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7/14/2017
Hegel Seminar—Week 1 Notes
1. Q: Why care about Hegel? A: Contemporary Anglophone situation.
Sellars: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase.
Rorty on me: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its incipient Kantian to its eventual
Hegelian phase.
What would it mean to do this?
2. I say that I am offering a semantic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Why? A: Because I
see thinking about concept use and conceptual content as the center of his philosophical
interests. Further, I think he has a very sophisticated account of these central phenomena—
one that we can learn a lot from today. I’m going to motivate it two ways: from Kant, and
from Wittgenstein.
One of the reasons my reading makes so little contact with the huge secondary literature on
Hegel [Stekeler-Weithofer’s Hegels Analytische Philosophie is an exception.] is that his
readers—particularly in Germany—by and large missed this central, axial concern. I think
there are causes for this, rather than reasons: he left no philosophically able students whose
principal concern was his logic and metaphysics. For understandable reasons, they all cared
about social, political, and broadly cultural parts of the system. It is fascinating to speculate
about how differently the history of philosophy would have developed if these motivating
problems—which we only recovered via Wittgenstein’s lessons—had been appreciated by
philosophers after Hegel’s death in 1831.
3. Kant’s normative pragmatism:
a) Kant on the framework: Kant discovered that the expressive role characteristic of some
concepts (alethic modal ones being the paradigm) is not to describe how things
empirically are, but to make explicit features of the framework of practices that makes
empirical description possible.
b) Kant’s normative turn. Judgment as minimal unit of responsibility. Subjective and
objective forms of judgment. Task responsibility is integrating into an SUA.
c) That view about pragmatics has consequences for conception of the content of
judgments: they must stand in relations of material (concept-specific) incompatibility and
consequence. This is a pragmatist order of explanation—explanatory primacy not of the
practical over the theoretical (Fichte?) but of force over content.
4. Three big questions are left over:
a) Content 1: Two dimensions of intentionality. Need to synthesize OSUA gives thatintentionality, what about of-intentionality? Kant has two ideas: i) inferential
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triangulation (as in Woodbridge Lecture I) ii) invocation of immediacy of representation,
in the form of intuitions.
b) Content 2: Determinateness. i) In what sense do conceptual contents need to be
determinate? Kant has an answer to this: Kant-Frege determinateness. In this case, it
must be settled for every rule and every manifold of representations, whether that
manifold can be successfully synthesized by that rule—i.e. integrated into the SUA—or
whether another rule is needed, or some of the manifold must be rejected as spurious.
ii) Where do the determinate conceptual contents come from? Here Kant has only
some weak things to say: once things are off the ground, reflective judgments (3rd
Critique) can make new concepts from old ones. But where do any empirical concepts
come from?
c) Normativity: What is the origin and nature of discursive normativity (Gültigkeit,
Verbindlichkeit)? Here Kant does not have a good answer. Transcendental activity
(instituting the discursive norms) must precede empirical activity (applying the discursive
norms in endorsing judgments and practical maxims).
5. Hegel will take over Kant’s normative pragmatism, but offer new answers to all these
questions. Further his answers to the three questions will be integrated into one story. (I tell
part of this story in the Woodbridge lectures.)
6. Let me motivate two of these questions (the second and third) another way. For I think these
are two of the big questions that Wittgenstein asks. Further, I think the general form of the
answers Hegel gives is the same as LW’s. But there is a lot more structure to H’s account
than to LWs. One of the big issues (partly a reflection of metaphilosophical and
methodological differences) between McDowell and me concerns whether this additional
level of fine-structure is a good or a bad thing.
7. A threat to the intelligibility of the determinateness (of discursive norms): This is essentially
Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s problem—though it need not be set up as SK does. The issue is how
to understand the nature and origin of determinate conceptual norms against the background
of a pragmatist order of semantic explanation.
a) We can start with Quine’s version of pragmatism (even though he is blind to the
normative dimension of concept-use). The slogan for my claim here is Hegel:Kant ::
Quine:Carnap. Kant and Carnap have two-phase theories: First, concepts, meanings, or
languages are instituted. Then, subsequently, judgments are made, beliefs formulated,
theories endorsed. Quine argues that while this is fine for artificial, formal languages, it
is not and cannot be how things work for natural languages. In the former case, the
meanings are stipulated—in some expressively powerful metalanguage. But in the case
of natural languages, languages in use, it is only the use of the language that can confer
meanings on the expressions used. And the use consists in making judgments, applying
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concepts, formulating and endorsing theories. So the challenge is to understand how the
one thing we do, use the language to make judgments, can count at once as both
instituting the discursive norms and applying them.
b) Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s version of this issue. How can what we actually do, namely
apply concepts in actual circumstances, and exhibit dispositions to do so in others,
determine (make determinate) what we ought to do in all future cases? A: If by
“determinate” one means Kant-Frege determinateness, “rails laid out to infinity,” one
cannot. So: what to do? Quine gives up on the idea of meaning—and in a certain sense,
so does LW (as semantic nihilist). But in another sense, LW’s response is to talk us out
of the feeling the need for determinateness in that (Kant-Frege) sense. What Hegel does
that LW does not do is give us a new model of determinateness, according to the
metaconceptual structure of Vernunft rather than the Kantian Verstand.
8.
The threat of genealogy: How to understand the rational bindingness of conceptual norms,
once their radical contingency (on details of our embodiment, training, and history—both
communal-traditional and individual-pedagogic) is appreciated.
Hegel: From rational derivability to genealogy (historical: at once rational and causal). The issue here is
that the great discovery of modernity is the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. But what attitudes
individuals actually adopt is contingent on many things. How, then, can we see the norms that are
instituted thereby as rationally binding on us? Those norms make us who we are (we are our
commitments and responsibilities). If those norms are not rational, how are we to identify with them?
This is alienation.
9.
a) A genealogy offers an explanation of why (cf. Sellars’s “becausation”) discursive norms
are as they are, or why applications of them are as they are, that does not appeal to
reasons why the norms are as they are, or the applications are as they are. It appeals to
causes instead: contingent features of embodiment, provenance, situation, history,
tradition, interests, and so on. LW often offers genealogies of our discursive practices, or
describes practices for which genealogical explanations are made available.
b) But for the great unmaskers (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud in the 19th century, Foucault and
Derrida closer to our time), genealogy undercuts rationality, and undercuts even the idea
that it is because the norms are as they are that we do what we do. The most radical form
undercuts the very idea that the existence of a norm that can be explained (or details of
whose content can be explained) genealogically can provide a reason for applying a term
one way rather than another.
c) Genealogies are in the first instance about the institution of discursive norms. They
interact with the application of norms in two ways. First, one can explain why the
applications are as they are by appealing to a norm governing them, and then offer a
genealogy of the institution of the norm. Second, one can offer genealogical explanations
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of the application of a discursive norm, and then appeal to the Quine-LW claim that
applying the norm must also institute it.
10. From Verstand to Vernunft:
a) These are two paired threats to the intelligibility of the institution and application of
discursive norms.
i.
