
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.
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.
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