Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust 9781138123564, 9781138123601, 9781003001942

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
The contributions
PART I: Semantics
1. Brandom on Hegel on negation
I
II
Notes
References
2. Truth and incompatibility
I. Introduction
II. Incompatibility
III. Conceptual dynamism
IV. Truth
V. Hegel
VI. Some logical upshots
Notes
References
3. Brandom on the Introduction to the Phenomenology
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
Notes
References
4. The possibility of a semantic interpretation of Hegel’s conception of consciousness
I. A prima facie case for Brandom’s pragmatist semantic
interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit
II. Brandom on Hegel on Sense Certainty
III. Brandom on Hegel on Perception
IV. The logic and metaphysics of the intentional attitudes of Sense
Certainty and Perception
V. The relevance of modality
Notes
References
5. Where is the conflict in Brandom’s theory of recognition (and why should there be any)?
I. Robust recognition
II. Recognition as forgiveness
III. The essential role of conflict
Notes
References
6. Intentional agency and conceptual idealism: Brandom on Hegelian reason
I. “Making realism intelligible”
II. Three issues
III. Two comparisons
IV. Locating conceptual idealism in the Phenomenology
Notes
References
PART II: With an edifying intent
7. Semantic self-consciousness
I
II
III
Notes
References
8. Is Brandom a positivist?: Notes on alienation, trust, confession, and forgiveness
I. The charge of positivism
II. Alienation as loss of trust in the world
III. A right to recognition and the obligation to forgive
Notes
References
9. Spirit and alienation in Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust: Entfremdung, Entäußerung, and the causal entropy of normativity
I. Brandom’s alienation
II. Alienation reconsidered
Notes
References
10. A pure philosophy of language with an edifying intent: Brandom’s reply to Rorty
I
II
III
IV
Notes
References
11. Brandom on postmodern ethical life: moral and political problems
I. Brandom on postmodern ethical life
II. The structure of rational reconstructions
III. Moral implications of postmodern ethical life
IV. Moral problems with magnanimous trust
V. Political problems with magnanimous trust
Notes
References
12. Brandom’s Hegel
I
II
III
IV
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

READING BRANDOM

Robert Brandom’s rationalist philosophy of language, expounded in his highly influential Making It Explicit, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, establishing him as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom presents the fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Hegel. He submits that the Phenomenology of Spirit holds not only many lessons for today’s philosophy of language, but also a moral lesson much needed in today’s increasingly polarized societies, in the form of a postmodern ethics of trust. In this outstanding collection, leading philosophers examine and assess A Spirit of Trust. The twelve specially commissioned chapters explore topics including:       

negation and truth empirical and speculative concepts experience conflict and recognition varieties of idealism premodern ethical life and modern alienation a postmodern ethics of trust.

Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust is essential reading for all students and scholars of Brandom’s work and those in philosophy of language. It will also be important reading for those studying nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Gilles Bouché is a former Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

READING BRANDOM On A Spirit of Trust

Edited by Gilles Bouché

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Gilles Bouché; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gilles Bouché to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bouché, Gilles, editor. Title: Reading Brandom : on A spirit of trust / edited by Gilles Bouché. Other titles: Reading Brandom (Spirit of trust) Description: 1. | New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019038941 (print) | LCCN 2019038942 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138123564 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138123601 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003001942 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brandom, Robert. Spirit of trust. | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes. | Phenomenology. | Objectivity. | Spirit. | Consciousness. | Truth. Classification: LCC B2929.B6928 R43 2020 (print) | LCC B2929.B6928 (ebook) |DDC 193--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038941 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038942 ISBN: 978-1-138-12356-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-12360-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00194-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Gilles Bouché

vii viii ix 1

PART I

Semantics

9

1 Brandom on Hegel on negation Robert B. Pippin

11

2 Truth and incompatibility Elena Ficara

29

3 Brandom on the Introduction to the Phenomenology John McDowell

41

4 The possibility of a semantic interpretation of Hegel’s conception of consciousness Paul Redding

56

5 Where is the conflict in Brandom’s theory of recognition (and why should there be any)? Georg W. Bertram

75

vi Contents

6 Intentional agency and conceptual idealism: Brandom on Hegelian reason Dean Moyar

87

PART II

With an edifying intent 7 Semantic self-consciousness Terry Pinkard

105 107

8 Is Brandom a positivist?: Notes on alienation, trust, confession, and forgiveness J. M. Bernstein

123

9 Spirit and alienation in Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust: Entfremdung, Entäußerung, and the causal entropy of normativity Italo Testa

140

10 A pure philosophy of language with an edifying intent: Brandom’s reply to Rorty Gilles Bouché

166

11 Brandom on postmodern ethical life: moral and political problems Franz Knappik

184

12 Brandom’s Hegel Charles Taylor

198

Index

208

CONTRIBUTORS

J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, New School for Social Research, USA. Georg W. Bertram is Professor of Aesthetics and Theoretical Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Gilles Bouché is former Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Elena Ficara is Junior Professor of Philosophy, Universität Paderborn, Germany. Franz Knappik is Professor of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Norway. John McDowell is University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, USA. Dean Moyar is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University, USA. Terry Pinkard is University Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University, USA. Robert B. Pippin is Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought and Philosophy, University of Chicago, USA. Paul Redding is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Australia. Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University, Canada. Italo Testa is Professor of Philosophy, Università di Parma, Italy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The origins of this volume can be traced back to the conference “Language and Modernity: Brandom’s Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” which took place on 19–21 June 2014 at the Institute of Philosophy of Freie Universität Berlin. It was organized by the editor of this volume with the institutional backing of Georg W. Bertram and the financial support of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and, through its funding of a postdoctoral research grant, the Luxembourg National Research Fund. The conference discussed the then-current draft of Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust and featured a keynote address by Robert Brandom himself as well as presentations by Georg W. Bertram, Gilles Bouché, Dina Emundts, Elena Ficara, Franz Knappik, John McDowell, Dean Moyar, Terry Pinkard, Robert B. Pippin, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, and Italo Testa. I want to use this opportunity to thank the speakers at the conference and the contributors to this volume for their generous and patient cooperation throughout the years and Robert Brandom for the work that provided its occasion. My thanks also go to Georg W. Bertram for his guidance during my postdoctoral research fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin and to my colleagues and students during those years for their companionship and for the countless conversations that formed the fabric of this vanished way of life.

ABBREVIATIONS

AR BSD CRH

MIE PP RP ST TMD VP

(2000) Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (2008) Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). (2005) “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel: Comparing Empirical and Logical Concepts,” Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus 3, pp. 131–161. (1994) Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (2011) Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent and Contemporary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (2013) Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (2002) Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (2000) “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in R. Brandom (ed.) Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 156–183.

Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel GW PG/M

(1968–) Gesammelte Werke, edited by the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste (Hamburg: Felix Meiner). (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

x Abbreviations

PG/P SL TWA

(2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (2010) The Science of Logic, translated by G. di Giovanni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (1986) Werke in 20 Bänden mit Registerband (Theorie Werkausgabe), edited by E. Moldenbauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).

INTRODUCTION Gilles Bouché

The present volume contains twelve essays on A Spirit of Trust, Brandom’s very own Owl of Minerva, which, after some thirty-odd years of feather-grooming and wingstretching, finally has taken to the skies. The waning evening light which it traverses, to take the image a bit further, invites those of us who have been following Brandom on his explorations for some time to pause and wonder: Now that our exploring is reaching its end, now that we are arriving at where we started, what is it that we know for the first time? The work in the dark, the madness of art, what has it all been about? And what are we to make of this odd bird? On the face of it, A Spirit of Trust is, of course, a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As such, it joins a long chain of strongly diverging and competing interpretations, which immediately raises the issue of the criteria of adequacy by which a reading of the Phenomenology ought to be judged—a question which turns out to be anything but easy to answer and threatens to lead any jury of critics straight into deadlock, if not into utter confusion, especially since Brandom, as we will see, insists on bringing his very own criteria to the bench. Let us then put this issue aside for the time being. We will return to it later on. Regardless of its hermeneutic value, A Spirit of Trust is also a systematic presentation of Brandom’s own philosophy. Although it is the latest, and certainly a very extensive and painstakingly crafted, exposition of his thought, one that gives Brandom the opportunity to sum up his life’s work and to extricate its main lines from more accidental accretions, it does not constitute his whole legacy. Too many of the details worked out in Making It Explicit, in which Brandom’s thought revealed itself in its systematic form for the first time and which, together with A Spirit of Trust, forms a formidable twin peak towering above the rest of his work, are missing. What then is Brandom’s philosophy? As what does it present itself in Making It Explicit, in A Spirit of Trust? Does the latter contain a correction of the former, as some contributors to this volume allege, or merely a supplementation? In what

2 Gilles Bouché

ways does the latter rise above the former? What difference of outlook do these two peaks offer us and what awaits us in the saddle that connects them? Brandom’s philosophy begins with an idea of humanity that strongly emphasizes what sets us human beings apart from the rest of nature: We are endowed with language and reason, of which other creatures merely possess a shadow. We do not merely feel and emote, but think and reflect. We do not merely react to an environment in which we passably cope, but strive toward an objective theoretical representation of the world, at which science is to give us our best shot. We do not merely act on impulse and are not enslaved to our instincts. We are free. We form intentions and perform actions. We bear ourselves according to norms, not just ethical ones, but norms in a wide sense—the concepts which form the living medium in which we act, think, and speak. And, finally, we strive toward a theoretical understanding of ourselves, which philosophy is to provide and of which Brandom’s own philosophy is to be a prime example. According to Brandom, all the elements of this conception are inextricably intertwined. It is only because language is one of them that Brandom, in Making It Explicit, can present his thought as a philosophy of language and his work as an attempt to recontextualize analytic philosophy, his home turf, within a pragmatic approach that understands language first and foremost as a human practice rather than an abstract structure. The main challenge of Making It Explicit, as has often been noted, is then to show how such a practice can be maintained by us human beings as an entirely human affair and yet be one in which we reach beyond ourselves and touch on objectivity and truth. Brandom’s answer, already in Making It Explicit, goes as follows: Each one of us has a perspective on what the concepts are by which we live. We take these concepts to be objective, not by breaking through to an objectivity beyond any human perspective, which is impossible, nor by bowing to a privileged intersubjective point of view, which would necessarily fall short of full-on objectivity, but by acknowledging the irredeemable subjectivity of our perspectives and by refusing to privilege any one of them, which becomes manifest in the way in which, ideally, we settle disputes: not by force and subjection, but by rational argument. Such a practice is one in which participants recognize each other’s perspective as of a priori equal value and in this sense stand to one another in relations of reciprocal recognition. But why should we understand such a practice as one in which there actually are, as opposed to one in which we mistakenly take there to be, objective concepts? It is here that the second part of Brandom’s answer comes into play: We cannot but take there to be objective concepts. We cannot and need not step outside of our practice. To think otherwise is to mistake our philosophical endeavor for a scientific one. We can of course make our practice the object of a scientific inquiry. But, in that case, the practice as such dissolves before the eyes of the scientists, who all the while remain themselves firmly anchored within the practice from which none of us can escape. Our aim thus should not be to step outside our practice, but to act as rationally as possible within it, which is all that we can hope

Introduction 3

to achieve. All other-worldliness must be resisted and its energy redirected to the work of maintaining and perfecting the rationality of our practice in this world. All of this, including the Hegelian idea of reciprocal recognition, is already present in Making It Explicit. What is new in A Spirit of Trust? First, of course, the presentation of Brandom’s philosophy as an explicitly Hegelian one, as an absolute idealism. Second, an account of the continuous development of concepts through rational reconstruction. As we have seen, Brandom’s aim, already in Making It Explicit, is to describe a practice in which we, just by taking there to be objective concepts, effectively institute objective concepts. But, in his first major work, he merely casts a still image of this practice. It exhibits of course the ongoing movement of experience, of making and unmaking assertions, of inhaling and exhaling commitments, as Brandom puts it, but this continuous motion takes place against the background of a firmament of fixed concepts, maintained by nothing but our own activity, yet already fully determined. Both Brandom’s recasting of his philosophy as an absolute idealism and its supplementation by an account of concept-development are already carried out in more or less detail in various minor works published in between his two magna opera. A Spirit of Trust contains however another, far less expected novelty, one that in previous work is merely dimly hinted at: something akin to an ethics. Why should Brandom—who, in his earlier work, seems most at home when he expands on simple material substitution-inferential commitments and the differences between indexical, deictic, and anaphoric tokenings of singular terms—want to present us with an ethics at all? To understand this urge, we have, in my mind, to understand the constitutive limitation of his philosophy. We have said that Brandom’s philosophy starts with a rationalistic conception of what it is to be a human being. The rationalism of this conception is so pronounced, however, that Brandom is led to eliminate from his account of us all that is not absolutely essential to us as rational beings, notably anything that pertains to a specifically human culture. This radical abstraction, which Brandom himself mischievously refers to as “vandalizing Neurath’s boat,” is certainly entirely legitimate, and maybe even indispensable, as a heuristic device. But it threatens to turn Brandom’s system into a glass-bead game that, as impressive and awe-inspiring as it might seem to like-minded philosophers, has little to offer to a wider circle of educated readers who expect philosophy to help them see through the culture that surrounds them and grapple with existential or political issues that arise in it. Brandom’s stabs at an ethics are, in my opinion, a response to this threat of irrelevance. He does not address culture as a proper topic of philosophical inquiry, which would force him to venture far outside the confines of his philosophy of language, but attempts to show that his rationalistic philosophy, beautifully selfcontained as it is, has ethical implications that point beyond it. To work out these implications, Brandom needs to draw on material from outside his philosophy of language, namely on Hegel’s accounts of action and modern culture expounded in the Reason and Spirit chapters of the Phenomenology, from which he extracts premodern, modern, and postmodern conceptions of action. The premodern

4 Gilles Bouché

conception is tragic: We are crushed by the responsibility we are called on to assume for our actions together with their unintended and unforeseeable consequences. The modern contraction of our responsibility to the intended and foreseeable raises the possibility of our innocence before the law, but, as it is hard to determine where the intended and foreseeable ends and the unintended and unforeseeable begins, we can make sure to seize this prize only by not acting at all: The modern conception threatens to alienate us from our actions. Now, according to Brandom, the practice already described in Making It Explicit is not only inescapable, but also implies a just-asunshirkable commitment to realize a community in which individuals are neither crushed by nor alienated from their actions, but in which responsibility for the actions of each one of us is shared by all of us—a postmodern community not of censoriousness and hypocrisy, of finger-pointing and virtue-signaling, but of good will, trust, and mutual help and forgiveness in the face of limitations that, otherwise, would render us helpless before an unforgiving fate. Brandom’s philosophy is thus exactly what he ascribes to Hegel: “It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent.” This unusual combination, which raises all kinds of questions, also determines the structure of this book: its first part, composed of six essays on Brandom’s semantic reading of the Introduction and the Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason chapters of the Phenomenology, is followed by another six articles homing in on the ethical implications that Brandom reads out of the Spirit chapter. Only two of these contributions, by Knappik and myself, are purely systematic. The other authors all take issue, in one way or another, with Brandom’s reading of Hegel, although their criticism is not merely hermeneutic either: They defend Hegel against Brandom not only for the sake of what they take to be a more faithful or more historically astute interpretation of Hegel’s ideas, but also because they take Hegel’s philosophy, thus understood, to have much to say to us even today. Which brings us back to the issue which we were quick to postpone: What are the criteria by which an interpretation of the Phenomenology ought to be judged? Why should we need such an interpretation at all? Certainly because Hegel’s work is simply too vast, too obscure, and too historically remote for us to benefit from it directly, without the services of a knowledgeable mediator. Hegel’s thought must be given a shape, through analysis and paraphrase, clarification and contextualization, that enables us to enter into a fruitful dialogue with it and actually profit from Hegel’s ideas, form an opinion on them, criticize them, learn from them. This is what most of us, and supposedly most of the contributors to this volume, are likely to expect from an interpretation of the Phenomenology. But it is not quite what Brandom claims to offer, which raises the very real danger of Brandom and his critics talking past one another. Applying his magnanimous ethics to his own theoretical work, Brandom wants to form a postmodern community of shared responsibility with Hegel, in fact a community of shared authorship: Under the guise of a commentary, he rewrites the Phenomenology in the light of his own philosophy, certainly preserving as much as possible of Hegel’s original thought and working through and learning from it on the way, but not without twisting and bending some of its parts and discarding as much of it as

Introduction 5

necessary. This supposedly magnanimous reading presents itself as a radical application of the hermeneutic principle of charity, an early conception of which we owe to Abelard, who sought to establish rules for reconciling contradictions in theological texts. The origins of hermeneutics as a handmaiden of theology ought to remind us that reconciling contradictions, for the purpose of preserving the authority of authoritative texts, need not be more respectable, from a rational point of view, than the critical task of actively seeking them out and exposing them. Brandom’s own approach is in a sense both more and even less critical than Abelard’s: more critical in that he readily excludes problematic passages from Hegel’s text, less critical in that these suppressed passages, unlike Abelard’s contradictions, then cannot even be thematized, which leads to a strange kind of doublethink: it is evident, and must be so to Brandom himself, that his reading in many instances diverges from Hegel’s text, but these divergences cannot be openly presented as such. Brandom’s approach is not at all without merit. Its greatest merit, in my view, is that it forces him to provide a reconstruction of the Phenomenology that is perfectly clear and unequivocal and thus lends itself to an assessment of its actual truth in the light of our best current understanding. No remnants of obscurity and vagueness are tolerated, which sets Brandom’s reading very positively apart from more deferential interpretations that are happy to reproduce the darkness of Hegel’s jargon and gladly follow his steps to the dark end of any blind alley. At the same time, as the essays in this book show quite plainly, Brandom’s approach to Hegel cannot possibly be the only rationally legitimate one. Not only would too much of Hegel’s original thought be lost. The loss itself would remain unacknowledged. Nor could it be compensated for by a multiplication of magnanimous readings, in the spirit of Brandom’s mock-Maoist injunction to let a thousand flowers bloom. What is needed are readings that, with the benefit of a “falling night,” strive to do justice to Hegel, and to Brandom, not by forgiving them, but by gracing them with the criticism they have worked hard to deserve.

The contributions Taking heed of Brandom’s characterization of what Hegel is after in the Phenomenology as “a semantics with an edifying intent,” this book is composed of two parts: Its first part contains six essays on Brandom’s semantic reading of the Introduction and the Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason chapters of the Phenomenology. Another six essays then close in on what Brandom understands as an “edifying intent” at work in the large Spirit chapter. The first two contributions, by Pippin and Ficara respectively, focus on Brandom’s understanding of Hegelian negation. While Pippin commends Brandom for understanding negation primarily not as a logical operator, but, in its material and modally robust form, as a feature of the world itself and as the very engine of experience, he criticizes what Brandom refers to as his “semantic descent”—a criticism which will be echoed throughout this book. Brandom takes Kant and Hegel to have unhelpfully focused on the processes by which speculative metaconcepts are made determinate and proposes to transpose their insights to the ground level

6 Gilles Bouché

of empirical concepts. According to Pippin, this strategy of semantic descent both misconstrues Hegel’s notion of negation and, since he takes Hegel to be on the right track, the nature of negation itself, which, according to Pippin, must be taken to drive our experience from within rather than entering it from outside in the form of empirical input. Pippin’s concern that Brandom truncates Hegel’s notion of negation is echoed by Ficara, who, forging a bridge from Hegel to modern-day dialetheism and non-classical logic, takes Hegel, unlike Brandom, to countenance the existence of true contradictions. While she admits that Brandom understands truth not only as an ongoing process of experience in which contradictions between propositions arise only to be dissolved, but also, more traditionally, as a property of such propositions, Ficara blames Brandom for overemphasizing the former over the latter in a way that she takes to shy away from the dialetheist conclusion that there are indeed true contradictions. McDowell, in his characteristically critical contribution, takes Brandom’s magnanimous reconstruction of the Introduction to task, setting out to deconstruct it piece by piece. He begins by criticizing Brandom’s understanding of the relation between empirical ground-level and speculative meta-level concepts that underlies his strategy of semantic descent as foreign to Hegel, and to Kant, and goes on to reject the very idea of reading a positive account of representation out of Hegel’s remarks on experience as a journey through various shapes of consciousness. Redding’s essay is part of an ongoing engagement with Brandom over the status of episodic sensuous experience, which Brandom largely disregards, distinguishing it as Erlebnis from the Erfahrung that, as processual conceptual experience, is at the center of his work. After carefully reconstructing Brandom’s reading of the Consciousness chapters, Redding argues that the sensuous experience of Sense Certainty must be taken to be preserved in the more abstract structures of Perception, in a way that corresponds to the preservation of what Redding describes as predication as inherence, where predicates refer to tropes that inhere in a substrate, in predication as it is more commonly understood. Since sensuous experience is irreducibly subjective, its preservation draws into doubt the conceptual realism that Brandom both endorses and attributes to Hegel. Looking closely at Brandom’s understanding of recognition, Bertram concludes that Brandom misses the essential role of dialogue and conflict in the constitution of relations of reciprocal recognition. Bertram insists that genuine recognition must be understood as an attitude that can be withheld, which he takes to disqualify Brandom’s understanding, in his reading of the Self-Consciousness chapter, of recognition as an essentially transitive relation, taking it to merely capture the defective recognitive structure characteristic of immediate ethical life. Genuine reciprocal recognition must be actively achieved, not however by one subject magnanimously turning another’s particularity into necessity, but, as Bertram insists, by two subjects unconditionally recognizing each other’s particularity as such by being prepared to enter into conflict with one another. Already in his reading of the Consciousness chapter, Brandom endorses conceptual realism as the claim that reality itself is conceptually structured, independently of our practice in which it appears to us in conceptual form. Later on, in his reading of the