The first questions how applying those norms can institute them, can
determine a genuine norm. How can actual applications settle what
ought to be done in an indefinite number of novel future cases (i.e.
institute a KF-determinate norm)?
ii.
The second questions how norms can rationalize or otherwise justify
one application rather than another, given the possibility of
genealogical explanations of the institution of the norm. How can the
norm explain, justify, or rationalize the applications, if it itself is
explicable genealogically?
b) Hegel’s response (and I think it is in the same general direction as LW’s) is i) to
acknowledge the facts on which the two threats are predicated, and ii) to claim that the
idea that they are threats to the intelligibility of the norm-governed character of
discursive practice is based on a mistaken view of what that norm-governed character is;
and iii) to claim that both are based on the same mistaken presuppositions: a structure he
calls “Verstand,” iv) to offer a worked-out alternative structure: “Vernunft.”
c) The key to his response is that in some sense, by thinking about both threats together,
we see how they can neutralize each other. Each provides the key to responding to
the other. They are two sides of one coin.
d) Roughly, the response to the threat to the intelligibility of applications instituting
determinate norms is to deny that the fact that more than one norm is compatible with
prior applications means that any norm instituted is completely indeterminate. Applying
the norm is determining the norm, making it more determinate, without making it wholly
determinate (in the K-F sense). [Note: later on, we’ll see that this is the prospective
perspective on norm institution and application.] A new notion of determinateness is
required.
e) Roughly, the response to the threat of genealogy is that once we see that it is precisely the
genealogically explicable contingencies in the institution-by-application of the norm that
are the determining of it, the rendering of it more determinately contentful, and that that
is the only possible source of determinateness, we see that the idea that genealogy
undercuts the normative bindingness of what it explains is based on a fantasy about
norms and determinateness: the Kant-Frege-Carnap Verstand fantasy about KFdeterminate norms first instituted (laying out “rails to infinity”) and then applied.
11.
Story of “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel”
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Part I:
a) Distinction between
i. Ordinary, ground-level, determinate empirical, practical, and theoretical concepts, and
ii. logical, philosophical, or speculative meta-concepts, whose distinctive expressive job it
is, on my reading, to let us make explicit the use, contents, and development of ordinary
determinate concepts.
 In both Kant and Hegel, I think the measure of our understanding of them is the
story we can tell about their views on (i), and secondarily, how their versions of
(ii) helps them do it. But the measure of their differences in (ii) is the very
different stories they tell about (i). Pursuing their work from this direction is
difficult, however, since both of them say a lot more about (ii), which they think
of as the core of their philosophical contributions, than they do about (i).
b) H thinks that determinate and logical concepts ((i) and (ii) above) are different with
respect to their potential completeness and finality:
i. logical concepts can be (and at least arguably are [though vide the incompleteness of H’s
magisterial tour de force discussion of the forms of inference in WL: inferences involving
iterated quantification are notable by their absence] and can be known to be complete,
correct, adequate, and final. Their metaconceptual role (as metavocabulary) can be fully
and finally carried out. [This interpretive claim about Hegel is not controversial.]
ii. determinate concepts cannot be (and hence, a fortiori, cannot be known to be) complete,
correct, adequate, and final. The march of empirical science has no end in principle. Herein
lies a very interesting story: Hegel’s version of Kant’s (and both pre-Kantian empiricists and
rationalists agree) version of the conceptual inexhaustibility of the sensuous lies not (just) in
its always outrunning any finite set of judgments, but also in the (holistic) instability of the
concepts. [see SPCRH]
c) H thinks determinate and logical concepts are alike in that their content can in principle
be specified or conveyed only genealogically: by a rational reconstruction of a possible
history of their development. He does this for some general and abstract determinate
concepts in his Realphilosophie. And both the PhdG and the WL do it—each in its own
way—for the logical, speculative metaconcepts.
d) My overall critical philosophical claim in the vicinity ((a), (b), and (c) are interpretive
claims) is that Hegel is wrong about both (b) and (c): both in his claim about how
determinate and logical concepts are different, and in his claim about how they are alike.
e) He is wrong about (b), because any set or system of logical concepts, too, must always
fail to make explicit everything about the use and content of ordinary determinate
concepts. The conceptual, no less than the sensuous, is (meta)conceptually inexhaustible.
Here I invoke the expressivism about logic (itself a Kantian-Hegelian, as well as Fregean,
claim) that is built on my inferentialism about semantic content (an Hegelian theme).
[Tell my story about a] distinguishing various sorts of ‘ought’s on the normativepragmatic side: prudential, legal, moral; and b] the expressive roles of various
conditionals: classical, intuitionistic, modally strict, relevant.]
f) And H is wrong about I because although he is right about the necessity of genealogical
specification of the contents of determinate concepts, the distinctive metaconceptual role
of logical, philosophical concepts makes another route available to convey them. We can
say directly, in other terms, what they help us say about the use and content of
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determinate concepts. That is what I aim to do for the PhdG and the WL: say what they
end up teaching us about determinate concepts, and how their vocabulary helps us do
that, but doing that in other terms.
12. On the issue of systematicity, and the potential viability of “cafeteria Hegelianism,”
contra Rolf-Peter Horstmann. He claims that Hegel’s commitment to philosophical
systematicity—a kind of holism at the level of metasemantics—specifically, explicitly, and
unavoidably forbids picking out some of his philosophical claims (a proper subset) for
endorsement, while rejecting others. My response is that the holism that matters is for
ground-level semantics: the semantics of non-philosophical, non-speculative, non-logical
concepts. He is just wrong to think that it holds also of his metaconcepts. Various features
that he lumps together under the heading of “Vernunft” are actually separable, and separately
intelligible claims, which ought to be assessed for their viability and plausibility individually
(retail, not wholesale assessment). That is, the first of Hegel’s claims that I deny is the
systematicity claim on which Horstmann relies.
Part II:
What would it be to make the Hegelian move from this Kantian perspective?
Outline of Hegel’s Big Ideas:
1) HBI #1: The social nature of the normative
2) HBI #2: Reciprocal recognition as the structure of the social
3) HBI #3: A conception of the conceptual
4) HBI # 4: Semantic/Conceptual Holism
5) HBI # 5: Idealism: objective, conceptual, absolute
6) HBI #6: Intentionality: expressive and representational, and the relations between them.
What follows is some discussion of each of these points:
HBI #1) The social nature of the normative:
a) Kant’s master idea, I claimed, is his normative turn: his identification of us as creatures who live
and move and have our being in a normative space of acknowledging, attributing, and assessing
commitments, obligations, responsibilities, authorities. He reconstrues concepts as rules that
determine what we have committed ourselves to, and what would entitle us to those
commitments, by applying those concepts in judging and acting.
b) In taking this line, he sides with his rationalist predecessors, against the empiricists, with respect
to their claim that in order to be aware of anything in a cognitiviely significant sense, in order to
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c)
d)
e)
f)
g)
h)
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.
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?
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 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 conceptmongering activity. 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
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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.
HBI #2) Reciprocal recognition as the structure of the social:
i) Hegel’s term for the normative realm—for the dimension of our activities that is articulated by
norms in the sense of being open to normative assessment, our commitments and entitlements,
responsibilities and authorities, everything that can be correct or incorrect, appropriate or
inappropriate—is ‘Geist’, spirit. Hegel sees Geist as an essentially social phenomenon. For
someone to be a self in the Kantian sense is to be a subject of normative statuses: commitment,
responsibility, authority, and so on. To say that Geist is an essentially social phenomenon is to
say that talk of selves and talk of communities are two sides of one coin. [Not just in the sense
that the concepts self and community are reciprocally sense-dependent, but in the stronger
sense that they are reciprocally reference-dependent.] Talk of someone as having authority or
responsibility, as committed or entitled is always implicitly talk of that individual as a member of
a community. Normatively characterized individuals and their communities are brought into
being and sustained as aspects of one process: the process Hegel calls ‘recognition’
(Anerkennung). Geist is synthesized by reciprocal (gegenseitig) recognition. The structure of
that recognitive process is for Hegel the structure of the social as such.
j) Recognizing someone is taking that individual to be a self in the Kantian sense: a subject of
normative statuses. Recognizing someone is adopting a practical stance or attitude. It is taking
or treating someone in practice as a subject of normative statuses: as someone who can
undertake commitments and responsibilities and exercise authority. Holding someone
responsible and acknowledging them as authoritative in some regard are specific forms of
recognition. The basic idea develops a theme familiar from earlier Enlightenment approaches to
specifically political norms. It is that normative statuses such as responsibility and authority are
creatures of our practical attitudes towards each other. There were no statuses such as
commitment, responsibility, and authority before we started taking or treating each other as
committed, responsible, and authoritative. Normative statuses are to be understood as
instituted by socially articulated normative attitudes.
k) The claim that the normative attitudes in question are socially articulated expresses the
requirement that in order to institute normative statuses, recognitive attitudes must be
reciprocal. To be a self is to be taken to be (recognized as) a self by those one takes to be
(recognizes as) selves. Here are some representative passages:
“Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another;
that is, it exists only in being acknowledged….The detailed exposition of the Notion of this
spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition.” [PG §178].
“But according to the Notion of recognition this [that a self-consciousness’ certainty of itself
have truth] is possible only when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in
its own self through its own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure
abstraction of being-for-self.” [PG §186].
l)
Here is an example that may help in getting a sense of the idea. (I’m not here talking at all
about the arguments that justify this way of thinking.)
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
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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 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.
m) I attributed to Kant the paradoxical-sounding conception of freedom as consisting in the
capacity to bind oneself by norms—to undertake commitments and responsibilities, and so to
open oneself up to normative assessment as having fulfilled or failed to fulfill those
commitments and responsibilities. On this conception, selfhood and freedom are two
inseparable aspects of one normative phenomenon. On Hegel’s social, recognitive conception
of the normative, freedom as constraint by norms is not something one can achieve all on one’s
own. It takes a village—in the sense of a community. (In fact, it takes a lot more institutional
structure than that. As we learn in the Philosophy of Right, it requires a state.) Being free, in
the sense of being the subject of normative statuses instituted by reciprocal recognition,
requires the recognition of the others one recognizes. Where recognition does not achieve full
reciprocity, where it remains asymmetric, only defective, not fully free selves are instituted. The
Phenomenology is, inter alia, the story of the different forms of unfree selves we have instituted
throughout history, culminating cumulatively in the Absolute Knowing that is the realization that
all along we were always-already implicitly committed to reciprocal recognition and so to
constituting ourselves and others as fully free selves. It is, as Hegel says elsewhere, a “history of
the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
n) I also attributed to Kant a criterion of demarcation distinguishing normative constraint from
merely natural constraint. What I called the “Kant-Rousseau autonomy thesis” is the claim that
genuinely normative constraint is always self-binding. One is normatively bound only by those
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authorities and responsibilities that one acknowledges as binding. One’s status as bound
depends upon one’s attitude of taking or treating something as binding. (Only one aspect of this
thesis is expressed by saying that selves as such are bound not by rules—as in laws of nature—
but by conceptions of rules.) As I told the story, it is because his conception of the normative
includes this criterion of autonomy that normative self-hood can be equated with freedom.
(Notice that in this sketch, no work needs to be done by the further claim—common to Kant and
Hegel, but not, for instance to Dewey or the early Heidegger, or the later Wittgenstein—that all
norms are conceptual norms, that is, norms articulating what is a reason for what.) In adding
the doctrine of the social institution of normativity by reciprocal recognition, we have seen,
Hegel makes freedom and self-hood in the normative sense something one cannot achieve all
on one’s own. One is dependent on the recognition of others. In giving up individual
independence, is Hegel also giving up the insights of the Kant-Rousseau autonomy thesis? I
think it is important to see that he is not. It is true that there is an apparent tension between
demarcating the normative by autonomy, on the one hand, and understanding it as having the
essentially social structure of recognition, on the other. And it is true that one of the
overarching lessons that Hegel seeks to teach us is to conceive ourselves (our selves, hence
normativity generally) under the category of freedom rather than of independence. (So, for
instance, Judith Sklar’s book on Hegel’s political thought is called From Independence to
Freedom.) But in fact his understanding of freedom in terms of reciprocal recognition is a
sophisticated way of working out the Kant-Rousseau autonomy criterion of demarcation of the
normative. For it is true according to Hegel, too, that we are only bound by what we bind
ourselves by. (As for Kant, it will turn out that by explicitly binding ourselves by conceptual
norms, we are implicitly acknowledging various commitments that come with being in the space
of reasons. But that part of the story should come in at the end, not at the beginning.) But
Hegel wants to look more closely at what is required in practice in order for something we do to
be properly understood as having the significance of binding ourselves by a determinately
contentful norm, of undertaking a definite responsibility. And what is required, he thinks, is a
practice exhibiting the structure of authority and responsibility distinctive of reciprocal
recognition.
o) Consider once again the toy example of the would-be good chess player. We may notice to
begin with that, at least in this case, the original commitment is up to the individual involved.
He commits himself to that goal. We saw that the goal becomes definite insofar as the player
recognizes some, and not others, as having the status he is committed to achieving. He
exercises his authority over the commitment he is undertaking by adopting those practical
recognitive attitudes—thereby setting the standards for goodness of chess playing higher or
lower, accordingly as his practical recognitions are more or less restrictive. (In this example,
there is a pretty strict hierarchy of inclusiveness. Not every specific sort of commitment would
have this feature.) But in exercising that recognitive authority, the individual also thereby binds
himself, in the sense of making himself responsible to those he recognizes. For fulfilling his
commitment, achieving his goal, now requires eliciting corresponding recognitive attitudes from
those he recognizes. And that lies beyond his authority. He is normatively independent
(authoritative) as regards his own recognitive attitudes towards others, but then is reciprocally
dependent (responsible) as regards their recognitive attitudes towards him. Being responsible
(having normatively bound oneself—a normative status) is intelligible only in a context in which
one can be held responsible (a normative attitude). That social context is what connects taking
oneself to be responsible (adopting an attitude) to making oneself responsible (exhibiting a
status). It is making oneself responsible to others (in that sense, recognizing them) that makes it
possible for one to bind oneself. (This is the same thought Wittgenstein expresses when he says
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“If whatever seems right to me is right, then there can be no question of right and wrong.”)