Introduction 7

Reason chapter, conceptual realism is counterbalanced with conceptual idealism, which might be paraphrased as the pragmatist claim that the difference between reality and appearance, the relation between the world and our practice, must be understood from within our practice. Moyar wonders whether conceptual realism and conceptual idealism thus understood can truly be reconciled. He proposes to modify Brandom’s conceptual idealism in ways which he takes to trace Hegel’s thought more closely, notably by understanding the priority of the practical in terms of the ubiquity of value, which Moyar takes to pervade not only our ethical practice, but even its most theoretically oriented branches, such as scientific inquiry, whose very insistence on a fact– value distinction one might understand as a judgment of value. Brandom’s enterprise, throughout A Spirit of Trust, can be described as a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of us forming conceptual representations of the world. It culminates in an understanding of concepts as in a sense instituted by us and yet fully objective, to which Brandom opposes incorrect hyperobjective and hypersubjective understandings. In his essay on Brandom’s reading of the Spirit chapter, Pinkard objects to what he presents as Brandom’s Fichtean transcendentalism, which, together with the absence of any genuine notion of life from his account, he takes to impose on Brandom an allegorical reading in which what Pinkard urges us to understand as breakdowns of specific historically situated ways of life can only be read as shifts between very broad cultural formations that in turn function as mere allegories for very general philosophical positions. Drawing an impressive arc from the confrontation of Antigone and Creon to that of the acting and judging consciousnesses, Bernstein offers a reconstruction of the Spirit chapter that is not fundamentally at odds with Brandom’s narrative, though Bernstein, like Pinkard, blames Brandom for overemphasizing the Kammerdiener passage and for identifying naturalism and cynicism, rather than Kantian moral individualism, as paradigmatic manifestations of modern alienation. Bernstein pays particular attention to Brandom’s idea of a right to recognition, in which he sees an attempt to overcome the limitations of what he understands, following Pippin, as the positivist streak of Brandom’s earlier work. As we have seen, Brandom understands alienation as an attitude toward norms that manifests itself most plainly in cynicism and reductive naturalism. According to Testa, Brandom thereby fails to account for the objective side of alienation, which he takes to come into view once we distinguish alienation (Entfremdung) from externalization (Entäußerung) and see that alienation has social institutions in which Spirit is externalized and reified as its objective conditions. Testa takes the subjective bend of Brandom’s account to manifest itself also in his understanding of practice only as praxis, as intentional action, not as poiesis, that is, not as the nature-transforming work through which Spirit can be both externalized and reappropriated. In my own contribution, I explore the possibility of reading Brandom’s philosophy, and in particular what he understands as its ethical implications, as a long and complex response to Rorty’s criticism of analytic philosophy in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the process, I offer a reconstruction of Brandom’s reading of the

8 Gilles Bouché

Spirit chapter that reflects on the relation between language and culture and draws into question the very idea of a “semantics with an edifying intent.” Some of its more problematic consequences are drawn out in great analytic detail in Knappik’s contribution, in the form of a reductio ad absurdum. Knappik argues that magnanimous trust prevents us from criticizing, and even from understanding, manipulative and oppressive behavior and thus makes us defenseless in the face of unethical behavior that threatens to undermine any practice governed by magnanimous trust. Echoing concerns raised by other contributors, Taylor submits that Brandom’s opposition of premodern and modern societies and their identification with hyperobjective and hypersubjective attitudes is too schematic, as, according to Taylor, any society necessarily contains both some forms of reciprocal recognition and some allegiance to communal norms. Emphasizing Hegel’s Romantic heritage, Taylor proposes to read the Spirit chapter as Hegel’s account of our spiral-shaped development toward the universalization of reciprocal recognition. In Brandom’s reading of Hegelian forgiveness and trust, Taylor sees a possible remedy to the mutual mistrust which he takes to threaten this development in our highly polarized societies today.

PART I

Semantics

1 BRANDOM ON HEGEL ON NEGATION Robert B. Pippin

I The many parts of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust interlock in such an organic way that it seems manifestly unfair to single out a topic in isolation and spend a few pages trying to understand and assess it. But unless there is someone who can get it all into economical focus in one article better than I can even imagine, this is the task for all of us. I have announced: “Brandom on Hegel on Negation.” Let me start with Hegel. In the Jena Phenomenology, Hegel already speaks of “the tremendous power of the negative” and simply identifies it with “the energy of thinking, of the pure I” (PG/P, §32). But also, in the first edition of the Science of Logic, he calls negation “the truly real and being-in-itself [das wahrhafte Reale und Ansichseyn],” and writes that negativity is the “abstract foundation of all philosophical ideas and speculative thinking in general,” and that it is only in our time, the “new time,” that we have even begun to understand it (GW 11, p. 77).1 When, in the last volume of the Logic, he comments on this “new” understanding of his, he is as clear about its supreme importance as he is difficult to understand: Now the negativity just considered constitutes the turning point of the movement of the concept. It is the simple point of the negative self-reference, the innermost source of all activity [Tätigkeit], of living and spiritual selfmovement [Selbstbewegung]; it is the dialectical soul which everything true possesses and through which alone it is true; for on this subjectivity [Subjektivität] alone rests the sublation [Aufhebung] of the opposition between concept and reality, and the unity which is truth. (GW 12, p. 246)

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Brandom interprets this speculative notion of negativity as “a process that is mediated by the relations of material incompatibility and consequence” (ST, p. 42). He calls Hegel’s concept of determinate negation Hegel’s most fundamental conceptual tool, and it is such negation that he defines in terms of “material incompatibility and consequence,” and he insists that the general normativity of material inferences is irreducible to the normativity of formal principles alone. There is no doubt that this tracks something crucial to Hegel. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes that negativity is to be understood “not as change, nor yet as nullity, but as difference or determination” (GW 8, p. 80, my translation). Brandom’s central idea is that determinate negation is a modal issue, a matter of alethic modalities, concerned with material modalities in reality (accounted for by a “modal realism”) of necessity, possibility, and impossibility. By “modal” Brandom means to point to the fact that theoretical cognition of the world, even empirical description, relies on words that are not mere descriptions, but, for example, articulations of laws that support robust counterfactual inferences, necessitation, preclusion, and that our descriptions, quoting Sellars, are only descriptions (and not “labels”) “in the space of implications” (ST, p. 761).2 Or: The determinateness of a thought or state of affairs (predicate or property) is a matter of its modally robust exclusion of other thoughts or states of affairs, those it is materially incompatible with. (ST, p. 95)3 The basic unit of intelligibility is the judgment, understood by Brandom as, essentially, a commitment. (He says that judgments are “the smallest unit for which one can take cognitive responsibility” (ST, p. 68). He also says that his use of “commitment” tracks Hegel on “setzen” (ST, p. 63, n. 1).4 Brandom’s full theory of intentionality is that it is functionalist, inferentialist, holist, normatively regulated, and socially pragmatist; far too much to consider here.5) But there is no doubt that one important element in understanding the possible content of any such commitment is an understanding of the possibility of conceptual content. And the most important element in the possibility of such content is that any entitled wielder of such a concept is just thereby (by having understood its content, by having come to possess and be able to use the concept) extruding material incompatibilities and finding and endorsing further material commitments. According to this conception, to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility (“determinate negation”) and material consequence (“mediation”) with other such contentful items (ST, p. 42).6 These incompatibilities are not modeled on predicate or sentence negation. Something’s being a square excludes its being an aspiration or an episode in the civil war, but these are “indeterminate negations” and locate the subject in that infinitely other logical space of everything that is not a square. (This is what traditional logic called an “infinite” judgment.) But knowing that a square is not a circle (that it is not a non-square, it excludes that possibility), or that something cannot be red and green

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all over, or that Pittsburgh’s being west of Harrisburg and Harrisburg’s being west of Philadelphia means that Pittsburgh is west of Philadelphia is determinately informative, and the inferences are not formal-logical. (Red and square are different, but compatible properties; square and circle are different but incompatible; two different kinds of differences.) These material incompatibilities and material consequences are normative requirements on understanding the content being the content it is. They have to do with the coherent thinking of these contents, but they involve no reference to the psychology of thinking. In a Fregean mode, one could say, as Brandom does, that thoughts stand in these relations, not psychological thinking-events, as long as we recall that a thought is what is, when true, a fact. (As Hegel would have it, this is to consider a thought in a logical mode, in terms of the logic of “pure thinking.” This is precisely not to consider it a mental episode, a temptation Hegel thought Kant gave in to, against his better philosophical nature.) Having noted that, when all goes well, what we know is what is the case, Brandom also notes that Hegel wants to understand what we should say about cases where all does not go well, or where we do not yet know how things are going. That is, in the Phenomenology, where the question is “how it is for the subject” when things are unsettled or error occurs, Hegel wants to discuss the relation between how things seem to be, or appearances, and how they are, really, and Hegel shows how he can have a position on this that does not rely on Kant’s “confirmation” by extra-conceptual intuitions. But, as in the two original Hegel quotations, this all concerns not just thinking. Facts or states of affairs stand to each other in these relations as well. The “logical” relations simply reflect the way the world is conceptually structured. So, on the object side, we have alethic modal relations, and, on the subjective side, we have deontic normative relations: what we ought to extrude, and what we ought to undertake. They are both “two sides of one coin.” More precisely formulated: Hegel sees the deontic normative sense of “incompatible” and “consequence” that articulates the attitudes of knowing subjects and the alethic modal sense of those terms that articulates objective facts as deeply related. They are different forms that one identical conceptual content can take. (ST, p. 3)7 Now this sort of conceptual or modal realism is only one of a triplicity of general characterizations that Brandom thinks we have to understand together if we are to understand Hegel. I won’t have time to go into them and will concentrate on this modal realism, but the rest of the picture should be noted. There is first objective idealism, defined as “a reciprocal sense-dependence of the concepts articulating the objective things and relations and the concepts articulating the subjective thoughts and practices of understanding consciousness itself” (ST, p. 209). The modally real impossibilities and implications would still exist even if there were no subjects around, but the sense or meaning of these determinations depends on our way of identifying them, as the determinate meaning of a fact could be said to depend on

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the meaning of the content of an assertion, particulars on the behavior of singular terms, and so forth. (It might be worth noting here that Hegel would not say that this is a relation of dependence, but identity, which Brandom sometimes suggests, as in “two sides of the same coin,” and he would ultimately not want to describe one side of the identity as “subjective,” if that is meant in any psychological sense. A great deal will ultimately depend on this, but it is not germane to the issue we are tracking.8) And finally there is conceptual idealism, where Brandom’s pragmatic reading of Hegel begins to be more detectable. This aspect arises with the question: Should this whole constellation of objective conceptual relations and subjective conceptual practices and processes be understood in terms of the relational categories of objectivity or the practical-processual categories of subjectivity? (ST, p. 369) The answer is the latter. These practical-purposive processes, the “instituting” processes of purposive action and intentional agency, are what have the priority, raised as a question in what was just quoted. (This aspect of Brandom’s position is worth a conference all by itself, since it involves his reading of Hegel’s summative position in the Science of Logic, in which the Absolute Idea is the unity of the practical and theoretical idea. Since we lack a chapter on the Logic, I will rely later on Brandom’s article about logical and empirical concepts, but in a way too limited to broach any issue about the Absolute.) The way in which Brandom discusses the side of deontic normative relations touches on quite a puzzling issue and gives us a way, I want to say a partial way, of understanding it; that is, Hegel’s frequent invocations of resolve and drive, of excitation, pulsation, and movement in the Phenomenology and the Logic. An attractive feature of Brandom’s approach is that this aspect is built into the theory of conceptual content itself (again, as throughout, if we do not think of these activities as psychological events, but as expressing the normative proprieties inherent in commitments as such). He claims that Hegel is building on an idea of Kant’s: the responsibility in question should be understood as a kind of task responsibility: it is the responsibility to do something. What one is responsible for doing in committing oneself to p is integrating that new commitment into the constellation of prior commitments, so as to sustain its exhibition of the kind of unity distinctive of apperception. (ST, pp. 67f.)9 The concept of negation (incompatibility) in terms of which we should understand determinateness (whether of subjective thought or of objective fact) essentially involves a principle of motion, of change, of active, practical doing—as odd as this seems from the point of view of the logical tradition indigenous to Verstand (ST, pp. 688ff.). Let me sum up the preceding. Brandom’s approach has the advantage of giving us one coherent way of understanding the position, clearly Hegel’s, that negation

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should not be understood as a mere logical operator. The world is “full of negation”; that is, in Brandom’s interpretation (and in his own view), objects and events stand in modally robust relations of exclusion and implication, all such that understanding the world imposes deontic normative requirements on anyone asserting anything about it. This definitely tracks something of importance to Hegel. As Hegel’s remarks on Kant’s Antinomies show, he greatly admired Kant’s treatment of negation in a substantive or material rather than an exclusively formal respect. In the way Kant thinks of it, p and ~p are formally contradictory, but if p is “The stone smells good” and ~p is “The stone does not smell good,” they are not contradictories, however it seems formally, but contraries. Stones have no smell; that predicate is excluded, impossible. (This is a point put to great use by Michael Wolff in his important book on contradiction.10) Now for some qualifications. The limitation of the approach (or its merely introductory status) is that the position is most often oriented from “ground-level” cases of, largely, matters of fact known empirically. I mean that it is empirical discovery that is the engine generating incompatible commitments, how we go about these material impossibilities. There is nothing necessarily misleading about this in itself, but there is a problem if we orient ourselves exclusively from this understanding when we move to the metaconceptual, speculative level, which is paradoxically both presupposed in the Phenomenology and demonstrated as unavoidable by a series of reductio arguments denying, or proceeding without appropriate acknowledgement of, various aspects of the logical conceptual order. (Put simply, at the always presupposed logical level, pure thinking’s self-negation, its basic engine, cannot be accounted for in this way, by material modal exclusions.) In Hegel’s case, those Brandomian exemplifications just cited express a specific understanding of determinacy, largely what Hegel calls qualitative determinacy, an understanding that persists throughout the explanation of quantitative and “measured” determinacy; that is, throughout the Logic of Being, and, correspondingly, in the Consciousness chapters of the Phenomenology. So, in the first place, this is a limited kind of negation (typical of the Logic of Being, what Hegel calls Anderssein), but by no means all of what Hegel means by the “reality” of negation. And even apart from the purely self-determining, self-negating level of pure thinking, such qualitative determinacy is not what is at stake in the assumptions of a “reflective” approach to reality, one that seeks to fix essential identities (not just matter-of-fact determinacy, specified qualitatively), identities not available to observation and description, and to understand the uniquely negative relation between essence and appearance.11 Partly, this is a problem for Brandom because he has (so far) only provided a kind of one-size-fits-all account of determinate negation. This certainly does get at something important in Hegel. In this picture, individuals are always understood as instances of kinds, this-suches, and, by virtue of that, are determinately excluded from their “complements” or contraries and just thereby determined. Horses are mammals, and so not non-mammals; that is, cannot be birds, or reptiles, or amphibians and so forth; the contraries of mammals, not just in the infinite logical space of all that is not mammalian, set by a negated predicate. (It is important to stress: Mammals do not just also happen to lack the properties of birds, etc. By being mammals, they cannot have the

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properties of birds, reptiles, etc.12) Individuals are not arguments satisfying functions, but members of determinate kinds and intelligible by virtue of that and by virtue of what that determines by “negating,” by excluding as impossible. What is important in the context of this discussion is not whether a more Fregean approach can handle such reliance on terms in its own way (which Brandom argues),13 but that a great deal changes when Hegel begins to consider individuals not just as “intelligible by virtue of kinds,” but as appearances, the “ground” of which is unobserved, and so “posited,” and ultimately relies for a proper account-giving of this ground relation on the notion of law. The character of determinate negation depends a good deal more on these very different contexts (the three “logics”) than Brandom’s modal realism can handle in Hegel.14 (This is important to stress. It is not just that Brandom is focusing on that aspect of Hegel’s account of negation that is of importance to Brandom’s modal realism. It is that this account leaves us without something necessary to understand that dimension; for one thing, the internally self-negating nature of the “conceptual processes” at work at the logical level in the Phenomenology.) In his book, Brandom has a lucid account of how Hegel handles the necessary inference to the unobservable that shows up in the Force and Understanding chapter but does not much dwell on the fact that Hegel leaves things there in a state of tension, not exactly like one of incompatible commitments to be overcome. Force is identifiable as the determinate force it is only by its “expression.” An inertial force is what we infer, posit, when we see that a resting heavy object stops or slows down another moving object, but all we have available empirically is the empirical event, the expression, the change in speed or stopping. At the observational level alone, the reference to an inertial force seems just another way to refer to the fact that the moving ball stopped. And so, it is non-explanatory, tautologous. On the other hand, we don’t know how to pick out what is significant and essential to the event and its explanation (the change in speed) without construing the appearances as expressions and tying them to a force. This is the heart of the matter throughout the Wesenslogik, too. An essence can be determinately identified only by specifying its essential attributes, distinguishing them from the non-essential. But we can only do that guided by a priori knowledge of an essence, which itself requires the specification of attributes.15 This reflective oscillation is not a matter of material incompatibility or implication. (It is the case, of course, that if a force is expressed, it would be materially incompatible with a contrary expression, but the new problem is not that, but in what sense a force both is and is not its expressions, or the sense in which an essence is, but is not nothing but its essential and appearing attributes.) The problem arises in a way internal to the very concept of essence and so is an example of the self-negation Hegel always refers to when he is talking about logical movement. The difficulty of thinking together both force in its expressions and the determinateness of expressions as expressions of a specific force is not, pace Brandom, any instance of the way an adequate approach to philosophical concepts “mirrors the view we are ultimately to achieve of the way ordinary, groundlevel empirical-practical concepts work” (ST, p. 425). It is an instance of the way any empirical determination of force-expressions must presuppose some resolution of the independent philosophical “oscillation,” as I have called it. This is still not to mention

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that this example of inertia and movement is not a matter of Anderssein, material incompatibility, but Gegensatz or opposition, primarily Hegel’s inheritance from and acceptance of Kant’s notion of negative magnitudes. As Wolff again has argued (successfully in my view), this is the main model for Hegel’s account of speculative contradiction. Here is Hegel’s full statement, at the logical or conceptual level, of the difference I am insisting on: In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other. Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only as selfreferring [sich beziehende]. (GW 11, p. 249, my emphasis) There are several more reasons why, in understanding Hegel on the reality of negation, we should distinguish Anderssein from Gegensatz. One has to do with the centrality of opposition in the establishment of recognitive relations (Brandom has said that he finds Hegel’s treatment too “martial”) and for other phenomena that Hegel thinks exist only in such active opposition, not just exclusion. Here is an example: So also virtue, for example, is not without struggle; it is rather the highest, the perfect struggle, and thus not only a positive but rather absolute negativity; virtue is virtue, not just by comparison to vice, but for the opposition and the combat in it. Or again, vice is not only the lack of virtue—innocence too is such a lack—and distinct from virtue not just in the eyes of an external reflection, but is opposed to virtue in itself; it is evil. Evil consists in maintaining one’s own ground as against the good; it is positive negativity. (GW 11, p. 284)

II This issue of negation opens up onto a much larger one. The move from the ordinary to the speculative level—the conceptual structure of reason—(or the “coming to self-consciousness” of the inherent speculative logic of the movement in the Phenomenology) alters the epistemology of negation understood as Brandom does. At the “ground level,” there is no serious epistemological problem involved in the determination of the content of “modally rich” descriptions of the world. It is a necessary element in any empirical understanding of surface and red that a surface that is red all over excludes being green all over. And if a commitment to a claim is discovered to be incompatible with another commitment, then the question of how to resolve it is not epistemologically problematic. One either has to give up one or the other, resting on the best evidence or argument available, or successfully recategorize the concepts such that the contradiction non-questionbeggingly disappears. But at the speculative level, which for our purposes we can define as the dawning, accumulating realization “for consciousness” about concept,

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conceptual content, substance–property relations, essence–appearance relations, universal–particular relations, and the interrelations among these, the epistemology has to be quite different. Coming to understand concepts like being, or becoming, or something, or manyness, or continuity, or infinity cannot of course be empirically based and has rather to be understood in some progression of interdefinability. This is just as true for the philosophical concepts in the Phenomenology. The experience that consists in what Perception, or the Understanding, or Observing Reason says it does is not articulated by empirical claims. And that alters any possible understanding of the origin of the discovered incompatibilities at the metaconceptual level. These cannot be due to our inability, as finite thinkers, to correctly anticipate all of the deontic requirements of any one commitment, given the virtual endlessness of empirical knowledge. (And nothing in the conceptual movement of the Phenomenology depends on empirical discoveries.) Hegel is clearly trying to show that under some limited assumptions about the nature or ground of possible determinacy, the arising of incompatibilities (and incompatibilities of a certain sort) is unavoidable and not a contingent matter of fact in ongoing empirical inquiry. The possibilities of resolution do not therefore involve assumptions like: “One or the other commitment must be in error. Which one should I give up?” Speculative negation of negation (Aufhebung) does not work that way. Said in its full Hegelian language, at the speculative level, the development of the Concept is autonomous (not driven by the discovery of unexpected inconsistencies).16 This means more than “I must resolve the inconsistencies I have discovered,” and rather means something like “in specifying the content of a logical concept, understood as something like an ineliminable component of any attempt to render intelligible, we find that the specification of that content requires—in our attempt to say self-consciously what we mean—conflicting Denkbestimmungen, thought determinations. (As with the example of essence above.) In Brandom’s account, we do not have yet a sufficient explanation of the idea of logical “movement,” especially given that it is not driven in the Science of Logic or in the Phenomenology at the conceptual level (the level of Understanding, Observing Reason, Spirit’s internal dynamic in the Phenomenology) by “consciousness’s” experience of discovered, incompatible commitments. For that, we need the appropriate logical understanding of this notion of “self-negation,” a notion most on view in the Logic of Essence. So Brandom is right to claim something like this: From Hegel’s point of view, that extrusion or expulsion of incompatible commitments and extraction of and expansion according to consequential commitments is the inhalation and exhalation, the breathing rhythm by which a rational subject lives and develops. (ST, p. 53) But as stated, the claim is too restrictive. It ought to read “is a crucial element of the inhalation and exhalation, the breathing rhythm, etc.” There are two more “logics” to go. And—the most important point—we don’t know enough about the source of the incompatibilities. In the Wesenslogik, it is not by any empirical discovery that Being is Nichts.