[This point is expounded in greater detail in Chapter Two of A Spirit of Trust: “Some Pragmatist
Themes in Hegel’s Idealism”.]
p) Conceiving norms under the category of ‘independence’ is seeking to have authority without
correlative responsibility. Conceiving norms under the category of ‘freedom’ is seeing that
authority without responsibility cannot be determinately contentful. The reciprocal recognition
model of necessarily correlative authority and responsibility is not incompatible with KantRousseau autonomy insight, but is an attempt to work it out. Auto-nomy has two parts: the
nomos or law, and the fact that one subjects oneself to it, that becoming subject to it is one’s
own doing. The model of independence focuses on the second, at the cost of making the first
unintelligible. The model of reciprocal recognition is invoked to make sense of both halves: that
one binds one’s self—in the sense that it is one’s self that is doing the binding—and that one is
bound. The first is the dimension of authority, and the second of responsibility. Hegel thinks
that only a social (recognitive) division of labor can both keep these from collapsing into each
other (“If what seems right to me is right…”) or being driven too far apart (if what I’m bound by
swings free of my attitudes).
q) Hegel saw that the best way to exploit Kant’s transformation of the concept concept from
something thought of as grasped by us to something thought of as gripping (binding,
constraining, obliging) us is to stop thinking of concepts as in any sense in our heads. I said
above that a fundamental question Kant, like any rationalist who rejects the empiricist order of
explanation, must answer is: how do concepts become available to us to apply (use to commit
ourselves) in judgment and action? Hegel’s answer is social: they are there in the language:
“Language is the Dasein (existence) of Spirit” [PG 652]. ‘Spirit’ is the totality of norm-governed
(that is, since for Hegel all norms are concepts, conceptually articulated) activity. Each of us
comes into language as an always-already up-and-running enterprise. It makes concepts
available to us, and we avail ourselves of them. (Compare Sellars—unkantianly phrased—
remark: “Grasp of a concept is mastery of the use of a word.”) The words that are available to
us to use already express concepts. Their normative significance—what one would be
committing oneself to by applying them, and what would count as entitling one to those
commitments—is already settled by the practices (Sitte: customs, uses, institutions) in which
they play a role. That is why we can use them to make moves in the antecedent, on-going game
in which they have that significance. Normative significances are socially instituted. Hegel’s
ferocious language is devised so as to express the metaphysics of such normatively articulated
concepts.
r) One last remark about this structure of reciprocal recognition (at this point, necessarily at most
suggestive): The expressive task distinctive of logical or philosophical vocabulary for Hegel is, I
think, making explicit what is otherwise implicit in the use of ordinary empirical and practical
concepts. Hegel takes over from traditional logic the terms ‘particular’, ‘universal’, and
‘individual’. But, of course, he uses them in his own distinctive, idiosyncratic way. I think that
the master idea that structures that use is the model of the synthesis of selves and communities
by reciprocal recognition. Individuals are particulars as characterized by universals. The model
is individual selves, which are particular natural organisms as members of recognitive
communities—which are a kind of universal they fall under. If we ask “Where do the norms
come from?” or “How does Geist arise out of nature?” Hegel’s answer is that the normative
realm of Geist comes into being when natural creatures start adopting recognitive attitudes
towards each other. [This story is told in more detail in Chapter Six of A Spirit of Trust: “The
Structure of Desire and Recognition”.]
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s) Have we yet worried enough about the Hegelian claim that the modal logic of recognition is S5?
That is, that recognition must be (on pain of the “causality of fate”, the metaphysical irony of
mastery) an equivalence relation: reflexive (self-consciousness) only if transitive and reflexive?
The alternative is to allow much more complex algebras, with respects of recognition, and
different algebraic features of them. (Cf. recognizing someone as an ambassador iff and only if
he/she is appropriately recognized as such by one’s we recognize as heads of state, whose
recognitive status is quite differently constituted.) The worry is that good, liberal political
consequences come too quickly and easily if we accept this metaphysical-constitutive claim
about selves. (Cf. Habermas). Things may not be so easy.
HBI #3) A conception of the conceptual:
a)
For Kant, all norms are conceptual norms, which is to say that they articulate
what is a reason for what. In that sense, all norms are rational norms—not in the sense that they can
be derived from the requirements of Reason, but in the sense that they are norms for reasoning.
Since being free is being able to bind oneself by norms and norms are concepts—norms for
reasoning—the Kantian normative realm of freedom is also the realm of reason. Hegel takes all this
Kantian structure on board. But he combines it with a distinctive notion of the conceptual.
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 counterfactualsupporting inferences that are underwritten by the contents of concepts. (He was comfortable
accepting the non-traditional consequence of this view that because they depend on what the laws
really are, one cannot know the contents of one’s concepts—what one means—just by introspecting,
but may need to go into the laboratory to determine them, because he held a kantian, rather than a
12istincti concept of concepts.) This, I think, is (one important component of) the Hegelian position.
c)
As we will see, Hegel is also a holist about concepts. Individual concepts are to
be understood in terms of their function within an extended but unified process of conceptual
activity (experience) that includes applying whole batteries of concepts in disparate, concretely
situated judgings and actings. To be entitled to talk about a determinate concept, rather than the
Concept (indeed, the Idea), one must be able to analyze the whole, breaking it down into 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.
d)
The point is essentially logical, in his sense of ‘logical’: a matter of the
metaconceptual apparatus we use to make explicit the implicit articulation of determinate
conceptual contents. When, in following out our holistic methodology, be carve up some
experiential process analytically, the results we achieve count as determinate concepts only insofar
as they are distinguishable from one another. One of the paradoxical-sounding consequences of
Hegel’s holist-functionalist philosophical methodology is that the identity of functionally individuated
components of a larger whole consists in part in their differences from one another. (That is one of
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the lessons of the comparative method of analysis establishing a 13istinction rationis mentioned
above.) But, though this way of putting the point does loom large in Hegel’s writings, mere
difference is not enough for determinateness. Hegel takes as his guiding thread the Spinozist
principle omnis 13istinction13n est 13istinct. For an essential, defining property of negation is the
exclusiveness codified in the principle of noncontradiction: p rules out not-p, they are incompatible.
For Hegel, it is this exclusiveness that is the essence of negation. He abstracts this feature from the
case of formal negation, and generalizes it to include the sort of material incompatibility that obtains
between the properties square and triangular. (Formal negation can then reappear as the shadow of
material incompatibility: not-p is the minimal incompatible of p. It is what is entailed by everything
materially incompatible with p.) That is, in thinking about the sort of difference implicit in the notion
of determinateness, it is important to distinguish between two different kinds of difference.
Properties (for instance) can be different, but compatible, as square and red are. We might call this
“mere” difference. But properties can also be different in the stronger sense of material
incompatibility—of the impossibility of one and the same thing simultaneously exhibiting both—as
square and triangular are. We might call this “exclusive” difference. In Sense Certainty Hegel argues
that the idea of a world exhibiting definiteness or determinateness as mere [gleichgültige, translated
by Miller as “indifferent”] difference, without exclusive [auschließende] difference, is incoherent.
This is why compatibly different properties always come as members of families of exclusively
different ones. When Hegel talks about negation, it is exclusive difference that he is invoking.
e)
One of the more notorious theses attributed to Hegel is the denial of the law of
noncontradiction. A mere denial would, of course be silly—in the sense that there could not in
principle be a reason for it. As Kripke says “Why give up the principle of noncontradiction? Why not
just keep it too?” But a reconstrual is something else. As I read him, Hegel takes noncontradiction, in
the sense of exclusion, to be the essence of negation. And that principle is at the very center of his
logic, semantics, and metaphysics. Far from rejecting noncontradiction, he radicalizes and extends it.
f)
Hegel’s term for exclusive difference is ‘determinate negation’ [bestimmte
Negation]. I take it to mean material incompatibility. The material incompatibility of red and green
is related to the formal incompatibility of red and not-red as Sellars’s material inference from scarlet
to red is related to the formal inference from not-not-red to red. Determinate negation, material
incompatibility, is the basic structure of distinctively conceptual articulation.
g)
It is a modal relation. Red is a (not the) determinate negation of green (is
materially incompatible with it) insofar as it is not just not true that some monochromatic patch is
simultaneously both red and green, but insofar as it is impossible that it be both red and green.
h)
The content of a concept or property can be thought of as articulated by the
concepts or properties it modally excludes. One could represent the content by the set of contents
materially incompatible with it.
i)
Contents so identified and individuated meet the conditions both of holism,
since they are identified and individuated only by their relations of exclusive difference from other
elements of the Concept comprising them, and of determinateness, since they are so identified and
individuated. But why should content so articulated this be thought of as specifically conceptual?
The conceptual we said, for Hegel as for Kant, is what determines what is a reason for what, in the
sense of underwriting counterfactually robust modal inferences. One of the key observations on
which my reading of Hegel rests—an observation that Hegel himself nowhere makes—is that
relations of material incompatibility underwrite modally robust relations of material inference. To
say that the property being a dog entails the property being a mammal, in the modal sense that it is
impossible for something to be a dog and not be a mammal, is just to say that everything materially
incompatible with being a mammal is materially incompatible with being a dog. Hegel’s term for
inferential articulation is ‘mediation’. The term derives from the role of the middle term in a
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specifically syllogistic inference—the role of ‘man’ in the syllogism in Barbara: All men are mortal,
Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. (The German word ‘Schluß’, inference—formed from
‘schließen’, to conclude, the root of ‘ausschließen’, to rule out—is also the standard translation of
the Greek word ‘syllogism’.) Mediation is the structure of reason-giving, hence of the conceptual.
For Hegel, the conceptual is articulated by relations of mediation (modally robust material inference)
and determinate negation (modally robust material incompatibility), and, I claim, it is articulated by
relations of mediation because it is articulated by relations of determinate negation. Thus for Hegel,
negation is the essence of the conceptual.
j)
According to this conception of the conceptual, the objective world is
conceptually structured, quite independent of any activity by rational knowers or agents. For even if
there had never been thinkers, the fact that A is wholly copper would rule out (be incompatible with)
its being wholly silver, and would entail that it is less dense than a wholly silver object. To say that
there is some way the world is, that the objective world is determinate, is to say that some states of
affairs (ways the world could be) rule others out, and (so) entail still others. The laws of the objective
natural world make explicit its conceptual structure, in Hegel’s sense.
k)
And thought, too, is conceptually structured. The claim, judgment, or thought
that A is wholly copper is incompatible with the claim, judgment, or thought that it is wholly silver. A
cognitive commitment to one of those contents rules out a commitment to the other, in the sense
that a reason for one is a reason against the other.
l)
Here, then, is a notion of conceptual content that can structure both objective
facts and subjective thoughts or commitments. (‘Subjective’ not in the Cartesian sense, but in the
sense of being the thoughts of a subject—thoughts a subject is responsible for, commitments of and
by a subject.) In the favored case of genuine knowledge, it is the very same conceptual content that
shows up on the subjective side of certainty in the form of a commitment and on the objective side
of truth as a fact.
m)
Nonetheless, the two realms are not identical. For the sense of ‘incompatible’ is
different in the two. One and the same object can not simultaneously exhibit incompatible
properties—it is impossible. By contrast, one and the same subject merely ought not to undertake
incompatible commitments—it is forbidden or inappropriate, but not impossible.
n)
It is possible to move from talk of the subjective perspective of certainty and the
objective perspective of truth (which are perspectives on conceptual contents) to talk of subjects and
objects. For they are each units of account with respect to their respective sorts of incompatibility
relation. An object is just what cannot simultaneously exhibit incompatible properties, and a subject
is just what is obliged not simultaneously to be responsible for incompatible commitments. In the
Perception chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel says that objects ‘repel’ incompatible properties.
That repulsion is natural. The sense in which subjects ‘repel’ incompatible commitments is
normative. If and when one finds oneself with incompatible commitments, one is obliged, rationally,
to do something: to give up one or both, to amend one’s collateral commitments, or the conceptions
that articulate them. That process of revision is experience. It is the determining of the content of
our subjective conceptions, to try to bring them better in line with the relations of objective
incompatibility and consequence that conceptually articulate the objective world.
HBI #4: Holism:
a)
Hegel is the first philosopher to whose thought is thoroughly holistic.
(‘Holism’ is not his term. It was not introduced until the late nineteenth century.) Hegel explicitly
and systematically pursues holism both generally in his methodology and more specifically in his
semantics. One of the principal reasons he finds it necessary so radically to recast the philosophical
terminology he inherited is because of his holist convictions. He sees previous philosophers as
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crippled by their semantic atomism: the view that one can make sense of the contents of concepts
(whether ordinary, determinate, empirical and practical concepts, or the metaconcepts in terms of
which one understands their functioning) one by one, each independently of the others. One of
Hegel’s master ideas is that to see things aright we must shift from atomistic to holistic conceptions
of concepts. His way of talking about this is to say that what he has to teach us is how to move
beyond the standpoint of Verstand to the standpoint of Vernunft. (His appropriation and
transformation of the use of these Kantian terms is a paradigm of the sort of thing Hegel does with
the conceptual raw materials he inherits from his predecessors.)
b)
In Hegel’s story, Kant is the avatar of Verstand: its final, most sophisticated
exponent. But Hegel’s holism is the result of generalizing and radicalizing what he properly sees as
one of Kant’s fundamental philosophical moves. Kant criticized the empiricists and rationalists alike
for postulating a single continuous dimension that had sensations at the bottom and concepts at the
top. One of his insights is that sensations and concepts are substantially and essentially different
kinds of things. One must distinguish more sharply between sensibility and understanding. On the
other hand, one thing he agreed with these traditions about is that one cannot understand empirical
knowledge by construing sensibility and understanding as wholly independent faculties, and then
somehow bolting them together to get judgments. His solution is a (locally) holist one. Start with a
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 15istinction 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 15istinction rationis (a distinction of reason) if they can be separated only by
comparison. Thus the shape and the substance of a wooden sphere cannot actually be separated.