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There are many more related issues. Hegel’s many remarks about Bewegtheit, or motility, or conceptual Lebendigkeit always have an ontological dimension, too, one that modal realism does not account for. Hegel writes often about negation as the pulsating process of being (GW 11, p. 288), about the self-movement and Lebendigkeit of what there is, and he associates his ontology with the notions of a drive (Trieb) in being, with the “appetite” or the “nisus” of the monad, with entelechy, and so forth (GW 11 p. 288). These are again largely Aristotelian inheritances (as they are in Leibniz) and they refer to a thing’s being what it is as a thing’s distinct being-at-work as what it is, its energeia, which Hegel translates by his most important ontological term, Wirklichkeit. Although this applies most appropriately to organic beings and artifacts in Aristotle, as is intimated in Hegel’s defense of Kant and Newton on negative magnitudes, even an inorganic object can be said to be actively resisting and/or attracting in a way that fits Hegel’s unusual language of ontological Gegensatz and that relies on a different sense of determinate negation. Finally, it would take a separate and lengthy discussion to explore how this notion of negation-as-opposition functions in Hegel’s account of the self-constitution by virtue of which differentiability as a subject distinct from others can be achieved. To defend or to begin, barely, to defend these, we need reference to another discussion. In his “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel: Comparing Empirical and Logical Concepts,” Brandom has provided a discussion of “logical concepts” that is of major relevance to the issues raised here. First, a major presupposition of the enterprise: Hegel learned from Kant that the soft underbelly of epistemological theories is the semantics they implicitly incorporate and depend upon. And he thinks that two-stage representational theories committed to the strong differential intelligibility of representings and what they represent semantically preclude genuine knowledge of those representeds. (ST, p. 44) Putting the point in terms of semantics, as if the linguistic turn had been made, is somewhat anachronistic. The reference to intelligibility is more historically perspicuous because it suggests that we should formulate the issue as Hegel’s inheritance from Kant’s new understanding of logic—that is, that logic concerns the constitutive conditions for the very possibility of intelligibility, and that means, in this tradition, the possibility of acts of rendering intelligible. Logic emerged in Kant as something other than merely the study of valid forms of inference, but also very different from an account of the laws that thinking does or ought to obey (as in the Port-Royal Logic), or as directly categorizing a basic ontological structure (as in Wolffian accounts of logic). For Kant, logic states the conditions of any possible sense, the distinctions and relations without which sense would not be possible, and so, compared with post-Fregean logic, covers more than truth-functional assertions, but also imperatives and aesthetic judgments. That is why Kant’s identical logical architectonic shows up in those books. Failing to observe the “norms of

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thinking” is not mistakenly thinking, making an error in thinking; it is not thinking at all, not making any sense. The prospect of objects “outside” something like the limits of the thinkable is a non-thought, a sinnloser Gedanke. 17 Brandom always makes clear that he conceives of logical concepts as involving what he calls the logical and philosophical metavocabulary we use to discuss and explicate ground-level concepts. But I think this is going wrong from the start. It would be better to say such concepts provide the rules for the possible formation of any groundlevel rules in the first place, but even that suggests the wrong direction of dependence. As Hegel puts it: “the concept [and he clearly means here philosophical concepts] is the ground and the source of all finite determinateness and manifoldness” (GW 12, p. 23). To see why this is so, I will need to refer to some more passages from Brandom. Most of the article just cited defends a Sellarsean notion of the tight relation between “concepts” and “claims” that not only make empirical knowledge infinitely inexhaustible in the additive sense, but also radically and necessarily revisionary. What we learn in the future about new inferential relations alters the meaning of concepts and ensures that many beliefs now held to be true will be found to be false. So again, empirically progressive inquiry is the primary engine of this process of formulation and radical revision. It is in this context that Brandom describes the logical concepts at work both in the Phenomenology and in the Logic as tied to or driven by that engine. The job of logical concepts, he says, is not to make explicit how the world is (to subserve a function of consciousness) but rather to make explicit the process of making explicit how the world is (to enable and embody a kind of self-consciousness). (CRH, p. 156) First, “making explicit” is, in my view, too weak a metaphor, and so is misleading. If we rephrase it as empirical inquiry rendering the external world intelligible, then we could say more accurately not just that a philosophical logic renders intelligible these acts of rendering intelligible, but that it renders the possibility of that firstorder intelligibility intelligible. And if we succeed in such an enterprise, in rendering intelligible what first-order inquiry can render intelligible, then we have, in the Logic, rendered what there is intelligible. This is why Hegel says that logic “coincides” with metaphysics or that it “takes the place” of metaphysics. He is thinking of Aristotle when he says such things. Aristotle’s categories render intelligible the “ground” forms of predication by means of which the world is rendered determinately intelligible. But thereby, since the world is thus rendered truly predicatively intelligible, the forms of thinking are the forms of being, not the forms of our rendering intelligible, not merely subjective activities. To be is to be intelligible. Brandom certainly agrees that for Hegel “the way the world really is can be said (and thought) of it. The world as it is in itself is thinkable […]” (ST, p. 428). But Hegel thinks that this is so even with respect to the results of the autonomous and prior Logic itself, as determined by a “science of pure thinking,” a science whose object is nothing but pure thinking itself. And there is this:

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What his logical concepts are adequate for is just making explicit the process by which determinate content is conferred on or incorporated in the groundlevel empirical and practical concepts that articulate our consciousness of how things are: the process of determining conceptual content through experience. Being able to deploy those logical, so metaconceptual, expressive resources Hegel has developed out of the raw materials he inherited from the philosophical tradition is achieving a certain kind of semantic self-consciousness. (CRH, p. 156) If we distinguish making the world explicit, rendering it intelligible, from making explicit these forms of making the world explicit, rendering intelligible ways of rendering intelligible, then the former depends on the latter, the latter constitutes the possibility of the former, not, as Brandom’s passage and others seem to suggest, the other way around, as if the task is clarifying what we have already done. (I mean: as if the development of logical concepts is somehow essentially post-empirical, retrospectively trying to get clear what ways of mediating the immediate have become required by new empirical discoveries.) This latter sounds like what Brandom means when he says: In exercising a capacity, engendered by the use of his logical vocabulary, to say and think explicitly what one has all along implicitly been doing in saying and thinking anything at all—namely, determining content, incorporating immediacy in the form of mediation, by engaging in a process of concept-revision through experience. This is the sort of self-consciousness Hegel calls “Absolute Knowledge.” (CRH, p. 156) and when he says: For the process recollected in the case of the logical concepts is not (in either of its versions) one of determination by incorporation of immediacy, as it is in the case of empirical concepts. In the logical case the transformative Erfahrung that is rehearsed in the two books is rather motivated wholly by considerations that show up retrospectively as having always already been implicit in the contents of the (meta)concepts already in play. (CRH, p. 158) What could it mean to say that Hegel develops these metaconceptual resources “out of the raw materials he inherited from the philosophical tradition”? There is no such reliance in the Logic and the development in question is modeled, very loosely, on Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction: thought’s a priori and “productive” internal self-determination of its own possibility. There are other passages in his corpus like the ones just quoted, and they introduce an interesting wrinkle in Brandom’s position. For example:

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The Wiederholung presented in the Logic is substantially more retrospectively reconstructed, and hence more rational in the sense of more reason-revealing, than is that of the Phenomenology. But for both, Hegel clearly believes that the only way to come to occupy the cognitive position he finally arrives at is by going through the conceptual process and progress to which the long expositions of those works are guides. It is no use jumping ahead to peek at the ending and see how the books come out. (CRH, pp. 157f.) Exactly so, one wants to say, but this appears to be how Brandom thinks Hegel thinks of his own position, in contrast to how Brandom thinks of it. For he also writes, in contrast with this “no-peeking” passage: For we can start with a pragmatic metalanguage, in which we describe the practices that confer and determine conceptual content, and specify in those terms what it is that a particular logical locution makes explicit, introducing it as expressing those features. This is, not by coincidence, the path I pursue in Making It Explicit. I think it is possible in principle to say how we should think about discursive practice according to the conceptual scheme in place at the end of the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic, without having to rehearse the expository paths by which Hegel develops that scheme for us. (CRH, p. 160) I am suggesting that how Hegel thinks of his own position is how we should think of it. Without such a picture, incompatible commitments generated at the empirical level will look like the engine driving the whole pulsating self-negating process, and the status of the Logic and logical movement will look confusing. When Brandom talks about the cycle of action and cognition by which one sense is found to be “implicitly defective by its own standards” (ST, p. 430), he is talking about “experiential episodes” that are paradigmatically empirical episodes (straight sticks that look bent), as a result of which we also experience “the unfolding into explicitness of the commitments and conceptual articulations that were all along implicit in the earliest ways things were for consciousness” (ST, p. 431). I don’t think this captures the Phenomenology’s sense of experience (which is not tied to empirical discovery) nor the Logic’s progressiveness, which is autonomous. And this means that Brandom’s conceptual idealism—that a “realist commitment is implicit in practically acknowledging the representational dimension of concept use” (ST, p. 440)—cannot be Hegel’s. It depends on an “experience of error or failure” that is not Hegel’s Urnotion. In the Phenomenology, a shape of spirit cannot say what it means coherently, a requirement imposed by the apperceptive character of any sense-making. In the Logic, a philosophical concept cannot “determine itself,” or as Hegel says constantly, “give itself its own actuality” or determinateness without requiring a reformulation as a higher-order concept. Said another way, Hegel clearly believes in a “science of pure thinking” that is not retrospective and recollective but internally self-

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determining and constitutive of what could be a world. As Hegel sees it, this is simply to believe in philosophy, in a first philosophy anyway. Finally, the difference between Verstand and Vernunft that interests Hegel is not what interests Brandom. Brandom ties the activity of Vernunft too closely to that kind of retrospective housekeeping for the results of constantly upended empirical results. But for Hegel, in the Logic, the problem is that Verstand, at a level of metaconceptual, speculative abstraction, cannot do what must be done. Let us say, for example, it contrasts the finite and what, determinately, it is not, the infinite, or the one and what it is not, the many, in a way that undermines the very possibility of the contrast itself and so requires a “negation” of that notion of negation. We can only understand how this works if we take fully on board Hegel’s basic claims about the science of pure thinking: It is autonomous, spontaneous, self-determining, produces its content from itself and is the logic of being itself. The Phenomenology is preparation for this enterprise. The task of that enterprise is not to say of anything what it is, or to recollect the metaconceptual structure we have discovered, but to say of anything at all what it must be, such that the question “What is it?” could have some purchase. And given that this is the task of the Logic, the inevitability of the internal contradictions within that enterprise cannot rest on what Brandom isolates and highlights, what he calls: “the inexhaustibility of immediacy” (ST, p. 613) or “the empirical” (CRH, p. 136).

Notes 1 For the Science of Logic, I use Di Giovanni’s translation. In the Introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel leaves no doubt that the new time was inaugurated by Kant, and especially his new conception of logic. See especially the footnote in GW 21, p. 46. There is also this from the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The standpoint of the philosophy of Kant […] is in the first place to be found in the fact that thought has, through its reasoning, got so far as to grasp itself not as contingent, but rather as in itself the absolute ultimate […]. Thought grasped itself as all in all, as absolute in judgment; for it nothing external is authoritative, since all authority can receive authority only through thought. (1896, p. 424). 2 See Sellars 1957, §108. The implication for Brandom is that we can, we must, be able to say such things as that it is objectively necessary that pure copper melts at 1,084°C, and impossible for a mass to be accelerated without being subjected to some force, and once we understand this, we understand that the objective world is “already in conceptual shape” (ST, p. 51). This avoids the cardinal sin of modern philosophy for Hegel (for Brandom): understanding our representations as in such conceptual shape, but not the represented. Therewith the path to skepticism. By contrast, Sellars (and Hegel) would insist that describing and explaining (reliance on such modality) go hand in hand, are inseparable. 3 See also TMD, p. 9. 4 This leads to the question of whether Fichte’s use of setzen can accommodate this interpretation of it as normative commitment to “saying how the nicht-Ich is,” rather than, as in many interpretations, to being responsible for how and even that it is. That and how it can is suggested in Pippin 2000, pp. 147–170.

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5 See the discussion in Pippin 2015, pp. 29–62. I will be critical below of what I take A Spirit of Trust to imply about Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, which I think is only properly articulated in his Science of Logic. The limitations of this format make it impossible to do any justice to the full story of Brandom’s position, which involves the components of conceptual realism, objective idealism, and conceptual idealism, as Brandom understands them (ST, p. 213). I hope to address that issue in a later work. This logical issue also touches on one of the most important in Brandom, the sense in which what he calls normative statuses are on the one hand “instituted” by, and so “depend on,” normative attitudes, but not subjectively in the sense of arbitrarily. The dyad is a dialectical relationship, actually instituted but possessing a restraining power on what can subsequently be instituted. Whether that constraint is sufficient to defeat worries about a kind of social positivism about norms is the question. 6 This means there is a priority to these material relations over logical-formal formulations. According to Brandom, “Frege exploits […] the idea that inferences good in virtue of their logical form can be picked out as those (materially) good inferences that remain good upon arbitrary substitution for their non-logical vocabulary” (2014, p. 11). He is aware of course that arguing that all of this can be ascribed to Frege is controversial and that there is another Frege in the commentaries, the more representationalist or “later” Frege. 7 See also: “Isomorphism between deontic normative conceptual relations of incompatibility and consequence among commitments and alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence among states of affairs determines how one takes things objectively to be. Practically acquiring and altering one’s commitments in accordance with a certain set of deontic norms of incompatibility and consequence is taking the objective alethic modal relations articulating the conceptual content of states of affairs to be the isomorphic ones” (ST, p. 60). 8 Modulo such qualifications as Brandom makes in ST, p. 2. For a fuller account of the identity issue, especially the identity between logic and metaphysics, see Pippin 2018. 9 Brandom’s account of apperception as involving a commitment to an integrated whole of knowledge claims seems to me derivative from a more basic point about apperception, one of Kant’s innovations in the understanding of logic: that judgment is the “bringing” of a content “to the objective unity of apperception.” Any judging is originally consciousness of judging, but this is not a dyadic, intentional relation. That the “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations means that the subject is not “positively” identical with a series of representational states. It “stands above them” somehow and so is in some sort of negative as well as positive relation with its representings. In Hegel’s unusual language, this is a form of self-negation. This is a huge topic, as indicated by this difficult passage from the Berlin Phenomenology: The I is now this subjectivity, this infinite relation to itself, but therein, namely in this subjectivity, lies its negative relation to itself, diremption, differentiation, judgment. The I judges, and this constitutes it as consciousness; it repels itself from itself; this is a logical determination. (1981, §413, translation modified) 10 Another point that Michael Wolff makes in detail concerns Hegel’s appreciation for Kant’s defense of Newton on the reality of negative magnitudes. See Wolff 1981. This passage from the first Critique could have been written by Hegel in the Wesenslogik: the principle that realities (as mere affirmations) never logically oppose each other is an entirely true proposition about the relations of concepts but signifies nothing at all either in regard to nature nor overall in regard to anything in itself (of this we have no concept). For real opposition always obtains where A − B = 0, i.e., where one reality, if combined in one subject with another, cancels out the effects of the latter. (Kant 1998, A272–3/B328–9, my emphasis)

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11 Brandom certainly has an account of unobservables, or theoretical entities (see ST, ch. 6). The point about reflective negation can be put this way. Stated in the relevant Platonic terms: A sophist is not a philosopher; but “not a philosopher” not in the way the philosopher is not a statesman or a poet. The sophist appears to be a philosopher, and in such a way that making out the real distinction is extremely difficult; it is not merely contrastive. One could also say that the mode of being of the sophist is itself “false.” There is also a relation here of active opposition, not just otherness, which I will discuss in a moment. (The philosopher must always work to overcome the appearance of sophistry; must actively negate the appearance of sophistry.) The problem of the logic of non-being necessary to make this distinction in The Sophist is a fine example of how Hegel thinks the logic of negation must be understood, in its manifold speculative senses. I mean the difference between a Parmenidean and a Platonic understanding of not-being; not a strict separation between Way of Truth and Way of Seeming, but a link; Not-Being what truly is, is not “being nothing at all,” sheer illusion. Seeing that is the parricide. Still less is it—this opposition between a thing and its contraries—suitable for the determination of an act as good, or a house as good, but not “what goodness is,” the complicated status of negation in the unfolding of a Logic of the Concept. Hegel revels in the paradoxical formulations he thinks this requires. As in the Lectures on Aesthetics: “But appearance itself is essential to essence [Doch der Schein selbst ist dem Wesen wesentlich]” (1975, p. 8). 12 It is important to say it this way, for one reason, in order to distinguish the claim from Kant’s, in his account of “The Principle of Thoroughgoing Determination,” for whom the exclusion of such a negated predicate is such a lack. Here is a piece of Kantian prose that again rivals Hegel’s. A transcendental negation, on the contrary, signifies non-being in itself, and is opposed to transcendental affirmation, which is a Something, the concept of which in itself already expresses a being, and hence it is called reality (thinghood), because through it alone, and only so far as it reaches, are objects Somethings (things); the opposed negation, on the contrary, signifies a mere lack, and where this alone is thought, the removal of everything is represented. (1998, A575/B603) Franks (2005, pp. 72–78) has suggested that when Kant goes on from this principle to arrive at the concept of an ens realissimum (in a move from “the totality of possibilities” to “all actualized possibilities” that I find bewildering), he sets up the possibility of using the concept of such a “maximal reality” (all of whose possibilities have been actualized) to derive the transcendentally real properties of finite things by limitation of such a reality, thus allowing an answer to critics of the Metaphysical Deduction. This would in turn show us how the “resurfacing of Kant’s pre-critical understanding of God could be understood as the “source for the Derivation Monism of the German idealists” (2005, p. 79). Beside the fact that Kant’s own derivation of the ens realissimum from the concept of all possibilities is deeply obscure, and the fact that Kant is talking about what he regards as aspects of the Transcendental Dialectic (and so impossible), the prospect that Franks opens up as the task of the idealists would be hopeless, for good Kantian reasons. Here the Kantians would be right: it is a pipe-dream, “nice work if you can get it.” Moreover, this is the notion of negation as mere limitation that Hegel is objecting to as a limitation of Verstand, and there is no trace of the strategy Franks suggests in the Science of Logic. 13 Material incompatibilities and consequences can be considered either for predicates (properties) or for sentences (states of affairs). The difference of logical categorial focus is orthogonal to the distinction between material incompatibility and formal inconsistency. So I do not see that the centrality of the concept of determinate negation to Hegel’s enterprise gives us any reason to think that Hegel’s meaning will be “masked” if we don’t follow him in setting his claims in the framework of a term logic. See Brandom 2012, p. 14.

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14 Again, see ST, ch. 6. Redding (2012, pp. 4f.) also notes that Hegel would want to leave room for concepts, like beauty, the content of which does not, cannot, depend on the inferential roles it plays. As understood after Kant, the notion cannot function as a normal predicate, even in such a conceptual role theory, without negating the free play inherent in the notion. (Interestingly, Hegel himself, in his Lectures on Fine Art, never makes such a point about beauty, although the fact that he insists that the appreciation of the beautiful is a sensible-affective modality of understanding the Absolute (not a conceptual modality) might be taken to imply such a claim. See my discussion in Pippin 2013.) 15 Here is the full Hegelian statement of the paradox: Essence as such is one with its reflection, inseparable from its movement. It is not essence, therefore, through which this movement runs its reflective course [the manifold essential attributes]; nor is essence that from which the movement begins, as from a starting point [the intuition of essence as such]. It is this circumstance that above all makes the exposition of reflection especially difficult, for strictly speaking one cannot say that essence returns into itself, that essence shines in itself, for essence is neither before its movement nor in the movement: this movement has no substrate on which it runs its course. (GW 11, p. 295) Or: Secondly, as regards form, in this kind of explanation the two opposite directions of the ground-connection are adduced without being apprehended in their determinate relation. On the one hand, the ground is ground as the immanently reflected content determination of the existence which it grounds; on the other hand, it is that which is posited. It is that on the basis of which that existence is supposed to be understood; but, conversely, it is inferred from the latter and is understood from it. (GW 11, p. 305) 16 The unusual character of this requirement has led some, like Henrich and Bowman, to argue that true Hegelian negation, the engine of the Logic’s movement and its systematic structure, is “absolute negation.” This means, not an equiprimordiality between affirmation and negation, but the absolute logical priority of negation, with affirmation a consequence. There is then an attempt to show that Hegel tries to understand the basic “determinations of reflection,” like identity and difference, in terms of such a logical structure, and therewith to show that the entire structure of the Logic is based on such a concept of negation. I am defending, in the terms that Bowman borrows from Horn (1989), Hegel as a proponent of the former, a “symmetricalist,” and in other work have focused on the implications of an apperceptive account of judgment as the key to understanding the intertwined positive and negative aspects of a judgment. A “negative asymmetricalist” must proceed by assuming that such negation, if absolutely prior, and yet the negation of something, can only negate itself, with affirmation the product of a negation of negation. See Bowman 2013, pp. 239–259, esp. p. 249 and p. 256. For Henrich’s account, see, inter alia, Henrich 1978, pp. 213–229 and 1976, pp. 208–230. We do not have, by either Henrich or Bowman, a worked-out demonstration of such a notion of absolute negation as the underlying notion appealed to by Hegel throughout, or how it is to be understood in terms of the different status of negation in the three “logics.” In general, there is very little in the way of detailed textual reconstruction in either Henrich or Bowman, but when we attend to Hegel’s appeals to “absolute negativity,” it is clear that he applies the notion in a variety of ways, none of which look like Henrich’s formulation. It first surfaces with regard to the category of “something” in the Logic of Being, and that “negation of negation” is a negation of the negation of qualitatively determinate reality (that is, of something positive; GW 21, p. 103) and does not fit Henrich’s model. When the phrase is used to describe the “I’s” status, the equiprimordiality of self-positing and self-negating is clear (GW 21, p. 224). And

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when it emerges in a more recognizable Henrichian context, in the Logic of Essence, Hegel is trying to explain that the inessential manifestations of some thing have to be understood in some way as a thing’s essence showing itself as non-essential, mere Schein (GW 11, p. 248), a kind of “self-repelling” self-negation. The manifestation of what-essence-is-not is essence’s own determinate manifestation, its manifestation, and so that negation of essence is itself a candidate for negation (since it is an essence’s self-negating). These are obscure notions, but I detect no “negation of pure negation itself” version of “absolute negativity.” Moreover, this whole account is as abstract as Hegel’s and it leaves the reader somewhat dissatisfied, since the initial move simply presumes that a self-sufficient logical system requires an autonomous starting point, and negation then simply enters on stage as the most likely candidate. (Not to mention that the notion of an absolutely autonomous starting point is un-Hegelian and impossible.) In itself, such a notion is unmotivated and has the feel, in Henrich, of a thought experiment. Imagine a logical system that begins with only one logical operator: negation. Then what? It is possible to see that the general structure Henrich is trying to clarify corresponds in a number of ways with important moments of Hegel’s account. What counts as finite in Hegel’s treatment is the non-substantial, not substance, not wahrhaftes Sein, and so has an inherently negative status. But in being shown to be the result of the self-determination of substance, that negativity is negated. Or, the converse is so. Substance understood as infinite totality is an indeterminate blank; its status is negative. But finding a way of linking determinate, finite being to such a selfdetermining substance negates that indeterminate emptiness. The “negation of negation” turns up everywhere in these accounts. But, as noted, we have to have already accepted so much of the Hegelian account to “begin” with negation that approaching Hegel by intervening at that point can seem unmotivated and even, potentially, question-begging. 17 I am convinced here by Tolley 2006. For more on the same point, see Wolff 1984, p. 186. And on the mere “Schein” of sense, see Conant 1992.