But they can be distinguished if we lay the wooden sphere alongside a wooden cube and a stone
sphere. Just so, we can grasp the distinctively different contributions made to judgment by
sensibility and understanding if we consider different conceptualizations of the same sensory
situation (say, construing what we see now as a dog, now as a fox, or a statue), and applying the
same concepts to different sensory situations (say, calling both this and that ‘foxes’).
c)
This move is indeed one of the most important and distinctive of Kant’s
philosophical contributions. But Hegel thinks it epitomizes a methodology that should be applied
much more widely than Kant did.
d)
For instance, Hegel thinks that Kant should have seen that this holistic
approach to the relations of what Kant understands as conceptual form and sensible content in
cognition requires a corresponding holism about the relation of form to content and particular to
universal in logic. Yet Kant takes over the traditional logic in most respects, making only the very
smallest conceptual adjustments to it in the light of his insight about the primacy of the
propositional. Hegel will insist that we start with the notion of an individual—intuitively or
presystematically, a particular as characterized by a universal—and work our way to notions of
particular and universal by analyzing individuals. In fact his model of the relations between these
logical categories is of an individual self as constituted by reciprocal recognition. The recognitive
community in which there are such selves is the paradigm of a universal, and the creatures whose
recognitive relations constitute both selves and communities are the paradigm of mere particulars.
e)
Even in thinking about the relations between sensibility and understanding,
Hegel takes it that Kant was insufficiently radical in following through on his holist insight. Hegel’s
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account of the relation between immediacy and mediation will be thoroughly holistic. The lesson of
the opening Sense Certainty section of the Phenomenology is the Sellarsian one that the immediacy
of the deliverances of non-inferentially arrived at sensory impressions is unintelligible apart from
consideration of its mediation, in the sense of its inferential articulation and relation to other
possible judgments.
f)
One of the clearest applications of Hegel’s holist methodology concerns his
new understanding of the relations between judgments and concepts. Kant, like all his predecessors,
had thought of concepts as having their contents independently of and indifferently to what
judgments articulated by those concepts subjects actually endorse. Hegel is a holist on this point in
the same sense that Quine is. Altering the judgments one makes alters the contents of the concepts
involved. (Because making judgments using determinate concepts will always lead one to
commitments that are mutually incompatible by one’s own lights—even if one applies the
conceptual norms correctly. And that experience of error is what obliges one to change, not just
one’s judgments, but eventually also one’s concepts. See below.) From Hegel’s point of view, Kant
should have seen that his insight about the primacy of judgment over intuition and concept requires
giving up the semantic atomism about the relations between concepts and judgments that had been
a hallmark of Enlightenment epistemology.
g)
Along another dimension, Hegel thinks that Kant should have adopted the
same holistic strategy toward the distinction between theoretical and practical activity that he did
toward the distinction between sensibility and understanding. Accordingly, in the Reason section of
the Phenomenology, which discusses practical agency (we are told that “reason is purposive activity”
at PG §22), the topic is addressed first in terms of “the cycle of action…the unity of the world as given
and the world it has made” (PG §308). This is a cycle of perception (of what is in that sense
immediately given), thought, action, and perception of the result of that action (a new given that is
also what was made). Empirical cognition and intentional action are to be understood only as
aspects of this developing process. The official name for this process is ‘experience’ (Erfahrung), and
the point of Hegel’s philosophical enterprise is an expressive one: to give us (meta-)conceptual tools
to understand that process. (That is why the original title of the Phenomenology of Spirit was The
Science of the Experience of Consciousness.) It is to take the form of a functional decomposition of
that process, analyzing it into components distinguishable by the different roles they play in that
process.
h)
The resulting account is a conceptual holism because it is the result of a
methodological functionalism. But the functional system in question is to be as large as possible: all
of it, everything—humans, their activities, and their environment.
i)
The later figure who most closely follows Hegel in this holistic thought is John
Dewey. His most important theoretical work is Experience and Nature, whose relentless pursuit of
Hegel’s holist, anti-reductionist, methodology led Rorty to characterize it as “using the term
‘experience’ as an incantatory device to blur every conceivable distinction.” In this regard, at least,
Dewey—though vastly less powerful and systematic a thinker—is true to the thought of his first
master, Hegel, whom he saw himself as naturalizing and de-intellectualizing. (His other important
theoretical work is his Logic, which again in good Hegelian fashion, aims to be an organon developing
conceptual tools to express the interaction of various aspects of experiential processes.)
j)
Perhaps most centrally and importantly (this is the thought with which he
opens the Introduction to the Phenomenology), Hegel thinks that one will never get an intelligible
account of the relations between conceptual activity and the world that is known about and acted in
if one attempts to start with independently intelligible accounts of subject and object, and then
attempts to bolt them together afterwards. Thus, rather than talk about subjects and objects, Hegel
wants us to start with a notion of content, as something that can be common to its subjective form in
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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 certaintyaspect of one unified kind of conceptual content. Of course, actually entitling oneself to talk this way
requires a lot of work. Hegel’s distinctive philosophical vocabulary is crafted with an eye to doing
that.
k)
Hegel’s term for holism about the relation of subjective and objective (which
he develops in the context of his holism about the theoretical and the practical, the immediate and
the mediated, recognizing and being recognized…) is ‘idealism’. (The Idea in the Science of Logic is
“the unity of Thought and Being”, as well as of the theoretical and the practical.)
HBI #5: Idealism:
a)
I said above that Hegel’s idealism is a kind of holism about the subjective and
the objective. The whole that must be analyzed is the whole constellation of objective relations of
material incompatibility, on the side of truth, and subjective processes of experience driven by
subjective incompatibilities, on the side of certainty.
b)
The basic claim of Hegel’s idealism is that the objective relations of
incompatibility that articulate the conceptual structure in virtue of which the world is determinate
and law-governed are unintelligible apart from their relation to the subjective processes of
acknowledging and repairing incompatible commitments. It is not that there could not be a
determinate objective world without such processes. It is just that we cannot explain what we mean
by saying that there is one without invoking also the experiential processes that are our
acknowledgment of constraint by objective incompatibilities and entailments. In the jargon I
introduce in Chapter Five of A Spirit of Trust (and in Chapter Six of Tales of the Mighty Dead), the
objective and subjective notions of incompatibility are reciprocally sense dependent, but not
reference dependent.
c)
Here are three more specific idealist theses that Hegel argues for (though not
quite in these modernized terms) that I think one can respectably and responsibly maintain today.
Each involves the reciprocal sense dependence of a fundamental category we use to express our
understanding of the objective articulation of the world and a corresponding feature of our use of
language:

The concepts object and singular term are reciprocally sense dependent. One
could not count as grasping the concept object unless one could use singular terms.