References Bowman, Brady (2013) Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2015) Wiedererinnerter Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Brandom, Robert (2014) “Some Hegelian Ideas of Note for Contemporary Analytic Philosophy,” Hegel Bulletin 35/1, pp. 1–15. Brandom, Robert (2012) “Hegel and Analytic Philosophy” (unpublished). Brandom, Robert (2005) “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel: Comparing Empirical and Logical Concepts,” Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus 3, pp. 131–161. Conant, James (1992) “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus,” Philosophical Topics 20/1, pp. 115–180. Franks, Paul (2005) All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2010) The Science of Logic, translated by G. di Giovanni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1981) Berlin Phenomenology, translated by M. J. Petry (Dordrecht: Reidel). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1968–) Gesammelte Werke, edited by Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste (Hamburg: Felix Meiner). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1896) Lectures on the History of Philosophy in Three Volumes, translated by S. Haldane and F. Simon (London: Kegan Paul). Henrich, Dieter (1978) “Formen der Negation in Hegels Logik,” in Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels, edited by R.-P. Horstmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), pp. 213–229. Henrich, Dieter (1976) “Hegels Grundoperation,” in U. Guzzoniet al. (eds.), Der Idealismus und seine Gegenwart (Hamburg: Felix Meiner), pp. 208–230. Horn, Laurence (1989) A Natural History of Negation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kant, Immanuel (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pippin, Robert (2018) Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Pippin, Robert (2015) “Robert Brandom’s Hegel,” Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 29–62. Pippin, Robert (2013) After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Pippin, Robert (2000) “Fichte’s Alleged One-Sided, Subjective, Psychological Idealism,” in S. Sedgwick (ed.), The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 147–170. Redding, Paul (2012) “Replies to Bob Brandom and Jim Kreines” (unpublished). Sellars, Wilfrid (1957) “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2, pp. 225–308. Tolley, Clinton (2006) “Kant on the Nature of Logical Laws,” Philosophical Topics 34/1–2, pp. 371–407. Wolff, Michael (1984) “Der Begriff des Widerspruchs in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” in B. Tuschling (ed.), Probleme der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 178–202. Wolff, Michael (1981) Der Begriff des Widerspruchs: Eine Studie zur Dialektik Kants und Hegels (Königstein: Hain).

2 TRUTH AND INCOMPATIBILITY Elena Ficara

I. Introduction Brandom’s reading of Hegel is enlightening for letting us see the importance and significance of Hegel’s views in the context of contemporary analytical philosophy.1 I will hint here at three aspects that, for my purposes, are particularly important. The first aspect is Brandom’s semantic understanding of the “conceptual” (or the domain of Hegelian reason, or Vernunft). Brandom takes Hegel to deepen and develop Kant’s insight that “particular and general representations, intuitions and concepts are to be understood only in terms of the functional role they play in judgments” (2014, p. 1) by not only understanding “concepts and objects in terms of judgments, but judgments in terms of their role in inference” (2014, p. 2). This is essentially coherent with the Wittgensteinian, Quinean, and Davidsonian strand in analytic philosophy. Quine’s view that “meaning is what essence becomes when it is detached from the thing, and attached to the word,” expresses—according to Brandom—“the translation of ontological issues into a semantic key that was […] already prefigured in Kant” (2014, p. 3). In such an account, the meaning of the Hegelian Begriff is clarified and saved from possible mystical or irrationalistic interpretations. The second aspect is the attention paid to the joint action of normative and descriptive components, which is typical of Hegel’s conceptual language.2 Conceptual determinations and descriptions are never totally free of normative commitments, and the normative components have to be considered together with the descriptive ones. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom refers to the interplay between the subjective and objective, the normative and descriptive components of the conceptual realm in terms of what he calls “bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism,” according to which “[s]ubjective practices and processes specifiable in deontic normative vocabulary and objective relations and facts specifiable in alethic modal

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vocabulary are two complementary aspects or dimensions of whatever is determinate, and hence intelligible” (ST, pp. 84f.). The third aspect is what I would call a logical upshot of Brandom’s understanding of the conceptual. In Brandom’s account, Hegel’s non-psychologistic view of logic emerges very clearly.3 As Brandom himself writes: “[Hegel’s talk of material incompatibility] is part and parcel of his non-psychological theory of conceptual content. According to this theory, to be conceptually contentful just is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and (so) material consequence to other such items” (2014, p. 12). This might constitute an important step towards a new confrontation between Hegel’s (and Kant’s) idea of logic and logic as it is commonly intended and practiced (i.e. as theory of valid inference in virtue of form—though, in this context, the peculiar Hegelian meaning of “form” should also be taken into account). Interestingly, Brandom’s own conception of logic (which he calls “logical expressivism”4) could give us important tools for addressing the question: “What kind of logic is Hegel’s logic?” If there is one aspect of Brandom’s views that, in my opinion, needs to be made more explicit (or maybe to be slightly changed), it concerns Hegel’s concept of truth, and more specifically the typically Hegelian connection between truth and contradiction. Most interestingly, we might be able to derive from Brandom’s views some positive insights for working out a Hegelian conception of truth that might both be reliable (faithful to Hegel’s texts) and able to enter into an interesting dialogue with contemporary philosophy. As I will try to show in what follows, according to Brandom, truth for Hegel is (rightly, in my view) the whole process through which we inferentially determine the content of concepts and transform judgments. However, this seems to imply that truth, as intended by Hegel, is not a property of single judgments or propositions. I stress, in contrast, that truth is both the process through which we inferentially determine the content of concepts, and a predicate (or a predicative function) that we use to express a property of propositions, claims, statements, assertions, or any other truth-bearer.5 This allows us to anchor Hegel’s philosophy more solidly into the analytic tradition and, more specifically, to logic. In particular, it allows us to reveal the link between Hegel’s dialectic and glutty approaches to truth.6 The sentential—standardly logical—component of Hegel’s logic has been stressed, significantly, by those authors who have tried to give a formal account of Hegel’s dialectic. Seen from the point of view of modern logic, Hegel turns out to be a paraconsistent logician who admits static contradictions (i.e. contradictions that cannot be parameterized or reduced to absurdity). Evidently, this formal reading has some limits, from a strictly Hegelian perspective, and one of the merits of Brandom’s account precisely consists in advocating the dynamic and processual nature of Hegel’s dialectical logic. If truth is a process, then the dialectical “moments” are not fixed, hence there is no point at which we have to say that p is true and not p is also true, and the contradiction is not a true contradiction of the form “p and not p.” Seen from this angle, Hegel’s logic does not question the validity of the Law of Non-Contradiction, and Hegel is a

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totally consistent logician, albeit one who admits that, in the life of thought, things may change in ways that might require the passage from p to not p. And yet, in many passages of his work, Hegel seems to think that, in fact, there are true contradictions and that truth in itself—especially conceptual truth—is not a “simple” property: It tends, in some cases, to split itself up, so that we must say that “p and not p” is true. The idea that I am trying to develop is that this happens because Hegel tries to consider truth both as a property of sentences, assertions, propositions, etc. expressing beliefs and as the process that leads us to true beliefs. In what follows, I will, first, consider Brandom’s views on incompatibility, conceptual dynamism, and truth in his Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel, with some reference to A Spirit of Trust. Then, I will consider Hegel’s conception of truth and highlight its double dimension, i.e. its dynamic and static components. This will allow us to show that there is a possible continuity between Hegel’s view and paraconsistent/glutty approaches to truth, but, at the same time, that these approaches should also take into account what Brandom stresses, i.e. the processual nature of truth.

II. Incompatibility According to Brandom, that Hegel endorses the Spinozist principle omnis determinatio est negatio means that we determine the content of judgments and concepts by excluding possible determinations from the content in question.7 For example, I determine the content of the concept or predicate “being a woman” by excluding determinations that are incompatible with it, such as “being a man,” “being a flower,” “being a table,” etc. Thus, I say: x is a woman if x is not a man, not a flower, not a table, etc. Relations of material incompatibility induce relations of material inference, via the principle that “being a woman” entails “being a mammal” because what is incompatible with being a mammal is also incompatible with being a woman. To be determinate or determinately contentful just is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and material inference to other such determinately contentful items […]. (CRH, p. 140) This is, according to Brandom, coherent with Hegel’s view according to which the “unity of cognition” is not a single sentence, but “the concept,” i.e. the whole net of intertwined claims and concepts together with their relations of material incompatibility and material inference. Contents of concepts cannot be determined in isolation, independently from their inferential connections to one another: Giving up the picture of the contents of determinate concepts as settled independently and in advance of their modal connections to one another leads Hegel to think of them as dynamic, as changing (not just being selected) in response to other changes in our commitments. (CRH, p. 141)

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In this context, Brandom presents the following example: Thus if I have a concept acid* that is determinate in having as modally robust conditions of application that if something tastes sour then it is an acid*, and as modally robust consequences of application that if something is an acid* then it will turn Litmus paper red, I can be led by the immediate deliverances of sense (judgments I find myself with responsively, noninferentially) to commitments that are incompatible by my own lights if I run across a liquid that tastes sour but turns Litmus paper blue. In the context of the hypothesized commitments, the world is then telling me that I cannot have the concept acid* with the exclusions and entailments I started out with. (CRH, p. 141) I do not determine the concept of acid* by selecting the right determination and by excluding the wrong one. Since the truth is the whole, the determination “x is an acid* if x tastes sour and turns Litmus paper blue” is not once and for all selected as the true determination of the content of the concept, and the determination that is excluded (i.e. recognized as materially incompatible with the former) is not simply abandoned. The excluded determination is rather essential for completely determining the content of the concept in question. As a matter of fact, it emerges from this view that conceptual contents (the truth about the concept of acid*) are not atomic and static, but correspond to the whole dynamics of what we do when we try to determine truthfully the concept of acid* (by making implicit commitments explicit, excluding other commitments, revising the original assumption about the content in question, and so on).

III. Conceptual dynamism All of this suggests that concepts and contents are not static but dynamic, but what kind of dynamics is here at work? Brandom distinguishes three versions of conceptual dynamism. The first two versions are rather weak. The third, Hegelian one is stronger. The first version consists in holding that “changing the claims or judgments one endorses alters the inferential significance of those endorsements, and hence the concepts that articulate their contents” (CRH, p. 143). This kind of dynamism is coherent with the Quinean holistic understanding of experience. The second kind of conceptual dynamism is entailed by the idea of a nonmonotonic inference relation according to which adding more premises might make new conclusions available or old ones unavailable. Inductive reasoning is, paradigmatically, non-monotonic. For instance, I might say: Most rock stars are drug addicts, Dave Grohl is a rock star, therefore, very likely, he is a drug addict. But then, I come to know that Dave Grohl is averse to the use of drugs, and my conclusion might change. The third sort of dynamism is the Hegelian one according to which “the very idea of an adequate stable system of determinate empirical concepts is deeply

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incoherent” (CRH, p. 144). It corresponds to the view “that we will always and necessarily be led to contradict ourselves by applying empirical concepts correctly […] and that it is in just this fact that the true nature of the immediacy, particularity, and actuality revealed to us in experience consists” (CRH, p. 144). Hegel’s strong conceptual dynamism implies what Brandom calls semantic pessimism, which is a peculiar, pessimistic view about truth. On this reading, when Hegel says of the concrete that “the true, thus inwardly determinate, has the urge to develop,” […] he means that no concepts with fixed, determinate boundaries can capture how things are in a way that will not turn out to require eventual revision. The case of the defective concept of acid* sketched above is not exceptional. We will always “learn by experience that we meant something other than what we meant to mean,” and so be obliged to “correct our meaning.” (CRH, p. 145) To recapitulate Brandom’s account of incompatibility and conceptual dynamism, and before turning to his notion of truth, it is useful to point to a distinction Brandom adopts in CRH as well as in ST, the distinction between what he calls (following Kant) empirical concepts (such as the concept of woman, or of acid) and higher-order, speculative, or logical concepts. Brandom’s account is based on the idea, stressed in A Spirit of Trust, of semantic descent, i.e. of a notion of conceptual dynamics as unfolding when we look at ground-level, empirical concepts and seek to determine their meaning. In Brandom’s own words: in addition to concepts whose principal use is to describe and explain empirical goings on, there are concepts that play the distinctive expressive role of articulating features of the framework that makes description and explanation possible. These “pure concepts of the Understanding” are the ancestors of Hegel’s “speculative,” logical, or philosophical concepts. Like Kant’s categories, these are metaconcepts: concepts whose job it is to express key features of the use and content of the ground-level empirical and practical concepts Hegel calls “determinate” concepts. […] Accordingly, I recommend, and practice in what follows, a strategy of semantic descent. This entails at every point keeping our narrative eyes firmly focused on what claims about the defects and virtues of the various “shapes” of self-consciousness mean for our understanding of the use and content of ordinary determinate empirical concepts. (ST, pp. 4–6) Brandom’s views on incompatibility and conceptual dynamism thus imply, to adopt a simplified, schematic account, three aspects. First, there are the judgements about empirical, ground-level concepts (being a woman, being an acid) that are more or less adequate to express the meanings of those concepts and are to be corrected in the process of conceptual determination (for example “if something is an acid then it will

34 Elena Ficara

turn Litmus paper red”). Second, there is the higher-order function of rejecting, evaluating, and accepting (although always provisionally) the ground-level determinations, and, third, there is the sceptical, pessimistic meta-meta-insight according to which the ground-level conceptual determinations are doomed to contradict themselves, and so to be continuously revised. I will call the first aspect G (from “ground-level”), the second one M (from “meta-level”), and the third one MM (from “meta-meta-level”). This picture about the processual and complex nature of conceptual thought has specific implications for the notion of truth.8

IV. Truth Brandom suggests that the dynamic account of the conceptual implies the necessity to think about truth in new terms, the necessity of “reconstructing truth.” The first amendment implies that truth is not a property that an individual empirical conception or an individual atomic sentence “has all on its own,” apart from its inferential relations to other conceptions and apart from “its diachronic developmental relations to its predecessors and successors.” This means that “the locus and unit of truth (and so of knowledge) can no longer be identified as the judgment” (CRH, p. 149). So, how should we think about truth? Brandom quotes the famous passage of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel writes: This truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be regarded as something on the other side, positive and dead. Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is ‘in itself’ [i.e. subsists intrinsically], and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. The True is thus the vast Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk […]. (PG/M, §47) The passage means, according to Brandom, that Truth is thought of here not as a special, desirable property of judgments, but as a distinctive sort of process of transforming concepts (and so, judgments) […] In this sort of expressively progressive process, the evanescent [das Verschwindende, what disappears], what shows itself to be cognitively incorrect, not only judgments found to be false, but concepts found to be inadequate, is an essential element. That each individual commitment, doxastic or inferential, eventually shows itself to be an appearance that must ultimately be rejected is the experience of error, finding oneself with commitments that are incompatible by one’s own lights, that is the motor of the truth-process. Truth is not a

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matter of getting things right (once and for all), but of getting things righter (at every stage). Hegel’s strong semantic pessimism, his conceptual dynamism, means that truth for him is a kind of progress, something you make, rather than something you have—a feature first of what you are doing, and only derivatively of what you have done. (CRH, p. 150) Brandom’s view of truth can thus be summarized as follows: 1. 2. 3.

Truth concerns the whole net of commitments, judgments, concepts, and their relations, not single commitments, judgments, concepts. Truth is a process of transforming judgments and contents and not a property of judgments or sentences. Truth is something we make and not something we have.

This characterization, however, gives rise to some questions. As to (1), one could argue that truth concerns both the whole net of commitments and the single commitments taken by themselves. From an epistemic point of view, I can say “Jones has true knowledge of Smith,” and in this case I use “true” as a property of a certain set of true beliefs that Jones has regarding Smith, and this set, as a whole, expresses the general epistemic commitment that ties Jones to Smith. I can also say that “Jones knows that Smith is married,” and in this case I express the single connection between the proposition “Smith is married,” thought by Jones, and Smith’s life. The first case involves the use of “knowing” with a direct object (I know X), and the second with a clause (I know that). But truth is involved in both. What is interesting about the Hegel–Brandom view is that engaging in the process of inferentially determining conceptual contents through relations of material incompatibility and material inference implies that, when we look at truth as a whole, we see that single, atomic commitments are wrong or false insofar as they are partial accounts of the conceptual content in question. In doing this, we have to understand truth and falsity as properties of single commitments and statements, but we also have to see that their truth is only part of the whole truth. The main point is that truth must be a property of the parts as well as a property of the whole. As to (2), one could admit that if something is a process, it can nevertheless plausibly be the property of something. “Being a process” is the property of something that has a processual nature, such as for instance downhilling at Teufelsberg. If someone asks me “What is ‘downhilling’?” I answer: “‘Downhilling’ is an activity people (mainly between 17 and 25, mainly at Berlin’s Teufelsberg) engage in, namely the activity of skating down hills from top to bottom using a longboard (a longer equivalent of a skateboard).” Thus “the activity of skating down hills …” is here a property used in order to give a definition of “downhilling.” Similarly, one could concede that truth is, as Brandom wants, the process of revising judgements as well as a property of judgements.

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As to (3), that something is something we make does not imply, in principle, that it cannot be also something we have. Using a very platitudinous example: if I make a cake, I have a cake. I take it that Brandom would not question the points (1) to (3). He would concede that, in Hegel, truth is primarily (1) what concerns the whole, (2) a process, and (3) something we make, and derivatively (1a) what concerns atomics, (2a) a property, and (3a) something we have. My claim is that the two components, (1) to (3) and (1a) to (3a), in Hegel’s conception, have the same right to be stressed: truth, in Hegel, is at the same time and right (1) to (3) (what concerns the whole, a process, and something we make) and (1a) to (3a) (what concerns atomics, a property, and something we have).

V. Hegel Thus, I propose to complete Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s conception of truth as follows.9 If we consider, again, the passage of the Preface where Hegel defines truth and Brandom’s reading of it, as quoted above, we see that one aspect, underlined by Hegel, but not thematically considered by Brandom, should also be highlighted. It is the view according to which “[t]he evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential” and “[a]ppearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is ‘in itself’” (PG/M, §47). When Hegel says that the “evanescent” is “essential” and that “appearance does not pass away, but is ‘in itself’” he simply underlines the static moment in his dynamic conception of truth, i.e. the fact that truth not only consists in making rigid determinations fluid, but also that, insofar as we grasp the process of fluidification and dissolution (the appearance is grasped “in itself,” the evanescent is grasped in its “essential” nature), we make it static again. This is what Hegel calls the “difficult but necessary” sentential dimension implied in every dialectical development: Here we should bear in mind that the dialectical movement likewise has propositions for its parts or elements; the difficulty just indicated seems, therefore, to recur perpetually, and to be inherent in the very nature of the philosophical exposition. (PG/M, §66).10 The three aspects I have fixed above: G (the ground-level empirical judgements and concepts), M (the higher-order function of evaluating, rejecting, and accepting the determinations of those concepts), and MM (the final overall consideration according to which empirical concepts are doomed to contradict themselves) can now be reassessed in the light of Hegel’s account of truth in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. More specifically, I propose to slightly modify Brandom’s account so as to make it able to incorporate Hegel’s notion of both the dynamic and static, the total and partial nature of truth. The final step I called MM implies more than the final pessimistic meta-meta-attitude suggested by Brandom. MM implies, more specifically, the

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consideration of M (the process of revision, evaluation, negation) as an object, i.e., to use Hegel’s suggestive formulation, as something that not only “passes away,” but also is “in itself,” which not only is a “Bacchanalian revel,” but also “absolute calm.” This means that the same processual, higher-order conceptual thought is determined sententially or representationally, and produces a ground-level, partial, and static determination.11 And, if we determine and sententially fix the same process of determining, we get a contradiction.

VI. Some logical upshots Having stated all of this, it is possible to reconsider the two aspects of Hegel’s conception of truth (truth as process and as propositional property or function) from a logical point of view. What is truth as process? My suggestion (following Brandom’s semantic view of the conceptual) is to interpret Hegel’s conception of the processual nature of truth in epistemic and inferential terms, understanding it as the requisite of truth-preservation in the inferential passage from premises to conclusions. In this sense, semantic validity concerns inferences rather than single sentences. Yet, it evidently presupposes the truth of sentences. Conceptual development is, for Hegel, the process through which we necessarily derive conclusions from premises, even if it implies a peculiar (dialectical) understanding of the inference relation. In his Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, when he addresses the question of the scientific nature of philosophy, Hegel writes that “the element of truth is the conceptual,” and evokes “the orderly ways of thought,” and more emphatically, the “march of cold necessity in the subject-matter” (TWA 3, pp. 15–16). Following my suggested reading, that “the element of truth is the conceptual” simply means that truth is preserved in the inferential process of making conceptual contents explicit; that the inferential relation is a “march of cold necessity” means that it is inexorable, since conclusions necessarily follow from premises. Truth as property of propositions (expressing single beliefs) is the preliminary meaning of truth. Hegel does not question it. He simply admits that sentences are the locus of truth. Yet what he considers are rather philosophical (higherorder) sentences and contents, i.e. contents that, as Brandom rightly observes, are not “static” but “dynamic.” However, the reading that does not see in the processuality the essential (static) nature of specifically philosophical contents cannot grasp their contradictory nature. If we engage in the attempt of propositionally fixing the complex and dynamic nature of concepts, we get a contradiction, i.e. a compound sentence of the form α ↔ ¬α. Evidently, this view implies an enlargement of the classical conception of truth and validity. It implies the non-classical insight according to which the classical logical principle known as ex contradictione quodlibet is invalid. Not only that, it entails the view that some truths are contradictory, and that there are true contradictions.12, 13

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Notes 1 On the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy for analytic philosophy, see, among others, Berto 2005; Horstmann 1984; Koch 2014; McDowell 1994; the essays collected in Nuzzo 2010a; Pinkard 2003, pp. 119–134; Pippin 2016; Redding 2007 and 2014, pp. 281–301; Stekeler-Weithofer 1992, 2005, and 2016, pp. 3–16. 2 The essays collected in Halbig et al. 2004 are proof of the central role played by normativity in the Hegel-reception of the last fifteen years. On the normative character of Hegel’s philosophy in general and of his concept of Spirit in particular, see Pinkard 2002, pt. 3. In 2003, pp. 119–134, Pinkard stresses the normative component of Hegel’s conceptual truth (Wahrheit). He claims that, to grasp the meaning of Hegel’s concept of truth, we must understand what it means that concepts realise themselves. For Pinkard “concepts are realised insofar as we act following them,” the reality of the concept is the way in which the concept works as a normative instance. In this context, Pinkard highlights the practical consequences of Hegel’s views on conceptual truth. He shows that, for Hegel, concepts are teleological structures which force us to follow them, to think, act, and live according to them (2002, p. 121). 3 For a complete account of the meaning of Hegel’s logic for the philosophy of logic, see the groundbreaking Stekeler-Weithofer 1992. Stekeler-Weithofer (1992, p. 23) emphasizes that Hegel’s logic, in spite of its apparent effusiveness, does correspond to what we mean by “logic” today. On common prejudices against Hegel and his idea of logic, see also Stekeler-Weithofer 2016, pp. 3–16. 4 See Brandom 2018, pp. 70–88. 5 In 2005, p. 150 Brandom claims: “Truth is thought of […] not as a special, desirable property of judgments, but as a distinctive sort of process of transforming concepts,” and in ST, p. 100, he claims: “Instead of thinking of truth as an achievable state or status, Hegel wants us to think of it as characteristic of a process: the process of experience.” However, Brandom does not deny the sentential dimension of truth tout court. In what follows (IV), I read Brandom’s position as implying that truth is primarily the process, and derivatively a property of propositions. In this respect, my claim is twofold. (1) The two components in Hegel’s notion of truth, truth as process and truth as the property of propositions, have an equal right to be stressed, while the focus of Brandom’s analysis is on the former component. (2) If we give both components equal right to be stressed, we are forced to admit that the very notion of truth includes a contradiction, and thus that there are some true contradictions. 6 In current debates on the Liar paradox and dialetheism, by “glut” is meant “true contradiction.” However, how to describe gluts is a delicate matter. See Beall et al. 2017 and Priest et al. 2018. 7 For an interpretation of dialectics and dialectical negation based on Brandom’s account of material incompatibility and material inference, see Berto 2005 and 2007, pp. 19–39. Berto 2007, p. 19 writes: “My reading is based on a very simple idea: the inferential intuition that an essential part of what it is to grasp a conceptual content, and to be able to apply it correctly to an object, consists in mastering its connections with the concepts it entails, and with the concepts that entail it […] Brandom ascribes such an inferential holism not only to Sellars but also to Hegel. [My work] aims at showing why this ascription is quite correct.” 8 In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom does not refer to the pessimistic nature of what I call MM anymore, but rather understands it in terms of what he calls recollection. 9 My aim here is to focus on the passages on truth of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that are the special subject of Brandom’s consideration. So I will not address Hegel’s views on truth in other texts. On Hegel’s notion of truth, see, among others, Nuzzo 2011, pp. 91–105; Pinkard 2003, pp. 119–134; Baldwin 1991, pp. 35–52; Stern 1993, pp. 645–647; Puntel 2005, pp. 208–242; Miolli 2016. On the sentential nature of truth (Wahrheit) in Hegel see Lau 2004; Trisokkas 2012, pp. 225ff.; Martin 2016, pp. 53–80; Harrelson 2013, pp. 1258–1280. 10 In other passages of Hegel’s works (for instance in Hegel’s consideration of Megarian paradoxes, and in particular of the Liar, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy), it

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is evident that Hegel endorses a propositional account of truth. Simultaneously, Hegel stresses that the sentential form is indeed problematic, because it fixes contents that are in themselves fluid (gives a simple account of a complex content). In the Jena aphorisms, he complains about the rigidity of the German language, which turns predicates into substantives and is not able to turn substantives (expressing fixedness) into predicates (expressing processuality and activity): “Diese Steinheit oder Steinigkeit oder Steinernheit […], diese Strengflüssigkeit ist es, auf die man Verzicht tun muss. Die Bildsamkeit, nicht das instinktmäßige non aridet, ist die Wahrheit” (TWA 2, p. 550). 11 Nuzzo 2010b, p. 65 highlights the question about the difference and the interplay between representative and conceptual language in Hegel. According to Nuzzo, Hegel distinguishes between the two kinds of language and states that “all scientific mediation consists in the double movement of crossing over from representation to concept and from concept to representation” (see especially TWA 11, p. 378). Hence dialectics involves the double movement from representation to concept and vice versa (whereby the language of representation cannot but be dogmatic or fixing, while the conceptual one is sceptical, negative, and dynamic). 12 The logical and metaphysical view according to which there are some true contradictions is known as dialetheism. Although I think that dialetheism is an important reference point to assess the role of dialectics in the history and philosophy of logic, in Ficara 2017, pp. 357–368, I have given a formal account of Hegel’s notion of true contradiction that is substantially different from the dialetheic notion of a true contradiction. On dialectic and dialetheism, see Priest 1989 and Ficara 2013. 13 The research for this paper is part of a larger project generously funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. For helpful comments, I am grateful to Gilles Bouché, Bob Brandom, Franca D’Agostini, and the audiences at various conferences in Berlin, Dresden, and Milwaukee.

References Baldwin, Thomas (1991) “The Identity Theory of Truth,” Mind 100/397, pp. 35–52. Beall, Jc; Glanzberg, Michael; Ripley, David (2017) “Liar Paradox,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online resource]. Berto, Francesco (2005) Che cos’è la dialettica Hegeliana? (Padova: Il Poligrafo). Berto, Francesco (2007) “Hegel’s Dialectics as a Semantic Theory: An Analytic Reading,” European Journal of Philosophy 15/1, pp. 19–39. Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2018) “From Logical Expressivism to Expressivist Logic: Sketch of a Program and some Implementations,” Philosophical Issues 28, pp. 70–88. Brandom, Robert (2014) “Some Hegelian Ideas of Note for Contemporary Analytic Philosophy,” Hegel Bulletin 35/1, pp. 1–15. Brandom, Robert (2005) “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel: Comparing Empirical and Logical Concepts,” Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus 3, 131–161. Ficara, Elena (2013) “Dialectic and Dialetheism,” History and Philosophy of Logic 34/1, pp. 35–52. Ficara, Elena (2017) “Hegel and the Consequentia Mirabilis,” History and Philosophy of Logic 39, pp. 357–368. Halbig, Christoph; Quante, Michael; Siep, Ludwig (eds.) (2004) Hegels Erbe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Harrelson, Kevin (2013) “Logic and Ontology in Hegel’s Theory of Predication,” European Journal of Philosophy 23/4, pp. 1259–1280.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1986) Werke in 20 Bänden mit Registerband, edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Horstmann, Rolf-Peter (1984) Ontologie und Relationen: Hegel, Bradley, Russell und die Kontroverse über interne und externe Beziehungen (Königstein: Athenäum). Koch, Anton Friedrich (2014) Die Evolution des logischen Raumes: Aufsätze zu Hegels Nichtstandard-Metaphysik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Lau, Chong-Fuk (2004) Hegels Urteilskritik: Systematische Untersuchungen zum Grundproblem der spekulativen Logik (München: Fink). Martin, Christian (2016) “Hegel on Judgements and Posits,” Hegel Bulletin 37/1, pp. 53–80. McDowell, John (1994) Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Miolli, Giovanna (2016) Il pensiero della cosa: Wahrheit hegeliana e Identity Theory of Truth (Trento: Verifiche). Nuzzo, Angelica (2011) “Truth and Refutation in Hegel’s Begriffslogik”, in E. Ficara (ed.), Die Begründung der Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), pp. 91–105. Nuzzo, Angelica (ed.) (2010a) Hegel and the Analytic Tradition (New York: Continuum). Nuzzo, Angelica (2010b) “Vagueness and Meaning Variance in Hegel’s Logic,” in Nuzzo 2010a, pp. 61–82. Pinkard, Terry (2003) “Objektivität und Wahrheit innerhalb einer subjektiven Logik,” in A. F. Koch, A. Oberauer, and K. Utz (eds.), Der Begriff als die Wahrheit: Zum Anspruch der Hegelschen „Subjektiven Logik“ (Paderborn: Schöningh), pp. 119–134. Pinkard, Terry (2002) German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pippin, Robert (2016) Die Aktualität des Deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp). Priest, Graham (1989) “Dialectic and Dialetheic,” Science and Society 53/4, pp. 388–415. Priest, Graham; Berto, Francesco; Weber, Zach (2018) “Dialetheism,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online resource]. Puntel, Lorenz Bruno (2005) “Hegels Wahrheitskonzeption: Kritische Rekonstruktion und eine ,analytische‘ Alternative,” Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus 3, pp. 208–242. Redding, Paul (2014) “The Role of Logic ‘commonly so called’ in Hegel’s Science of Logic,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22/2, pp. 281–301. Redding, Paul (2007) Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin (2016) “Hegel wieder heimisch machen,” Philosophische Rundschau 63/1, pp. 3–16. Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin (2005) Philosophie des Selbsbewusstseins: Hegels System als Formanalyse von Wissen und Autonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin (1992) Hegels Analytische Philosophie: Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung (Paderborn: Schöningh). Stern, Robert (1993) “Did Hegel Hold an Identity Theory of Truth?” Mind 102/408, pp. 645–647. Trisokkas, Ioannis (2012) Pyrrhonian Scepticism and Hegel’s Theory of Judgement (Leiden/ Boston: Brill).

3 BRANDOM ON THE INTRODUCTION TO THE PHENOMENOLOGY John McDowell

I In the Introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel says his project is to describe a succession of shapes of consciousness, with one giving way to another until we reach Absolute Knowing. Brandom acknowledges that, but in his treatment of the Introduction he almost totally ignores the succession of shapes. His pretext is that he thinks Hegel’s description of his project is at a semantic metalevel, and he reads the Introduction at a level reached by semantic descent. He thinks Hegel’s description of the succession of shapes deals with progress in the understanding of “speculative,” logical, or philosophical concepts, which, supposedly like Kant’s categories, are semantic metaconcepts; their function is to serve in characterizing the use and content of concepts at the ground level, ordinary empirical and practical concepts. Brandom undertakes to expound the significance of the Introduction for the ground level. He finds in it a description of how the content of ground-level concepts is determined in a process driven by experience of error. That is central to an account of conceptual content that he attributes to Hegel and finds spelled out in the body of the Phenomenology. This take on the Introduction is important for justifying Brandom’s approach to the Phenomenology as a whole, at any rate the parts he deals with in A Spirit of Trust. He writes (ST, p. 21): That a reading [of Hegel’s Introduction] in terms of semantic descent is so much as possible is strong evidence for the viability of the project [Brandom’s project in A Spirit of Trust] of understanding Hegel’s metaconcepts in terms of what they let us say about the use and content of ground-level determinate concepts. No doubt approaching the Introduction in these terms is unusual. But to reject it out of hand would require treating the fact that it sustains a detailed

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reading by semantic descent as well as one in terms of shapes of (what are later revealed to be self-)consciousness as just an astonishing coincidence. I am going to argue that there is no coincidence; Hegel’s Introduction can be made out to sustain Brandom’s ground-level reading only by doing violence to it. Hegel’s point in describing the succession of shapes goes missing if we take the succession to be located at a metalevel for an account of the semantics of ordinary concepts.

II Brandom says the idea of semantic metaconcepts is “one of the founding Big Ideas of German Idealism” (ST, p. 5). He thinks the idea is first exemplified in Kant’s categories, which he thinks are an inspiration for Hegel’s conception of logical concepts. But he is wrong about Kant’s categories, and that undermines the credentials of the Big Idea. For Brandom’s Kant, to judge is to undertake a commitment, a normative move that must be understood as part of a package with what one thereby makes oneself responsible for doing. In judging, one makes oneself responsible for “rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception” (ST, p. 10). In the activity of integrating, one “synthesizes” what is, in effect, a world view, and at the same time a judging self. Kant conceives concepts as functions of judgment; Brandom takes that to mean that the content of an ordinary concept is given by a rule that governs the difference its presence in a judgment makes to the norms that govern the activity of integrating judgments into a unified constellation. And he thinks the categories are metaconcepts for describing that activity and thereby articulating the contents of ordinary concepts. Brandom’s Kant thinks this conception of what one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging yields an account of the idea of what one makes oneself responsible to in judging, and so an elucidation of the representational purport of a judgment, in terms of the way its subject matter is authoritative in assessing its correctness. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom does not undertake to justify attributing this story to Kant. He offers documentation in his Woodbridge Lectures.1 But the documentation does not stand up to scrutiny. There (RP, pp. 29f.), he cites a passage in the first Critique’s Transcendental Deduction, from Kemp Smith’s translation (1929, B140–1), as follows: I have never been able to accept the interpretation which logicians give of judgment in general. It is, they declare, the representation of a relation between two concepts [… W]hat is defective in this interpretation [… is] that it applies only to categorical, not to hypothetical and disjunctive judgments (the two latter containing a relation not of concepts but of judgments), an oversight from which many troublesome consequences have followed.

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Brandom takes Kant to be noting that someone who makes a hypothetical or disjunctive judgment is not committed to affirming its constituent clauses, though she is committed to the whole judgment. And he thinks Kant’s point is that judging must be understood as undertaking a commitment. On that basis, together, I suppose, with the fact that Kant’s notion of the unity of apperception figures in the context of the passage he cites, he constructs his supposedly Kantian story about judgment. This would be a stretch even if the text he cites suggested that the key to understanding judgment is that it is a kind of commitment. In fact, there is not even that much going for the idea that the story is Kant’s own. Here is the passage in Kemp Smith, without Brandom’s ellipses and supplementation: I have never been able to accept the interpretation which logicians give of judgment in general. It is, they declare, the representation of a relation between two concepts. I do not here dispute with them as to what is defective in this interpretation—that in any case it applies only to categorical, not to hypothetical and disjunctive judgments (the two latter containing a relation not of concepts but of judgments), an oversight from which many troublesome consequences have followed. Kant goes on, in what is a new sentence in Kemp Smith but not in Kant’s German: I need only point out that the definition does not determine in what the asserted relation consists. Brandom doctors what he quotes to make it seem that Kant wants to focus on something Kant says he is not concerned with. And he leaves out the point Kant does want to make. Even if Kant had not disclaimed a concern with the omission of compound judgments, his passing mention of it would be unsuited to make the point Brandom wants him to be making. If Kant’s point were that judgment must be understood in terms of commitment, it would be inept to describe what the logicians omit as judgments that contain a relation of judgments. A judging subject is not committed to the constituents of a hypothetical or disjunctive judgment, and on Brandom’s account of Kant’s point Kant should not call them “judgments.”2 I am not suggesting Kant would object to the claim that a subject who makes a self-standing judgment undertakes a sort of commitment.3 And no doubt the commitment has concomitant responsibilities, for instance to defend the truth of what one judges. But this passage does not indicate any interest in explaining what judgment is in such terms. The logicians’ formula is defective in failing to accommodate judgments whose elements are, as Kant puts it, judgments, but that does not matter for Kant’s complaint that the formula does not explain the relation a judgment asserts between its elements. The complaint still holds if we correct the logicians about what elements judgments can have, and that is why Kant does not make a fuss about the correction.

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Brandom gives his story about integrating commitments a roughly Kantian sound by saying the result of the integration exhibits “the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception.” But that is not Kant’s notion of the unity of apperception. The unity of apperception figures in the answer Kant goes on to give to the question the logicians leave unaddressed; he says “a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledge [Erkenntnisse] are brought to the objective unity of apperception” (B141).4 Bringing cognitions to the unity of apperception is self-consciously unifying, in a judgment, concepts and, in the compound judgments that the logicians overlook, judgments; it is what makes a judgment the unity it is.5 The unity of apperception does not figure in Kant as a kind of unity that characterizes what results from integrating multiple judgments into a world view.6 I am not suggesting Kant is nowhere interested in the kind of unity that is required in admissible constellations of affirmed judgments. He will go on from the Transcendental Deduction, via the Schematism, to the Principles of the Pure Understanding. The principles state conditions that must be met by any world that can be experienced. And they correspond one to one with the categories. But that is not to say, as Brandom does, that the function of the categories is to “play the distinctive expressive role of articulating features of the framework that makes description and explanation possible” (ST, pp. 4f.). Brandom acknowledges that some topics that are prominent in the context of the passage he quotes from the Transcendental Deduction are absent from the story he elicits from it: in particular intuition and the form of our sensibility. He claims to be disentangling a strand in Kant’s thinking from a presentation in which Kant runs it together with separable concerns (RP, p. 50). But the effect of abstracting from Kant’s concern with sensibility is that Brandom’s story makes no contact with the Transcendental Deduction. Brandom is not isolating a strand in Kant’s thinking; he is foisting a story of his own on Kant. The content of ordinary concepts does not set Kant a problem that might recommend introducing metaconcepts for a semantic treatment of them. He thinks the possibility of experience requires that the categories, the pure concepts of the understanding, have “objective validity.” If they do, the content of empirical concepts can be derived from experience. But Kant holds that the understanding needs objects to be given to it from outside itself, in sensibility, if it is to actualize its potential as a power of knowledge. That makes urgent the question how we can be entitled to attribute objective validity to concepts that originate in the pure understanding, independently of its interaction with sensibility. That is Kant’s question in the Transcendental Deduction, and he answers it by elaborating the role of the categories in making it possible for objects to be given in intuitions. Kant’s question cannot so much as come into view if one abstracts from his thinking about the relation of understanding to sensibility. Kant’s categories are not semantic metaconcepts. They are concepts of an object überhaupt (B128), concepts whose contents are forms of unity conferred on intuitions by the same function that confers unity on judgments (A79/B104–5), which accounts for how intuitions are of objects. And Hegel is a perceptive, if sometimes

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unsympathetic, reader of Kant. He is a better reader than to find the idea of semantic metaconcepts in Kant. Brandom’s idea that Hegel’s succession of shapes of consciousness is a progression in the understanding of semantic metaconcepts gets no support from anything in Kant. And as I said, I am going to argue that the idea of an implicit ground-level account cannot be made to fit the text of the Introduction.