The concepts fact and declarative sentence are reciprocally sense dependent.
Nothing could count as mastery of the concept fact except what is implicit in the use of declarative
sentences to make assertions.

The concepts law and necessity, on the one hand, and counterfactual
inference on the other, are reciprocally sense dependent.
HBI #6: Intentionality:
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a)
The fine structure of Hegel’s idealism is worked out in his account of
intentionality and representation. For it is here that we see how the process of resolving
incompatible commitments in experience, on the side of subjects, is to be understood as normatively
governed by the over-arching goal of correctly representing how things objectively are. I have
already indicated that the direction of explanation of his account of intentionality, like Kant’s, will be
from conceptual content—something that can be grasped in the sense that it articulates
commitments subjects can undertake—to aboutness or semantic directedness on objects. I’ve said
something about how he thinks about conceptual content in terms of (subjective and objective)
incompatibility. One of Hegel’s key moves is the route he lays out to explain what it is to make
ourselves responsible to objects for the correctness of conceptually contentful commitments—that
is, the way he explicates a normative sense of aboutness, and so the representational dimension of
thought—in terms of what it is to be responsible for commitments whose conceptual content is
(holistically) articulated by relations of incompatibility.
b)
Conceptual contents articulate both ways things could be (objective states of
affairs, among which are facts) and ways things could be taken to be (states of subjects, normative
statuses, the contents of commitments). They are the contents both of how things are in themselves
(objectively) and how they are for consciousness (subjectively). Another way of talking about how
things are for some consciousness is as phenomena: appearances. Another way of talking about how
things are in themselves is as noumena: realities. As appearances, the phenomena present
purported realities. They are representings, and the noumena are representeds.
c)
What is it about conceptual contents, articulated by relations of modally
robust material incompatibility (determinate negation) and (so) modally robust material inference
(mediation), in virtue of which they so much as purport to represent (for or to consciousness) how
things are in themselves, i.e. to be (for consciousness) representings of representeds? This is a kind of
question Descartes, for instance, never asked. (And the point goes through as well for successors
such as Locke and Hume. The rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz, I claim, did have this as an explicit
question, and offered worked-out theoretical answers. See Chapters 4 and 5 of Tales of the Mighty
Dead.) That is, Descartes never asked what it was in virtue of which my rabbit-idea was a rabbit
idea—as opposed to one representing lemurs, or robots, or nothing. He took the representational
purport of ideas, their semantic content, for granted (dividing the world metaphysically into those
things that are by nature representings, and those things that by nature can only be represented),
and asked only an epistemological question arising downstream from that one: what is it for that
representational purport to be successful, for things in fact to be as my idea represents them as
being. We owe the deeper, antecedent, semantic question to Kant. That is Hegel’s question, too.
He saw in Kant this advance from epistemological to semantic questions, as perhaps no-one did again
until Wittgenstein. Hegel offers a much more systematic, explicit, and worked-out answer to that
question than Kant does. (Which is not to say that it is all that easy to recover from his texts. But
then, where in the first Critique would one say that Kant is clearest and most explicit about his
answer?)
d)
The book we are reading is a phenomenology in no small part because Hegel is
committed to explaining the concept of noumena solely in terms of phenomena. (We’ll see below
why it is a phenomenology of Spirit. But I claim that the point of this large-scale metanarrative is to
make explicit how ordinary conceptual contents develop, and in what their semantic properties
consist. That story, too, I claim, deserves to be called a ‘phenomenology’.) He wants to say what it is
about how things appear to us, the conceptual contents that articulate our commitments, in virtue of
which it is correct to understand them, and they can appear to us as, subjective commitments
regarding how things objectively are, how they purport to represent things as they are in themselves,
and so are intelligible as being how those things (the ones represented or thought about) are for a
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consciousness. This is to say what it is about them in virtue of which they are correctly understood
as representings of some representeds, appearances of some realities, phenomena corresponding to
some noumena.
e)
In discussing Hegel’s account of the conceptual I’ve already pointed out, in
effect, that phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality, are the same kind of thing for Hegel.
As Frege said: “A fact is a thought that is true.” If that is right, facts are kinds of thoughts. Not, of
course, kinds of thinkings, but kinds of thinkables. Facts, ways the world really, objectively, is, in itself
are conceptually structured by their relations of incompatibility (and so inference) to other possible
states of affairs. Their contents can be the contents of commitments, which are conceptually
structured by their relations of incompatibility (and so inference) to other possible commitments.
The way things are in themselves can be a way they are for consciousness. Noumena are a kind of
phenomena. The challenge of a semantic phenomenology is then to say what distinguishes the
phenomena that are noumena (the ways things can be for consciousness that are the way they are in
themselves) and what it is for all phenomena as such to purport or aspire to have that distinction,
and to do that while appealing to nothing outside the realm of phenomena.
f)
Hegel’s strategy is to explain the representational purport of phenomena as a
feature of the experiential process by which they develop: by which they arise, mature, decay, and
are replaced. The basic idea has already been introduced. It is in practically acknowledging an
obligation to do something, to change something to alter one’s commitments when they turn out to
be incompatible that subjects in practice take or treat their commitments as answerable for their
correctness and acceptability to a structure of objective incompatibilities, and so as being about,
being for consciousness presentations or appearances of some way things are in themselves.
Experience is the experience of error and failure. For that “manifestation of negativity”—finding
oneself with commitments that are by one’s own lights incompatible—is the motor of the process of
selecting, revising, and grooming one’s commitments that is Erfahrung. Acknowledging error (on the
theoretical side, and failure, on the practical side) is taking the erroneous commitment to be about
something, which it gets wrong. It is to take that commitment to be a way things were for
consciousness that was subject to assessment accordingly as it did or—as it turned out—did not
present how things actually are in themselves.
g)
This representational aspect that turns out to be implicit in judgment (a kind
of commitment) can be made explicit by offering a certain kind of rational reconstruction of a
previous stretch of experience. Hegel calls this an ‘Erinnerung’: a recollection. It is what turns a past
into a history. As I understand it, an Erinnerung traces out a trajectory through past experience,
selecting index episodes where finding one’s current commitments to be incompatible has led to
changing them, so as to yield a monotonic, cumulative series of expressively progressive discoveries,
culminating in one’s current view. One’s current view, how things are for one, is how one now takes
things to be in themselves. The recollection is an account of how one (takes oneself to have) found
out how things actually are, in themselves. Doing this is presenting one’s experience as having a
certain form: as the gradual unfolding into explicitness of what now appears as having been all along
already implicit. The commitments one now has—the whole, holistically construed constellation of
judgments and concepts—is seen as presenting how things are in themselves, in the sense of having
all along been the standard that earlier constellations were assessed according to, and found wanting
in various respects.
h)
The model of this process that I find it most useful to keep in mind (though it
is not one Hegel ever suggests) is the development of concepts of common law by precedent.