III Brandom says Hegel opens the Introduction (§73) by introducing a certain model of knowledge (ST, p. 35). He quotes, as if it were how Hegel begins: “Knowledge […] tends to be regarded as the instrument with which one takes hold of the absolute or as the medium through which one discovers it.” In fact, that is the second sentence in Kenley Dove’s translation;7 I will come back to this. Hegel says conceiving knowledge as an instrument or medium leads to “the conviction that the whole project of acquiring for consciousness through cognition what has being in itself is contradictory in its concept, and that between cognition and the absolute there falls a boundary that completely separates them” (§75).8 He does not go into detail about how the conception has those consequences. Brandom takes that as an invitation to construct an argument on Hegel’s behalf. He traces the epistemological inadequacy of conceiving knowledge as an instrument or medium to a semantic presupposition: a defective conception of how representations that are supposedly knowledgeable are related to the represented items that are supposedly known through them. The argument uncovers semantic criteria of adequacy for a conception of knowledge, and Brandom thinks that in rejecting the instrument-or-medium conception Hegel undertakes an obligation to show how those criteria can be met. Brandom’s Hegel sketches an account of representation in the final two-thirds of the Introduction, and finishes discharging the obligation, in the body of the Phenomenology, by elaborating a distinctive understanding of the conceptual. Brandom does not at first purport to find the argument he constructs on Hegel’s behalf in Chapter 1 explicitly formulated by Hegel. But later he in effect forgets that it is his own construction. In Chapter 2 he says Hegel “opens his Introduction to the Phenomenology by insisting that our semantic theory must not already doom us to epistemological skepticism” (ST, p. 63). When he harks back to the Introduction in later chapters, he regularly writes as if the argument is explicit in Hegel’s text. Now the Introduction actually begins like this, with a sentence Dove splits into two: It is a natural supposition that before philosophy gets to the business itself [die Sache selbst], that is, to the actual cognition of that which has being in truth, it would first be necessary to come to an agreement about cognition, which is considered as the instrument with which one takes control of the absolute or as the medium through which one gets it in view. (§73)

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Hegel does not introduce the instrument-or-medium conception out of the blue, as if to be considered for its own sake. He introduces it as a concomitant of the supposition, which Brandom never mentions, that philosophy should get straight about what cognition is before engaging in it. He goes on to express contempt for “taking trouble over such useless representations and ways of talking, about cognition as an instrument to make the absolute graspable, or as a medium through which we bring the truth into view and so forth” (§76). He says: We would be better justified in sparing ourselves the trouble of taking any notice at all of such representations and ways of talking, through which science itself is supposed to be kept at bay, for they constitute only an empty appearance of knowing, which immediately vanishes before science itself when it comes on the scene. That opens into explaining his project for the Phenomenology. He will bring science itself on the scene. But science can come on the scene, at first, only as appearance. We must display it as freeing itself of that character. The project is to “undertake the exposition of knowing as it makes its appearance” (§76). That needs, and will get, further explanation. But, for now, the point is this: Hegel’s discussion of the instrument-or-medium conception is framed by the supposition that philosophy should come to an agreement about cognition before engaging in it. The supposition is natural, as Hegel acknowledges. But the project he goes on to describe flouts the supposed requirement. He will bring science on the scene without first taking trouble with questions about what cognition is. We do not need to theorize about cognition before we can engage in it. To exploit the instrument-or-medium conception in introducing the project, Hegel does not need an elaborate inquiry into the defects of the conception. So, far from uncovering an implicit message behind Hegel’s rejection of it, Brandom’s reflections about the conception are activity of just the kind Hegel dismisses: taking trouble over useless representations instead of engaging in the proper business of philosophy.9 By ignoring the natural supposition, Brandom prevents himself from registering the distinctive character of Hegel’s project: to approach an understanding of cognition by embarking directly on it without first reflecting about what it is.

IV Brandom thinks Hegel has Kant (among others) in mind in these passages. Kant is surely in Hegel’s sights; but not because Kant is a proponent of the semantically defective conception of knowledgeable representation that Brandom imports as Hegel’s target. Hegel’s actual target is the natural supposition, and it is plausible to identify that with Kant’s idea that the first task for philosophy is a critique to determine the limits of reason as a power of knowing. And Kant is surely in view when Hegel

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mentions people who find it tolerable to accept that we cannot know “that which has being in truth,” because they pretend to make sense of a second-best mode of cognition, in which one supposedly knows something else (§75). Hegel dismisses the idea that a second-best mode of cognition might compensate for an acknowledged impossibility of knowing the absolute. By his lights, what is known in any genuine knowledge is the absolute, “that which has being in truth.” So, when Kant says that though we cannot know things in themselves we can know appearances, Hegel sees that as a disguised acknowledgement that for Kant genuine knowledge is unavailable to us. For Brandom’s Hegel, Kant’s inability to countenance knowledge of things in themselves reflects the idea that what, as Kant acknowledges, the understanding cannot know does not have a form, a mode of intelligibility, that corresponds to the form of the understanding’s own acts. This does not match anything in Kant. Kant’s thesis that we can know only appearances is a way of expressing his doctrine that for us to know anything, the understanding needs to be provided with subject matter by something else, sensibility. Hegel’s label “the absolute” fits a region of the range of reason into which Kant thinks our power of knowledge cannot penetrate. That is not because what is in that region does not correspond in form to acts of the understanding. Kant does not conceive what Hegel will call “the absolute” as unreachable by our power of thought. He conceives it as beyond the reach of our power of knowledge, because of a limitation in a power of knowledge restricted, as he thinks ours is, to the understanding: not that it can know only what corresponds in form to its own acts, but that it can know only objects provided for it from outside itself.10 For Hegel that implies that its supposed knowledge is not really knowledge at all.

V As I said, Hegel’s statement that his project for the Phenomenology is “the exposition of knowing as it makes its appearance” needs further explanation. He goes on to explain the project more fully. As he notes (§77), if the topic is knowing only as appearance, it might seem that the exposition cannot itself be science. Later he will disarm that thought. Meanwhile, he says that “from this standpoint” (that is, even if we think the exposition is not science), what the Phenomenology will describe “can be taken as the path of natural consciousness that presses towards true knowing, or as the path of the soul that journeys through the series of its shapes, as stations laid out for it by its nature, so that it may purify itself into spirit, in that through the complete experience of itself it achieves knowledge of what it is in itself.” True knowing, which he identifies with full self-knowledge, is the goal, even if we grant for the moment that the account of the progress towards it is not science. What does Hegel mean by talking of the path of natural consciousness or the soul’s journey through the series of its shapes? Science, knowledge, will come on the scene, as appearance, in the guise of the first in the series of shapes: a shape of natural consciousness, taking itself to

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be a knowing consciousness. Its claim to be a knowing consciousness will be unmasked as mere appearance, and it will give way to the next shape in the series, which will be unmasked in its turn, and so on until the progression reaches its goal. Hegel will explain how these transitions will happen, and I will come to that. For natural consciousness this is, as so far described, a path of despair; at each stage (until the end, when consciousness will presumably no longer be natural consciousness), a shape’s claim to be a knowing consciousness will be shown to be unwarranted. But Hegel says, “the exposition of non-truthful consciousness in its untruth is not a merely negative movement” (§79). At each stage the result of a candidate’s being unmasked and removed from the scene is not an empty void, but a determinate negation of the unmasked candidate. The way one shape is negated determines what the next shape is to be. So, there is system in the series of shapes of consciousness. This too Hegel will explain more fully later.

VI As apparatus for explaining the transitions from one shape to the next, Hegel introduces a feature of the idea of an object of consciousness. He writes (§82): Consciousness […] distinguishes from itself something to which it relates itself; or, as I will express this: it [that to which consciousness relates itself] is something for consciousness; and the determined side of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is [putative] knowing. But from this being for another [that is, for consciousness] we distinguish being in itself; that which is related to [putative] knowing is by the same token distinguished from it and posited as being also outside this relation; the side of this in-itself is called truth. Again (§84): There is in it [consciousness] one thing for an other, or it has in general the determinedness of the moment of [putative] knowing in itself; at the same time to it this other is not only for it, but also outside this relation or in itself: the moment of truth. In these passages Hegel is distinguishing two aspects of the idea of the being of an object of consciousness. The first, the object’s being for consciousness, is the relation to consciousness that consciousness takes to constitute the object’s being known by it. The second is the being that consciousness posits its object as having, or that to consciousness its object has, in itself; that is, independently of, or, as Hegel puts it, outside, its relation to consciousness.11

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VII Hegel uses this apparatus to give an account of how one shape will give way to another. He frames the account as a response to an apparent problem about how a shape is to be shown to be a mere appearance of knowing. A shape’s supposed status as a shape of knowing consciousness can be unmasked as mere appearance only through its failing to meet a standard for knowing. But if the standard is presupposed, brought to bear by us from outside the shape, why should the shape accept that its failure to meet the standard shows that it is not the knowing consciousness it takes itself to be? Hegel sets out the difficulty in §81, and again in §83. In §82, he promises, in effect, that the double character of the being of an object of consciousness will enable us to resolve it. And in §84, he explains how. The appearance that the standard is separate from the shape that is tested by it, and presupposed in the testing, is overcome by the double character of the being of an object of consciousness. A shape of consciousness contains its own standard for assessing its moment of (putative) knowing. The standard is what to the shape is, what the shape posits as, the being in itself of its object: that is, the conception of the being in itself of what it supposedly knows that is internal to it as the shape of consciousness it is—in the language of §82 and §84, its moment of truth. A shape’s claim to be a shape of knowing consciousness fails when it turns out that the object’s being for that shape of consciousness does not constitute the shape’s knowing an object with the being in itself that figures in the shape’s own conception of its object. And it is not just that we do not need to presuppose a standard that we bring to bear from outside a shape whose claim to be a knowing consciousness we are testing. We do not even need to do the testing; each shape will do that itself, in an activity we need only observe (§85). In Hegel’s terms, each shape will consider whether its moment of knowing passes muster by the lights of its moment of truth, and each shape, until the end of the progression, will fail its own test and be replaced by a successor shape, determined by how its predecessor has been negated. Hegel introduces “Erfahrung” (“experience”) as a term for this reflection by shapes themselves on their credentials as shapes of knowing consciousness: this “dialectical movement which consciousness practises on itself as well as on its knowing and on its object” (§86).

VIII Brandom says “experience” is “Hegel’s term for the process by which new commitments are integrated into a constellation of old ones” (ST, p. 75). Brandom’s Hegel focuses on a role played by experience of error in that process. For Brandom’s Hegel, experience of error is central to the account of representation he is giving, to discharge an obligation he undertakes when he rejects the instrument-ormedium conception of knowledge. As we saw, integrating new commitments into a constellation of old ones figures in the account of judgment Brandom attributes to Kant. Experience of error is

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central to how Brandom’s Hegel appropriates that account. Brandom’s Hegel singles out occasions on which someone finds she cannot consistently integrate a new commitment into a prior constellation and concludes that one of her previous commitments was erroneous. In Brandom’s example, someone first judges that a stick is bent, on the basis of how it looks when partly immersed in water, but then sees it out of the water and judges that it is straight, taking herself to be experiencing error in her earlier judgment that it is bent. In discarding her former judgment, she is acknowledging, in practice, that the two judgments bear a representational relation to the stick; the stick stands in authority over the acceptability of what are thereby revealed as judgments about it, and it is impermissible to judge that something has both of a pair of contrary properties. That exemplifies the account of a representational dimension in the content of judgments that Brandom thinks Hegel is giving. I have argued that Brandom’s ground for thinking Hegel has undertaken an obligation to give an account of representation rests on mischaracterizing the opening of the Introduction; and that the supposedly Kantian story about judgment that he thinks Hegel is elaborating has no footing in what Kant actually says. And what Hegel says about experience is a part of the Introduction where it is particularly clear that the text does not sustain Brandom’s reading.

IX Hegel remarks that his use of “Erfahrung” is unusual. What is supposedly known by a successor shape is not something newly encountered, but something its predecessor’s object becomes in the predecessor’s experience. I will come to what that means in a moment. But the point to note first is that the alteration effected by an experience, in the sense Hegel explains, is not a response to an external impact on the shape that undergoes the experience. Hegel contrasts his notion of experience, in this respect, with a more ordinary notion, in which “we undergo the experience of the untruth of our first concept in connection with another object, which we come across accidentally and in some way externally […]” (§87). That seems a good fit for Brandom’s example. Brandom’s account cannot accommodate the selfcontained character Hegel emphasizes in the experience of a shape. Again, Hegel says the new object emerges “as it were behind the back of consciousness” (§87). In the body of the book each new shape conceives itself as simply what consciousness is; it does not recollect the experience, undergone by its predecessor, that brought it on the scene. At the end of the progression, Absolute Knowing recollects the stages that led to it, but until then the emerging of a successor shape is in view only for us, Hegel’s readers.12 That does not fit Brandom’s example. When Brandom’s subject comes to judge that the stick is straight, the change does not happen behind the back of her consciousness; she knows how she arrived at that judgment. As I noted, Hegel says the experience of a shape results in a different object, a different standard by which the new shape’s claim to knowledge is assessed. How

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far Brandom is from Hegel’s notion of experience comes out in the heavy weather he makes over that. Brandom’s puzzlement reflects his trying to make what Hegel says fit changing one’s mind about such things as whether a stick is straight. What Hegel says is certainly not straightforward. But to understand it we need to focus on what he says his topic is, the transitions from one shape of consciousness to the next. And it helps to look forward to some of the transitions in the text. Consider Sense Certainty, the first shape of consciousness to come on the scene. What to Sense Certainty is its object’s being in itself, the standard by which it assesses its own credentials as a knowing consciousness, is being a pure singular, a this. The being for it of its object, the relation it takes to constitute its object’s being known by it, is being passively received in sensibility. In its experience, its testing of itself, Sense Certainty learns that the relation it took to constitute its knowing its object relates it not to a pure singular but to a universal. Thereby it learns that it is not the knowing consciousness it took itself to be; the being in itself that it attributed to the object it took itself to know, the being of a pure singular this, was only for it a known being in itself. And in the experience that disqualifies Sense Certainty as a knowing consciousness, the idea of the being for consciousness of an in-itself appears in a second guise: as the being for consciousness of an in-itself that is a universal. That is just a way of stating what Sense Certainty learns in its experience: the being for it, the relation to itself, that Sense Certainty took to constitute its object’s being known by it actually relates it to a universal. That gives the new object, the object of the next shape, Perception. Being a universal is what to Perception is the being in itself of its object, the standard by which it will test its own credentials as a knowing consciousness. The being for Perception of its object, the relation it takes to constitute being known by it, can no longer be being passively received; it is being actively taken (§110). In the experience of Perception, its in-itself, the universal, is revealed to be only for it a known in-itself. In the experience a new object emerges, in a way that parallels how the new object emerges in the experience of Sense Certainty. The new object is the unconditioned universal, which is the object of the next shape, Understanding. In a similar way, the experience of Understanding reveals that it does not know its initself, the unconditioned universal conceived as Gegenstand, as standing over against the consciousness that supposedly knows it, and a new object emerges: the absolute concept, which no longer stands over against the consciousness that knows it. That is the object (now in a paradoxical sense, the Gegenstand that is not a Gegenstand: §177) of the next shape of consciousness, Self-Consciousness. Of course, I do not claim ready intelligibility for these thumbnail sketches of how what Hegel says in §86 and §87 plays out in the opening chapters of the book. But so far as they go, the sketches fit the texts. It is these developments, framed in terms that anticipate their official explanation in Hegel’s Logic, that we need to understand if we are to understand the Phenomenology. Experience in Hegel’s sense is not a process of integrating new commitments into a constellation of old ones, if necessary by discarding an old one as erroneous.

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Experience is reflection in which a shape of consciousness learns that its object’s being for it cannot be made out to constitute its knowing an object with the being in itself that figures in its conception of itself. What a shape experiences is not error in its commitments, but incoherence in its self-understanding.

X Brandom misdescribes the two aspects of the being of an object of consciousness. He introduces “in itself” and “for consciousness” in Chapter 1, in connection with his idea that in rejecting the instrument-or-medium conception of knowledge Hegel is rejecting a certain conception of representation. In that context, Brandom attributes to Hegel a distinction between what things are for consciousness (an appearance, a way consciousness takes things to be) and what they are in themselves (the reality of which the appearance is an appearance). And it is that distinction that he thinks Hegel goes on to exploit in his account of the transitions between shapes. But being for consciousness in Hegel’s distinction is not a way consciousness takes things to be.13 The being of its object for a shape of consciousness is the relation to it that it takes to constitute the object’s being known by it. And what to it is the being in itself of its object, its conception of its object’s being in itself, is not a standard for assessing the truth of judgments at the supposed ground level. The only judgment that is relevantly up for assessment is the judgment that the object’s being for a shape of consciousness constitutes the object’s being known by it.14 Brandom takes pride in appreciating the significance of Hegel’s uses of the dative case, an example of which is “to it [consciousness]” in the passage I quoted from §84. What is something to consciousness, on Brandom’s account, is the distinction he imports, between what things are for consciousness and what things are in themselves. On his account, for that distinction to be something to consciousness is for consciousness to acknowledge it in practice, in experience as Brandom understands it, in particular in experience of error. Brandom’s subject acknowledges the distinction in practice when she acts on the realization that judging that the stick is straight—that that is how the stick is in itself—makes it impermissible for her to go on endorsing the previous appearance that it is bent. This does not fit what Hegel says. At least primarily, Hegel uses the dative on the initself side of his distinction.15 His point in speaking of what to consciousness is the being in itself of its object is that the in-itself side of his distinction is how consciousness conceives the being in itself of its object, not what the object actually is; so that, as he emphasizes, the standard by which a shape of consciousness tests itself is internal to its self-understanding. The being of its object for a shape of consciousness is also, of course, part of its self-understanding, but there is not the same point in insisting on that.

XI In line with his idea that the distinction between being for consciousness and being in itself encapsulates a semantic task Hegel is setting himself, Brandom says Hegel is

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asking what it is for something to be something for consciousness; the idea of being for consciousness is “not one of his primitives” (ST, p. 73). But in §82, after one of his expositions of the distinction, Hegel says: What might properly reside in these determinations is of no further concern for us here; for since our object is knowing as it makes its appearance, its determinations are also taken up to begin with as they immediately present themselves; and the way they have been grasped is indeed the way they present themselves. “These determinations” are the two aspects of the idea of an object of consciousness. And here Hegel says, in effect, that they do not need elucidation. They are primitives, not just for Hegel but for any self-conscious subject. The distinction does not present Hegel with a task of elucidating its sides, and thereby elucidating the idea of representation. He takes the distinction as he explains it, which is not how Brandom characterizes it, for granted, and he puts it to use in his account of how one shape of consciousness will go under and be replaced by another.

XII In §87 Hegel harks back to §79, where he said that a successor shape is what results when its predecessor is not merely removed from the scene, but determinately negated. It is now clearer what that meant; in §85 and §86 he has explained how a successor shape is determined by the demise of its predecessor. Brandom thinks what Hegel means by “determinate negation” is material incompatibility, which is a fundamental element in the inferentially significant relations that figure in the account of conceptual content he attributes to Hegel. This gloss on determinate negation ensures that Brandom misses Hegel’s point in §87. There are typically many things that are materially incompatible with something. If all we can say about a transition is that its end point is materially incompatible with its starting point, we have not provided for the starting point to be negated in a way that determines the end point. But Hegel’s thought is that his account of how a successor shape emerges from the failure of its predecessor reveals a necessity in the transitions from one shape to the next. The negating of the previous shape determines what comes on the scene to replace the shape that is negated. Hegel says (§88): “Through this necessity this path to science is itself already science, and according to its content it is thus the science of the experience of consciousness.” This is his response to the appearance he acknowledged earlier (§77), that a description of a succession of shapes that are mere appearances of knowing consciousness cannot itself be science, even if it culminates in science. Here we see that by virtue of the necessity in the transitions from one shape to the next, “the path of the soul as it journeys through the series of its shapes” is already science: the science of the experience of consciousness. Brandom thinks the experience of consciousness is activity at the ground level, and the science of the experience of consciousness is a systematic metalevel description of

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that ground-level activity. But there is only one level. What takes place there is a succession of experiences in Hegel’s sense. Each experience reveals that a shape is not the knowing consciousness it takes itself to be, and determines the character of the next shape, in a progress towards genuine knowing that, once started, goes on inexorably until it reaches genuine knowing. The succession of shapes is not a metalevel for something else. It is, in its own right, Hegel’s execution of a stunningly original project, in which we are to come to understand what knowing is by engaging in it.

Notes 1 He mentions them at ST, p. 53, n. 10. 2 Brandom connects his take on Kant’s point with Geach 1960. But Geach’s focus is not the unasserted character of constituent clauses (he takes that for granted), but the requirement that they must be understood to have the same content when unasserted as they would have if asserted. 3 Nor would anyone else, before or after Kant, who gave the matter a moment’s thought. Brandom attributes to Kant an innovative conception of human mindedness as normatively situated. But to the extent to which this depends on a supposed novelty in what he says Kant thinks about judgment, it is unwarranted. What is novel in Kant is quite different. I hope to write about this elsewhere. 4 He adds: “This is what is intended by the copula ‘is’.” The copula is not restricted to propositions that are affirmed. There is no sign of a concern to attribute a semantic significance to the idea of committing oneself to the truth of a thought. 5 Whether the judgment is endorsed or not. The question about unity arises not only about thoughts one endorses, but equally about the constituent clauses of a compound judgment. 6 Brandom acknowledges, in a way, that Kant is concerned with the unity of the proposition, the unity of the content of a judgment. But he claims that for Kant propositional unity “can be […] understood in terms of the unity that defines the rational norms that must govern what one does in order for such doings to count as judgings having contents exhibiting the unity characteristic of the propositional” (ST, p. 73). Bizarrely, he cites, as if it supported this claim, A79/B104–5, where Kant connects the unity of a judgment with the unity of an intuition (ST, p. 73, n. 5). 7 Brandom’s quotations from the Introduction come from Dove (Hegel 1970), not, as elsewhere, from Miller (PG/M). 8 My translation, as are all translations henceforth. (I borrow, of course, from others’ versions.) I have tried to keep close to Hegel’s own words, and I have not strained to make my renderings read smoothly in English. I cite by Miller’s paragraph numbers. 9 Dove mistranslates “die Sache selbst” as “the real subject matter”; Miller, similarly, has “its proper subject-matter.” Hegel’s point is that knowing is not a subject matter for prior philosophical reflection, but the proper task of philosophy. We will come to understand what knowing is by engaging in it. 10 This is the feature of Kant’s conception of the understanding (Verstand) that matters for how Hegel appropriates Kant’s distinction between Verstand and Vernunft. Kant holds that we can know only objects supplied to Verstand from outside itself; Vernunft is subject to no such restriction, but it is not available to us as a power of knowledge. For Hegel, Vernunft is the only genuine power of knowledge, and contrary to Kant it is available to us as a power of knowledge, not just as a power of thought. Contrast Brandom’s idea that the distinction as Hegel uses it is between semantic meta-metaconcepts. That has no better justification than the idea that Hegel follows Kant in a concern with semantic metaconcepts. 11 Hegel begins on the double character of the idea of an object of consciousness in §80, where, in contrasting (bearers of) consciousness with what is restricted to a natural life, he says that to consciousness the beyond is also posited. Here “beyond” expresses the

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12

13

14 15

same idea as “outside this relation,” in the passages I have quoted from §82 and §84. I discuss §80 in McDowell 2018. Contrast Brandom’s ground level, where there is recollection throughout the process of experience, providing a retrospective view of the process in which it is one of discovering the contents of concepts, in contrast with the prospective view in which it is one of determining them (ST, pp. 17f.). Here Brandom purports to use, in describing the ground level, an apparatus from Hegel’s account of the supposed metalevel. But recollection figures quite differently in Hegel’s account of the succession of shapes. The recollective conception of rationality that Brandom attributes to Hegel is a wild extrapolation from the role Hegel gives to recollection in his account of the self-understanding of consciousness only in its final shape. An interpretation of being for consciousness in terms of content that is already intelligible as how a subject takes things to be, but that still needs to have a representational dimension provided for it, does not fit Hegel’s explanation of the transitions. I do not believe Brandom has ever given a satisfactory explanation of how there might be an understanding of an expressive dimension of conceptual content, an account of the idea of what someone thinks, that still leaves a task of explaining a representational dimension, giving an account of the idea that it is of something in particular that she thinks whatever she thinks. The idea of such a task is an idiosyncrasy of Brandom’s own. I do not believe there is anything to be said for importing it into Hegel. Sense Certainty is not even in a position to make what Brandom conceives as ground-level judgments. All Sense Certainty can say about what it supposedly knows is that it is (§91). In one place (§85), the dative may be meant to include both sides of the distinction; Hegel says: “to it [consciousness] something is the in-itself, but another moment is the knowing, or the being of the object for consciousness.” But even here it is not compulsory to suppose the scope of “to it” includes the “but …” clause.

References Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2013) Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Geach, Peter (1960) “Ascriptivism,” Philosophical Review 69/2, pp. 221–225. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1970) “Introduction,” translated by K. R. Dove, in M. Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row), pp. 7–26. Kant, Immanuel (1929) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan). McDowell, John (2018) “What Is the Phenomenology About?” in F. Sanguinetti and A. J. Abath (eds.), McDowell and Hegel: Perceptual Experience, Thought and Action (Basel: Springer), pp. 29–40.

4 THE POSSIBILITY OF A SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION OF HEGEL’S CONCEPTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS Paul Redding

In the early twentieth century, Bertrand Russell used results from the logical revolution in which he played a major role to campaign against Hegel’s philosophy. In this Russell was successful: Hegel had been a real presence in English-speaking philosophy in the late nineteenth century, but within the new “analytic” philosophy that Russell helped to create, Hegel would largely be persona non grata. This outcome was occasionally challenged, and such challenges have indeed increased in recent decades. Nobody, however, has challenged the analytic dismissal of Hegel with the ambition and detail that is to be found in Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, we might see his long-awaited A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology as a belated reply to Russell from within an approach that remains true to the spirit of analytic philosophy. As such it sets new standards for any subsequent comprehensive work that purports to interpret and evaluate Hegel’s great text, but, at the same time, raises questions about how such work in the history of philosophy is best to proceed. Very crudely, it could be said that historical work in philosophy must choose a path that negotiates challenges coming from the different fronts of history and philosophy. From the perspective of the historian-philosopher, the main error to be avoided will be the anachronistic interpretation of philosopher A’s views in terms of conceptual resources that had been unavailable to A. In contrast, done in a predominantly philosophical spirit, the philosopher-historian will be more interested in what present philosophy can learn from A, and so will be more concerned with interpreting and evaluating A’s claims in terms of criteria that she broadly shares with her contemporaries. Brandom’s approach to Hegel is surely that of the latter, and his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology proceeds within the framework of semantic concerns that have been influential within analytic philosophy since its “linguistic turn.” While there in fact had been considerable discussion of language and its relation to thought in German philosophical circles in the 1790s (Redding 2016), it is far from

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clear that contemporary semantic issues—issues to do with linguistic meaning in the way dealt with in analytic philosophy—were central to philosophy as Hegel understood it. But even if one were to be open to an approach to Hegel based on the not implausible idea, say, that in fact broadly similarly pragmatist attitudes to language found in analytic philosophers such as Wittgenstein or Sellars had been foreshadowed in Hegel’s work, alarms for the historian-philosopher might be raised by a quip made by Brandom in relation to his own earlier work in semantics. “Experience,” Brandom declared, “is not one of my words” (AR, p. 24, n. 7). Later, Brandom was to affirm the Rortarian provenance of this quip: “I have by and large followed my teacher [Richard Rorty] in rejecting the notion of experience as too burdened by noxious baggage—in particular, by the myth of the given—to be worth trying to recruit for serious explanatory and expressive work in philosophy” (Brandom 2013, p. 91). In the 1960s, Rorty had embraced a radically eliminativist account of experiential talk (Rorty 2014, chs. 3–5), which had developed into his thoroughgoing critique of the early modern idea of the mind’s “mirroring” of the world in conscious experience (Rorty 1979). One might suspect that an entirely experience-free, Rorty–Brandom-style semantics could be problematic for the project of a “phenomenology.” Introduced in the mid-eighteenth century by Johann Heinrich Lambert to designate a systematic study of appearance (Lambert 1764, p. 3), “phenomenology,” being a study of effectively what Kant would later call “phenomena,”1 can seem irreducibly experiential, but Brandom has since qualified his earlier dismissive attitude towards experience (for example PP, p. 7). Thus, in A Spirit of Trust, he attributes to Hegel a processual notion of experience qua “Erfahrung”—a non-Cartesian conception of how mind can come to correct the criteria it applies in making judgments—and distinguishes this from that of the seemingly discardable “Erlebnis” (ST, p. 123), which he associates with Hegel’s notion of sense certainty, a conception of an immediate object of experience with which the Phenomenology starts but which will be quickly negated—“aufgehoben.” But we might question the degree to which Hegel’s “Erfahrung” can be so easily separated from the subjective connotations of “Erlebnis.” In the Phenomenology, it certainly seems as if Hegel appeals to phenomenal aspects of consciousness—the purported “what it is like” of conscious experience, or those aspects of experience that are “lived through” in some “first-person” sense of the term.2 Moreover, if “sense certainty” is aufgehoben, given Hegel’s distinctive use of this concept, does this not imply that it must be somehow retained in some “negated” form in the richer conceptions of experience that develop from it, such as experience as Erfahrung in Brandom’s sense? “Experience” in the sense of first-person lived experience may not be one of Brandom’s words, but can the same be said for Hegel? In this chapter, I will examine Brandom’s reading of the Consciousness chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology against the background of this question, but first want to sketch a prima facie case for the appropriateness of a broadly “pragmatist semantic” reading of the Phenomenology,3 pointing to those elements of Hegel’s Consciousness and Self-Consciousness chapters that might generally support as well as benefit from such an approach. Following that, I will return to some of the detail of Brandom’s reconstruction of what Hegel is doing in these chapters from the point of view of

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his capacity to capture the full weight of the issues that Hegel packs into “consciousness.” There are many elements of Brandom’s interpretation that suggest the retention of a role for Erlebnisse and these, I suggest, point in the direction of an understanding of Hegel that is contrary to Brandom’s most general interpretation of Hegel’s idealism as a form of “conceptual realism” or “objective idealism.”

I. A prima facie case for Brandom’s pragmatist semantic interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit The Consciousness chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit commence in a way that is relatively familiar from the perspective of modern philosophy—a consideration of the contents of consciousness from an epistemological point of view. An opening move effectively asks, “Of what can one be certain?” and the first three chapters track a series of objects that provide ultimately unsuccessful answers. In Chapter 1, Sense Certainty; or the “This” and Meaning Something,4 atomic sense contents presented immediately to the mind are suggested, and Hegel’s account of the problems encountered there seems to anticipate Wilfrid Sellars’ much-discussed mid-twentieth-century critique of the “Myth of the Given” (Sellars 1997; ST, p. 114).5 This initial “shape [Gestalt] of consciousness,” sense certainty, cannot live up to its promise and collapses to be replaced by another shape, perception, and, following a similar story for it, finally by a third, called “the understanding.” By the time of this last form of consciousness, we are presented with one in which the mind actively posits rather than passively receives contents—the model being that of the positing of something non-perceived, such as underlying forces, meant to function in the explanation of perceived events. With such an active role for the positing subject of consciousness having come to the fore, Hegel’s focus will shift in Chapter 4 to self-consciousness. In the course of a consideration of “self-consciousness,”6 there now emerges the idea of the necessity of intersubjective conditions for any adequate form of this capacity: “Self-consciousness,” we are told, “is in and for itself while and as a result of its being in and for itself for an other; i.e., it is only as a recognized being [als ein Anerkanntes]” (PG/P, §178). Hegel exemplifies this condition with a scenario that is perhaps the most well-known from the Phenomenology, an account in which a “struggle for recognition” becomes resolved into a relatively stable normative form of intersubjective life in which agents act out the conceptually linked roles of master and slave. This part of Hegel’s story seems strongly to suggest a central role for language among the conditions for this primitive form of social existence, and so, among the conditions of self-consciousness, and thereby, of consciousness. Thus, it might be thought that the master–slave form of social life will require at least the capacity for the master to convey the particular contents of his will to his slave in a way that carries an effective force. Thereby a picture with features of Wittgenstein’s well-known “builders’ language game” from the Philosophical Investigations might come to mind (Wittgenstein 1953, §§2–21), a picture which blends “language game” and “form of life.” Hegel implies that the spiritual (geistig) realm is itself made up from such mutually recognitive acts, and also describes language as the determinate being (Dasein) of spirit (Geist) and as “self-

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consciousness existing for others” (PG/P, §652), suggesting a tight nexus between the notions of consciousness, self-consciousness, recognition, and linguistically mediated forms of intersubjectivity. Thus an “externalist” approach to mental content seems to emerge, and we leave “the colorful semblance of the this-worldly sensuous” of Cartesian innerness and step into “the spiritual daylight of the present” (PG/P, §177). In fact, with a focus on “recognition” or “acknowledgement” (Anerkennung) a role for language seems to go even deeper than that suggested by Wittgenstein’s particular way out of Cartesian subjectivity, with its potentially behaviorist interpretation, as the reciprocity required for Anerkennung seems to point to language games that go well beyond any type of simple builder’s language model. A recognitive account of the dynamics of linguistic interaction suggests a conception of a speech act meant to bring about its effect in virtue of the recipient’s recognition of the speaker’s expressed intention. Such an utterance is not to have a simple effect as in, say, a conditioned response. Rather, the suggestion seems to be that a hearer must recognize the speaker’s intention in order to act appropriately, and to recognize the speaker as having the status or authority required to utter such response-demanding sentences. Moreover, this relationship seems to presuppose a degree of reciprocity in as much as the speaker, even qua master of the master–slave relation, must implicitly recognize his interlocutor as a creature capable of recognizing the intention expressed in so speaking. Even the slave is implicitly recognized as having the status as a cognitive “subject,” and not simply that of a utilizable piece of nature—an object. In Hegel’s account, the overt non-reciprocity of the master–slave relation thereby demonstrates its contradictoriness as a recognitive relation. Developed along these lines, the reciprocity presupposed might again suggest the figure of Sellars, this time in relation to the type of rational language games he explored in the 1940s and 1950s, in which the authority of a content communicated by a speaker in speaking is conceived as always potentially open to the asking for reasons for its acceptance by the interlocutor. Rorty’s twist on this had been to link this story to a quasi-Romantic “poets-as-legislators” account of social institutions, and see Hegel’s life-and-death struggle as over the power to legislate what are to count as reasons.7 Brandom’s “inferentialist semantics” developed in Making It Explicit, in which the meaning of utterances are freed from being based on some notion of the experience expressed in them by being made a function of the implicational relations within which they stand, might be read as an attempt to develop Rorty’s synthesis of Sellars and Hegel, but in ways such as to halt the relativist and historicist implications of Rorty’s version. Elsewhere (Redding 2015) I have argued that while Hegel might indeed be described as having an “inferentialist semantics” along broadly Brandomian lines, his was a weaker version than Brandom’s own, and without Brandom’s strong dismissal of the relevance of conscious experience. While for Brandom, the inferential relations among utterances constitute not only a necessary, but also a sufficient condition of their meaningfulness, in the weaker version, the inferential potential of sentences plays a necessary but insufficient role for the meaningfulness of the words constituting them. This weaker version would allow experience as traditionally conceived to also play a necessary role in semantics, while not in a way that is found in the traditional

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explanations as the simple source of the content of linguistic representation. Thus, in the context of the Consciousness chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology in particular, we might think of weak inferentialism as better fitting the sense in which earlier shapes of consciousness, starting with sense certainty, are meant to be “aufgehoben”—negated and yet preserved—by their successors. Conscious experience still plays an essential semantic role, but not the role against which Brandom is fighting, and against which his own response constitutes an overreaction. With this suggestion in mind, in the following sections I turn to Brandom’s presentation of Hegel’s Consciousness chapters.

II. Brandom on Hegel on Sense Certainty In A Spirit of Trust, Chapter 4, Brandom takes the sensory intuitions of Kant’s critical philosophy as exemplifying what Hegel means by the objects of sense certainty, enabling him to read Hegel as unpacking Kant’s “concept–intuition” distinction along three different dimensions that are conflated in Kant’s account. In earlier chapters, Brandom had read Hegel in the Phenomenology’s Introduction as laying down the “Genuine Knowledge Condition,” a “basic epistemological criterion of adequacy” that “any understanding of the processes and practices that institute cognitive relations between minds and the world they know must make it intelligible that if everything goes well, the result is genuine knowledge of how things really are” (ST, p. 107). Kant had been unable to meet this criterion, and part of the problem was his distinction between intuitions, conscious representations that are meant to be both “immediate” and “singular,” and concepts, representations that are, in contrast, “mediated” and “general.” Brandom reminds us that, unlike typical proponents of “sense certainty,” Kant had himself not thought of the reception of sensory intuitions as sufficient for knowledge, as “intuitions without concepts are blind” (ST, p. 111; Kant 1998, A51/ B75). Despite this, a Kantian sensory intuition does seem in many ways to fit the picture of the kind of entity the sense-certaintist needs. Brandom reads Hegel as unpacking Kant’s complex notion of intuition along three orthogonal axes. Read along the first, the immediacy of sensory intuition is understood in terms of the passivity of its reception—its “non-inferential provenance.” This is just what recommends such a conception to the sense-certaintist, as here the knower achieves this state not by or in any act of reasoning, and “where consciousness does not act, it cannot err” (ST, p. 134). But an important lesson of the Sense Certainty chapter for Brandom is that this idea of immediacy as non-inferential provenance should not be confused, as it had been by Kant, with the idea of the non-conceptuality of the content itself. When investigated along this second dimension, the relevant distinction between intuitions and concepts is modeled by the distinction between singular terms, representing particulars, and general predicates. Here the linguistic dimensions of Brandom’s model have become explicit, and this continues into the third axis of the distinction. While earlier analytic philosophers, including Sellars, had explored various ambiguities of Kant’s intuition–concept distinction, with this third dimension Brandom opens up the topic in importantly new ways. Here in particular, Hegel seemed to exploit a linguistic analogy by employing the first-person pronoun and

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the demonstrative to make his relevant point. “For its part, consciousness only is in this certainty as the pure I, or, within that certainty, the I is only as a pure This, and the object likewise is only a pure This” (PG/P, §91). In the early modern period, it seems to have been assumed that the “I” functions as a type of namelike singular term with which a subject could refer to herself qua thinker. This can be seen clearly, for example, in the Port Royal Logic where Arnauld and Nicole group proper nouns such as “Socrates,” “Rome,” and “Bucephalus” and “the idea each person has of himself” as singular designations (Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 39). But by effectively distinguishing indexicals, such as “I” and “this,” from singular terms, Hegel seems to break with such Cartesian assumptions. For Hegel, “I” does not function as a proper name like, say, “Hegel,” but as what Brandom describes as an “unrepeatable episode tokening” of a “repeatable episode type” (ST, p. 114). Thus, when Hegel, talking to Schelling, says “I haven’t seen Hölderlin for some time,” with his tokening of the type “I” he refers to himself, but when Schelling repeats the same type in replying “Neither have I,” with his tokening of the same type he refers to himself. In contrast, tokenings of names do not have that type of indexicality or context-sensitivity. This same analysis applies to demonstratives, such that what is picked out by a tokening of the type “this” will vary from context to context: the demonstrative is not, as Russell had assumed in his account of “knowledge by acquaintance,” a type of proper name. To treat such elements as unrepeatable episode tokenings that “might refer to something different” on different occasions of use is to point to their sensitivity to context. In contrast, “cotypical tokenings […] are construed as coreferring (such as ‘tree’ and ‘night’)” (ST, p. 115). Distinguishing between intuitions as modeled on singular terms on the one hand (as in Kant) and on unrepeatable episode tokenings on the other (as Hegel does) is central to a lesson that, Brandom thinks, we “by and large still need to learn from Hegel” (ST, 125). There will be many lines of thought running from this point through Hegel’s work, but for Brandom a key one is that with these distinctions Hegel helps us (once we have seen through the errors of sense certainty) to grasp the actual cognitive contributions of unrepeatable episode tokenings. This path will take us deeper into linguistic territory of the solution to the problem of demonstratives that Brandom had earlier offered in Making It Explicit. “Demonstratives have the potential to make a cognitive difference, to do some cognitive work, only insofar as they can be picked up by other expressions, typically pronouns, which do not function demonstratively. Deixis presupposes anaphora” (ST, 125). While the act (tokening) of uttering a demonstrative is unrepeatable, the act’s content must in some way be repeatable, and it is so in the sense of its cognitive significance being inherited by subsequent acts. Such considerations “will rule out thinking of the content as immediate in the sense of being unrepeatable in the way the uniquely occurring act (the bearer of the content) is” (ST, p. 125). The capacity for an anaphoric pronoun to inherit the content of an earlier demonstrative sets up a temporal structure of “recollective repeatability,” the exemplar of which is to be found in Hegel’s discussion of “the now” in paragraphs 95–107 of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter 1. By bringing linguistic processes of the use of demonstratives and deixis to bear on the notion of “recollection,”

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Brandom is clearly moving to an explicitly linguistic context, a notion that is usually given a primarily psychological connotation: we should no longer think, in the style of the Myth of the Given, of the meaning expressed by “this” as that which is immediately present to the consciousness of the person uttering it. Many important and difficult issues surface here, but I will focus on the way that, on Brandom’s interpretation, Hegel’s discussion of “the now” in the Sense Certainty chapter introduces a distinction that, when spelled out, will bring about a new conception of the object which, according to the ambitions of “consciousness,” becomes a new privileged representation that is explored in Chapter 2, Perception.

III. Brandom on Hegel on Perception The attitude of “Perception” (Wahrnehmung) emerges out of the rubble of “Sense Certainty.” In Brandom’s reconstruction, Hegel’s disambiguation of Kant’s notion of sensory intuition had shown that Kant’s notion rested on a conflation of different senses of “immediacy,” but the unpacking of the relevant distinctions in turn supplies the raw materials out of which a new conception of the type of object satisfying the demands of consciousness emerges. The implicit metaphysics of this new attitude is (lower-case) “aristotelian,” in that the new object is an “object with many properties,” but as yet not understood as an instance of a kind. The articulation of this object is to be understood in terms of the treatment of negation that has emerged out of the dialectic of sense certainty. The atomic self-contained phenomenal contents of sense certainty were understood as “features,” merely different from each other and located in an object considered as an “also,” but an important difference between ways that such features might differ among themselves had emerged in that chapter from a consideration of “the now.” There, Hegel’s discussion of the indexical “now” had effectively started with the question “What is the Now?,” to which an answer had been suggested, “The ‘now’ is the night.” However, “[i]n order to put the truth of this sense certainty to the test, a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth […] and if now, this midday, we look at this truth which has been written down, we will have to say that it has become rather stale” (PG/P, §95). Reflection on this example leads to the realization that not only are the significances of the designations “day” and “night” different, they are opposed. Some different features that we might place together in a judgment, such as day and raining, are compatible, but others, such as day and night are not. The relata of the first difference are indifferent to each other, while those of the second mutually exclude each other. With this, Hegel’s distinctive idea of “determinate negation” comes on the scene, and the metadifference between these two sorts of difference (mere difference and excluding difference) allows a reconceptualization of the nature of the object of consciousness. When individual sense contents are thought of as indifferently related sensory features placed in the world, the object bearing them is regarded as a mere bundle, the “also” of a judgment such that something is red, also square, also heavy, and so on.8 But when exclusive difference is added, the thing’s redness is seen as excluding

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its blueness, its squareness as excluding its roundness. Here, the excluding oneness of the object that admits only compatible properties comes into focus—a plurality of properties inheres in a single substrate. Brandom focuses on two important and related themes introduced in the Perception chapter as consequences of the emergence of this metadifference, and that will be developed in the following chapter on Force and the Understanding. These are the themes of modality and consequence. First, the exclusion involved in, say, the way something’s being circular excludes its being rectangular is modally robust. To know that a is circular is to know more than the fact that it isn’t rectangular: if it is circular it cannot be rectangular. In this way, modal relations produce patterns of inference: if everything materially incompatible with a feature B (being colored, say) is also materially incompatible with another feature A (being red, say), then B can be materially inferred from A. The issues of modality and consequence that emerge from the unpacking of the fine-grained structure of the object of perception function in this chapter in a way analogous to that of the metadistinction between indifferent and exclusive difference that emerged in the chapter on sense certainty: they work to undermine the overt assumption with which this attitude was being aligned and to provide the resources for the reconstruction of the object of consciousness that takes place in the next chapter. It had been thought that the object with properties was still wholly given in perception as a discrete entity, much like the earlier object of sense certainty, only more complex. In truth, however, the object of perception is not perceived—it is the properties of this object that are considered as perceived. The object is grasped as the underlying imperceptible unity that cannot be comprehended in isolation from the types of exclusions and inferences it enters into. This theme of the role of a non-perceived explanatory posit will be elaborated in the following chapter, Force and Understanding. This basically goes along the path as described above in the preliminary sketch of the three shapes of consciousness, with the idea of a new source of certainty for consciousness arising, a source of certainty that is arrived at in exclusively inferential ways. That is, the true object of consciousness is now grasped in a way that is the mirror image of the originating sense certainty: rather than as something as sensuously given, it is the non-sensuously posited object invoked in explanation of which consciousness can be certain—an object exemplified in this chapter by the notion of a force. While there is much more that Brandom will develop in the context of these chapters than can be sketched here, I want to return to a point signaled above—his way of characterizing the implicit metaphysics of the objects of the two different intentional attitudes, Sense Certainty and Perception, discussed in the first two Consciousness chapters.