Common law differs from statute law in consisting entirely of case law. It is not the interpretation of
explicit founding laws, rules, or principles. All there is to it is a sequence of applications of concepts
to actual sets of facts. It is for this reason often thought of as judge-made law. The only justification
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that a judge is allowed to offer for a judgment consists of appeals to previous judgments. That
appeal postulates a principle, which, it is claimed, can be discerned as having been implicit in
previous decisions, guiding them, or at least codifying them. The precedents must be presented as
sequentially revealing different aspects of the principles, distinctions, and applications the judge now
enunciates. They are, the judge claims, what this tradition in common law all along was really about,
what it was getting at. A commitment to justifying one’s current decisions by always telling a story of
this shape is what in practice taking it that the tradition is the revelation of an underlying set of
principles, distinctions, and so on consists in.
i)
I have already talked about the social dimension of Hegel’s understanding of
conceptual norms, in terms of recognition. And I have also already talked about the inferential
dimension of Hegel’s understanding of conceptual norms, in terms of incompatibility. What we see
here is the historical dimension of Hegel’s understanding of conceptual norms, in terms of
recollection (Erinnerung). It is introduced already in Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology
(discussed in Chapter Three of A Spirit of Trust), and reappears at other crucial junctures such as the
discussion of how to understand the notion of an intention as guiding and being progressively but
imperfectly revealed in action, in Reason (discussed in Chapter Seven of A Spirit of Trust), and (I
claim) is important in understanding the significance of the final form of reciprocal recognition,
confession and forgiveness, discussed at the very end of Spirit (and in Chapter Eight of A Spirit of
Trust).
j)
I have already discussed modality in connection with Hegel’s understanding
of conceptual articulation in terms of material incompatibility (determinate negation). The final
understanding of what is expressed by modal vocabulary (which I discuss in Chapter Eight of A Spirit
of Trust) is couched in terms of the historical-recollective process (that turns out to have the
structure of reciprocal recognition in the form of confession-and-forgiveness) whereby contingent
content is given the form of necessity. Mere facts, which could have been otherwise, are
incorporated into the contents of concepts, and the norms those concepts embody are seen
(retrospectively) as having always-already been in play, implicitly governing the development of the
Concept all along. Conceptualization, which is giving the contingent the form of necessity, is the
process of determining (making determinate) conceptual content by incorporating contingency into
it. This is the process of experience that is at once the application of conceptual norms in judgment
and intention and the instutition of conceptual norms. This pragmatist point (intimately connected
with the Quinean holism of concepts and judgments mentioned above) is that all there is to
constitute conceptual content is the actual attitudes (in Fregean terms, a matter of force) of those
who undertake and assess commitments articulated by those contents. There is an apparent tension
between this point and the claim attributed to Hegel above that the boundaries of conceptual
content and the investment of force (endorsing a judgment) must come from different sources, if the
content is to be intelligible as providing a normative standard for assessment of the correctness of
the commitments undertaken by applying those concepts in judgment and intention. This second
point is the one that at (2f) above was argued to be reconciled with the Kant-Rousseau autonomy
thesis by the model of reciprocal recognition. The tension between the tight connection between
force and content required by the pragmatist point, on the one hand, and the distancing of force
from content required if what is right is not to be equated with whatever seems right is resolved by
the historical account of concept formation and reformation through experience, as retrospectively
rationally reconstructed.
HBI #6: Modernity:
a)
Though all of our philosophical heroes from Descartes through Kant were
important players in producing the theories that rationalized and articulated the practical and
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institutional achievements of modernity: secularization, science, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the rise
of the modern state, and so on, Hegel was the first to take this titanic transformation in all of its
aspects as his explicit topic. In this sense, he was the first theorist of modernity as such. He thought,
roughly, that only one big thing had ever happened in the history of the world, and that was the
transition from traditional to modern societies, selves, and thought. He wanted to understand that
grand change, why the old ways hung together as they did, and the sort of unity becoming visible for
the emerging constellation of practices, institutions, and concepts. In this thought was the germ,
inter alia, of what would become over the course of the nineteenth century, modern sociology, and
indeed, the social sciences more generally—which still have at their theoretical core the aspiration to
understand this transformation.
b)
And Hegel aspired, further, to discern the shape that a second such
transformation might take, and the kind of unity that such an equally radical and progressive third
phase of human development might take.
c)
One large division between Anglophone and Contintental European
philosophy is drawn precisely by whether one takes this problem to be a, perhaps the, central
philosophical topic, or not.
d)
See (15) below.
13. The structure of the Phenomenology:
a. The big book can be thought of as consisting of three apparently self-contained
books:
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, SelfConsciousness, 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), SelfAlienated Spirit (Culture), and Spirit that is Certain of Itself (Morality).
b. One structural interpretive controversy concerns whether Hegel changed his mind
in mid-stream, setting out to write (ii), but then taking the opportunity to write
(iii) as well. Michael Forster’s The Idea of the Phenomenology is a very judicious
discussion of this issue.
c. The Introduction discusses the relations between phenomena and noumena,
historical development of conceptual contents, precipitation of the
representational dimension of conceptual content;
d. I think that the first half of the book divides up its topic by aspects of conceptual
activity (Spirit), and the second half pulls those discussions together to discuss the
development of Spirit as a whole. The aspects are:
i. Consciousness: empirical knowledge, language-entry transitions in noninferential reports, and the relations between immediacy and mediation.
This is a paleo-Sellarsian discussion, which makes an anti-Given point in
Sense Certainty, an anti-atomism in semantics point in Perception, and
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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 selfconsciousness. 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, languageexit 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 subject-matter. The exposition is sequential and cumulative.
Within each of these chapters, the development discussed is also sequential and
cumulative. But across the chapter boundaries, the topic discussed is simply
changed. Indeed, the developments within each chapter are parallel, lining up
with one another. Spirit then pulls them all together, to discuss the one
development they all partake of, not now from the point of view of empirical
language entries, practical language exits, and the selves who mediate them, but
from the point of view of the whole constellation that comprises those aspects.
Here is a key retrospective passage (which, unfortunately, from my point of view
confuses the issue it is seeking to clarify by its placement of “immediate Spirit”,
but ignore that for now):
“When self-consciousness and consciousness proper, religion and Spirit in its world, or
Spirit's existence, are in the first instance distinguished from each other, the latter consists
in the totality of Spirit so far as its moments exhibit themselves in separation, each on its
own account. But the moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and
Spirit—Spirit, that is, as immediate Spirit, which is not yet consciousness of Spirit. Their
totality, taken together, constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally; Spirit as
such contains the previous structured shapes in universal determinations…. The course
traversed by these moments is…not to be represented as occurring in Time. Only the
totality of Spirit is in Time, and the 'shapes', which are 'shapes' of the totality of Spirit,
display themselves in a temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality and
therefore the form of pure freedom in face of an 'other', a form which expresses itself as
Time. But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and
Spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence in separation from one another.”
[Phenomenology §679]
14. On allegory:
a. Throughout the book, but much more obviously starting with the SelfConsciousness 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
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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 hardhearted judge.
b. Methodologically, taking Hegel to be presenting us with semantic allegories
requires us to 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.
15. 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):
“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.
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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.”
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