IV. The logic and metaphysics of the intentional attitudes of Sense Certainty and Perception By the end of Brandom’s presentation of the Consciousness chapters, one might be puzzled by a number of its features. Consider, for example, his account of the (lower-case) “aristotelian” metaphysics of the object of perception that emerged

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from the explication of what had been implicit in the earlier “Kantian” object of sense certainty. In contrast to the indifferent “features” or “(ur)properties” of sense certainty, in Perception, he says, Hegel’s account is “on its way to the full-blown logical conception of particulars exhibiting universals” (ST, p. 153). But it is only “on its way,” as perceptual objects involved here are “aristotelian,” not “Aristotelian.” That is, there is as yet no distinction between two types of predicates, sortals and the “mere characterizing predicates,” that is needed for the Aristotelian idea of individual substances as instances of kinds (ST, p. 145). Nevertheless, Brandom does typically refer to the objects of perception as “particulars exhibiting universals,” and, with this, blurs the complexity of Hegel’s presentation. In short, the idea that the objects of the Perception chapter are conceived as “particulars exhibiting universals” is problematic, at least in the sense that Brandom seems to presuppose with these terms—that is, the idea of individual things as designated by singular terms, able to exhibit conceptually conceived universals. Here Brandom’s typically “Anglophone” use of the term “particular” obscures Hegel’s categorical distinctions between the determinations of singularity (Einzelheit) and particularity (Besonderheit) that are relevant to understanding the series of objects as we move through the Consciousness chapters. To appreciate Hegel’s approach, we must look to the explicit account of these categorical distinctions he gives in the Subjective Logic of the Science of Logic. Furthermore, this in turn requires some understanding of the features of the logic taught at the Tübinger Stift when Hegel was a student there and that are clearly reflected in his work, the logic of Gottfried Ploucquet. It is often assumed that Hegel simply accepted a version of the Aristotelian syllogistic, but while the overall framework of the logic taught at Tübingen was Aristotelian, it had been transformed in important ways by Ploucquet (Ploucquet 2006; Pozzo 2016), a follower of Leibniz and an important formal logician in his own right (Venn 1881, p. xxxvi). Ploucquet had adopted Leibniz’s nominalist-influenced modifications of the traditional syllogistic, most significantly the incorporation of singular judgments, such as “Socrates is sitting,” into a system that had traditionally only applied to general judgments, such as “All Athenians are mortal” or “Some Athenians are philosophers.” This innovation is reflected in the role given to “singularity” in Hegel’s Subjective Logic (SL, pp. 546–549). This was a significant innovation. The incorporation of singular judgments had first been attempted in the tenth and eleventh centuries by treating singular judgments as universal judgments,9 and this approach had also been given an ontological interpretation with the idea of concrete singular essences—individuals being treated ontologically as well as logically as universals (Tarlazzi 2017). That is, individuals came to be thought of as manifesting their individual essences, rather than merely the essence of their kinds. Later, this notion, expressed in Hegel’s idea of concrete universals, can be found in his treatment of the logical structure of immediate positive “judgments of determinate existence” about individual things in which the subject term of a judgment like “the rose is red,” said of a specific rose, is able to have the logical determination of universality (SL, p. 560). However, Leibniz had also added a second way of incorporating judgments about individuals into syllogisms, by using the model of particular

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judgments. Just as one says, “Some Athenians are philosophers,” one can say, about Socrates, for example, “Some Athenian is a philosopher,” providing an indefinite judgment about this concrete person, and providing a qualitative sense to the otherwise quantitative notion of “particularity.” Ploucquet’s logic text taught at Tübingen presented this distinction as between “exclusive” (definite) and “comprehensive” (indefinite) forms of particularity (Ploucquet 2006, §§14f.), a distinction Hegel freely applies in various places in the Science of Logic.10 Leibniz had allowed these two forms of reference to be freely interchanged, and this provided Hegel with the means for redetermining the logical form of any given sentence or Satz.11 Hegel captured the logical forms of different judgment types in terms of the way both subject and predicate terms expressed one of the three conceptual determinations of “singularity,” “particularity,” and “universality”, resulting in forms such as “the particular is the universal” (SL, p. 534), “the singular is particular” (p. 566), “the singular is universal” (p. 558), and, a form prohibited in Aristotle’s logic, “the universal is singular” (p. 559).12 These forms underlie the variety of judgment types generated in Hegel’s account of judgment in the Subjective Logic. Running through Hegel’s attempt to generate in a systematic way the various forms of judgment and inference in the Subjective Logic is a recurring fundamental distinction between two different understandings of the predicative relation: predication as the inherence of the predicate in the subject characteristic of de re judgments and as the subsumption of the subject by the predicate characteristic of de dicto judgments. There is no suggestion that either type of predication can be reduced to the other, although there is the suggestion that judgments of either form can be transformed into the other. Thus a judgment of inherence can be transformed into a judgment of subsumption, and vice versa, and this alternation occurs in cycles, such that each cycle will start with a de re form of judgment with inherence predication, which will be transformed into a de dicto form with subsumptive predication, which in turn is transformed back into a new de re form, with a more complex “res” as subject.13 Again, the characteristic figure of Aufhebung is recognizable here—aspects of earlier opposed “inherence” and “subsumption” judgment forms becoming internally retained and related within more complex judgments which reveal the “truth” of the judgments that preceded them. The final product of this series of cycles, the “judgment of the concept,” will be shown to be an implicit syllogism, in which the three forms of conceptual determination, singularity, particularity, and universality, are explicitly related in ways they cannot be in simpler subject–predicate judgment structures. Predication as inherence is exemplified in the first judgment form Hegel treats—the judgment of determinate being (Das Urteil des Daseins), by which he clearly has in mind a type of immediate perceptually based de re judgment about some specific object, his examples including “the rose is red” and “the rose is fragrant” (SL, pp. 558f.). Predication as subsumption by contrast is found in the succeeding judgment of reflection that has a more properly propositional (de dicto) content. In this first cycle, the initial judgment of determinate existence evolves through a string of subforms, starting with the “positive judgment” which shows the surprising logical structure of having a universal subject term and a singular predicate term (SL, p. 560), a structure that will starkly contrast

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this judgment form from the opposed subsumptive judgments of reflection, which will show the more conventional singular subject and general “subsuming” predicate. This first universal subject–singular predicate structure is clearly relevant to the idea of the judgment expressing some immediate sensuous content, as with the idea of the singularity of the predicate, such as “red” in “the rose is red.”14 Hegel clearly intends that the predicate acts in a quasi-namelike manner to pick out the specific redness “inhering” in a specific rose—we might say, this red as this specific rose’s way of being red.15 If thought of as a name, the singular predicate’s referent would be something like an individual “feature,” an individual property instance or “trope,” colocated with others in an “also.” But if this universal subject is as yet at most an “also,” it is soon shown to be an “excluding one”—a proper substrate excluding the properties contrary to those inhering in it. Negation, as Brandom suggests, plays the key role here, and negation will transform the determinacy of the predicate term, but this makes Hegel’s story of the transition of the object of sense certainty to that of perception subtly different to Brandom’s own account. This starting positive judgment “is not true but has its truth in the negative judgment” (SL, p. 562), and the “exclusionary” negation utilized in the negative judgment introduces a new degree of logical complexity. When one says, for example, “the rose is not red,” negation, Hegel tells us, will only be taken as applying to the determinateness of the predicate: in saying that the rose is not red one does not imply that the rose is thereby not colored. Negation being restricted to the determinacy of the predicate, “it is […] assumed that [the rose] has a color, though another color” (SL, p. 565).16 But negation here has resulted in a less determinate judgment because the determinacy of the predicate has been transformed. In the negation, the rose is assumed to be some particular non-red color—say, yellow, or pink, or some other color—but all that is said of it is that it is “not red.” Thus, while the color of the rose had first been determined qua singularity, this red, it is now only determined as some non-red that Hegel classifies qualitatively as a particular (SL, p. 563). But I take it that the implicit idea here is that one would only deny that, say, the rose was red with this type of negation if one had reason to believe that it was some specific non-red color—that one’s experience had revealed it to be yellow, say. In this sense, saying that the rose is non-red implies the existence of a more specific judgment from which the less definite judgment can be inferred. The first negation, Hegel says, has produced a judgment that, as “the positive expression of the negative judgment” (SL, p. 563), still says something positive but less determinate about the rose by using a particular predicate in place of the original singular one. Now, however, a second negation produces an even more abstract judgment as its output, as negation is now applied in an external fashion to the entirety of the negated judgment, not just its predicate, effectively to produce a judgment with the form “it is not the case that the rose is not red.”17 In fact the doubly negated judgment that results from the second negation, the “infinite” (or “indefinite”) judgment, has a structure familiar to modern readers as that form often taken to be the “true” logical structure underlying all empirical judgments, as it is a judgment with properly propositional content whose truth or falsity relies on no contextual features, such as the presence of the rose, required for talking about “this red.” Hegel does not regard this output of

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double negation as a proper judgment at all, it is a merely transitional “Satz” that allows the original judgment of inherence to be translated into a judgment of subsumptive predication—here, the de dicto “judgment of reflection”—and this judgment form carries the consequences of the indeterminacy of the pseudo-judgment (the infinite judgment) that gave rise to it. In the context of the Consciousness chapters of the Phenomenology, it seems clear enough that the “positive judgment of determinate existence” can be taken as the primitive judgment form coinciding with the “object” of sense certainty, but note that Hegel’s conception of what is presented to consciousness is treated as a singular predicate—a concept in the determination of singularity—a logical form not found in Brandom’s more Fregean typology, where singular terms pick out objects and stand opposed to concepts that are general. We can also think of the object of perception as coinciding with the form of judgment that results from the first negation— determinate predicate-term negation. This is the object in which what is now conceived as a property (and not mere “feature”) inheres, and it is the object that excludes contrary properties. An object uniformly red can be round or square, but it cannot be simultaneously uniformly blue and green. Brandom refers to such an object as a “particular,” in the sense of an object that can be picked out by a singular term, and describes it as “exhibiting” a universal, and this is, he thinks, at the heart of Hegel’s disambiguation of Kant’s concept–intuition distinction. But this does not take into account Hegel’s basic distinction between predication considered as inherence and predication considered as subsumption. Hegel doesn’t describe either subject or predicate term of the judgment of determinate existence in the broadly Fregean terms Brandom uses. When we think of a concept as a universal, we typically think of that universal as a “subsuming” predicate qua function, assigning a truth value to an argument. But in the system of inherence judgments, a judgment’s predicate is not subsuming in that sense. If we talk of a particular red thing as exhibiting the concept red, it cannot be the abstract concept red that is being exhibited, as concepts qua abstract entities are not the sort of things that can be red or some other color. But a red thing can, by virtue of being red, exhibit the concept red in another sense, by, say, providing something like a prototypical example of redness, and it can only do this in virtue of being red. But as red objects always exemplify red in a certain way (the type of determinacy Kant tried to capture with the idea of an intuition) each object will present a specific instantiation of redness. As we have seen, Hegel treats the singular redness here as conceptual, and he can do so because he thinks of a judgment of the type “the rose is this red” as licensing an inference to the judgment “the rose is (some) red,” the form characteristic of the indeterminacy of its first negation “the rose is (some) non-red (color).” Hegel’s reference to the determinacy of the concept involved here is consistent: the redness involved is a “particular” color, and as such an element of a holistic structure of colors opposed to each other as contraries. But the fact that the color of an object exemplifying the concept “red,” say, is always by necessity some particular shade of red, opens up important features of the logic of color concepts, as some shades of red, ones comparatively central in the continuum

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of “red” colors on the spectrum, say, will be better exemplars of redness than ones closer to the region when red shades into orange. And while it may not be thought that such considerations are particularly compelling in relation to judgments of color, they will be crucial to the logic of the sorts of judgments in which Hegel’s genetic taxonomy concludes—evaluative judgments not about objects per se but about human actions and their products, judgments which, as I have argued elsewhere, are more akin to the aesthetic judgments of Kant’s third Critique in demanding the first-person sensuous apprehension of the actual “objects” involved (Redding 2007, ch. 8). The “objects” judged in judgments of the concept—“this act” or “this house” in Hegel’s examples—are subjects of opposed evaluative predications, “good” and “bad.” Such contrary predicates are opposed in an even stronger way than mutually excluding properties like red and green—they are polarly opposed and stand at the extremes of a continuum of scalar properties such that other such objects might be ranked as more or less, good or bad. This is not the case with judgments of which the relevant value is truth, understood in the conventional sense. Thus, the amodal judgments of “reflection,” needing to be sorted into consistent and contradictory relations with other such judgments, can only be true or false simpliciter. It would seem, then, that with Hegel’s final form of judgment, features found in his earliest form of judgment—the singularity and sensuous immediacy of its subject, the (now strengthened) contrariety of its possible predicates—return. With this, I suggest, we start to get a clearer sense of the way that the object of Sense Certainty might be retained as aufgehoben in the increasingly more complex structures of the objects of Perception and the objects taking subject position in subsequent judgment forms. In relation to Brandom’s distinction, this casts doubt on whether Hegel’s concept of experience as Erfahrung can be so neatly uncoupled from the notion of experience as Erlebnis. To try to bring this point home, I now turn to Brandom’s important treatment of modality as it is found in Hegel.

V. The relevance of modality With his account of the genesis of the proper object of consciousness through the Consciousness chapters in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Brandom stresses the way that modal considerations are “built into the metaphysical bedrock” of Hegel’s system (ST, p. 141). To know that an object is red all over is already to know not just that it is not blue all over but that it cannot be blue all over. In contrast, conventional approaches to the logic of modality add on modal notions to an otherwise non-modal account of inference defined in terms of relations among the truth values of the constituent judgments. With this appeal to the fundamentality of modal notions for Hegel Brandom draws attention to this comparatively neglected dimension of Hegel’s subjective logic and metaphysics, and he brings out these features of Hegel’s thought in a remarkably clear way. However, I suggest that these features are nevertheless more consistent with the idea of the non-eliminability of an experiential dimension to

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empirical concepts, and, moreover, that for basically the same reasons, they run counter to Brandom’s portrayal of Hegel as a “conceptual realist.” From a metaphysical perspective, Brandom considers Hegel a conceptual realist, whose realism is asserted against Kant. While for Kant, only mind-related appearances are intelligible, for Hegel, the world in itself is intelligible, or is “in conceptual shape” (ST, p. 221). Hegel’s Phenomenology charts both objective and subjective poles of intentionality, and, as Brandom stresses, both poles are inferentially and modally structured. The objective pole is structured in alethic modal ways, the subjective pole in deontic modal ways, Hegel’s realism being a “bimodal hylomorphic” form (ST, p. 84). This might suggest (and I think that Brandom is often, if incorrectly, read this way), that the alethic modal structure of the intelligible world is somehow dependent on or a reflection of the deontic modal structure of subjective inquiry, but Brandom explicitly denies this, and I suspect that the reasons for this lie in the apparent historicist and relativistic consequences of such an approach. If the norms of subjective inquiry were taken as primary, and if these were equated with historically changing Wittgensteinian “language games” and “forms of life,” then it would seem that the metaphysical structure of the world could only be a reflection of the norms of our linguistic practices. Rorty had seemed happy to embrace such consequences, but Brandon does not want to follow his former teacher here. Brandom expresses Hegel’s purported conceptual realism with the idea that Hegel “understands the objective world as always already in a conceptual (and so, ultimately, thinkable, intelligible) shape that it does not owe to any activity by the thinking subjects to whom it is in principle intelligible. (Nor, it should be said, does it owe anything to the thinking activity of any supersubject called ‘Geist.’)” (ST, p. 3). In his conceptual realism, which is equally an “objective idealism,” concepts express “the ontological structure of objective reality” (ST, p. 229). But I suggest that the idea of the world’s independently being in “conceptual shape” should give us pause here, when “concepts” are understood as they are by Hegel. As alluded to above, Hegel does not accept Kant’s thesis of the generality of concepts, but adopts singularity as a legitimate conceptual determination, attributes to it the dimension of phenomenal immediacy found in Kantian empirical intuitions and gives singular concepts a role as predicates of judgments. If the objective world is in “conceptual shape,” then the objective world would seem to have a place for such sensuously determinate singularities, but it is hard to make sense of this in isolation from the presence in the world of subjects for whom the world appears in such sensuously determinate ways. Brandom’s claim that modal considerations are central for Hegel from the very start is reflected in the fact that Hegel’s first judgment form, the “positive judgment of determinate existence” is, according to contemporary approaches to modal logic (Blackburn et al. 2001), a typical modal judgment in being a tensed judgment, as Hegel’s positive judgments of determinate existence are clearly tensed. A rose that is red or fragrant today cannot be expected to remain so forever. Indeed, Hegel even includes as an example here a version of the judgment familiar from the discussion of sense certainty in the Phenomenology, “Now is night”—here, “Now is day [Jetzt ist’s Tag]” (SL, p. 562).

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Tensed judgments are today regarded as prototypical “modal judgments” because this category is no longer identified simply with judgments about possible and necessary truths. Rather, modal judgments are taken to be per se contextual or indexical, with judgments about possible and necessary truths thought of as indexical in a way analogous to tensed judgments: while tensed judgments are centered on a particular time, the present, alethic modal judgments are centered on a particular world—this world, the actual world, with its distinct patterns of “natural” (non-logical) necessity. In fact, Hegel’s three basic de re judgment types, judgments of determinate existence, judgments of necessity, and the explicitly evaluative judgments of the concept, are all “contextual” in their own ways—judgments of determinate existence are now-centered, judgments of necessity are this-world-centered, and judgments of the concept, being evaluative judgments about human actions or products, are centered on patterns of normative evaluation with which cultures evaluate their own products. Being fundamentally modal, Hegel’s logic must then treat non-modal judgments as somehow derived from modal ones. In fact, this is just what we have seen in the transition of de re judgments with “inherence” forms of predication into de dicto ones with “subsumptive” forms of predication, as with the transition of judgments of determinate existence into judgments of reflection. As we have observed, this transition is achieved by a sequence of two “negations” applied to the judgment’s initial content, predicate and sentential, and it is as a result of this second type of negation that the infinite judgment has been produced, a pseudo-judgment that is then transformed into the various subforms of the judgment of reflection, characterized by an abstractly universal predicate under which subjects determined as a bare singulars are “subsumed.” The infinite judgment is a pseudo-judgment because it is not about any particular actual object or objects whose properties or relations can be stated. Rather, it organizes the variety of alternative predicates that have appeared in the “negating” claims, constructing, as it were, a “logical space” of possible judgments. The infinite judgment transitions into the judgment of reflection in which the conventional singular-subject/universal-predicate order has been restored, and a property predicated of a subject will now be explicitly universal in the standardly abstract sense—a “universal” that might be truly said of a variety of different things indifferent to consideration of kind. “RED” can thus be truly said of this rose just as it is said of a London bus, and with this the universal abstracts away from the particular ways the things it predicates “red” of actually instantiate redness. From this perspective, relations among such “occupied classes” permit formally logical relations among judgments of the type “all As are B,” “some As are B,” and “some A is B”—universally, particularly, and singularly quantified judgments. In this approach, each judgment will be understood as amodal and as having a “properly propositional” content, with a fixed truth value indifferent to context. Each such content being either true or false, these judgments are either consistent with or contradictory to other such judgments. This is a familiar picture of the nature of judgments from a modern “classical” truth-functional perspective, but Hegel was critical of the semantic shortcomings of this conception because of the loss of proper subject–predicate structure. Thus it

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would seem that, relying on such indeterminate “dummy” subjects the functions of which are simply to associate class terms, such judgments have lost contact with those things of perceptual experience, the perceivable properties of which were conceived as responsible for the judgment’s truth or falsity.18 As Brandom notes, for Hegel “material incompatibility underwrites a notion of entailment” (ST, p. 144). Otherwise put, he envisages contradictory relations between judgments as somehow secondary to more basic ones of contrariety. But these derived formal structures come to mediate the more “immediate” ones of inherence predication, producing more complex forms of the latter. For Hegel, such problems of associating judgments of reflection with what is revealed in experience will be now resolved by the introduction of an explicit role for kind terms that would allow subject–predicate judgments in which it was explicit that it is, say, this instance of roseness that is being judged to be red. Thus, in a process that repeats the double negation of abstraction in a kind of inverted way, he tries to show the transition from judgments of reflection to a new type of de re judgment—a judgment in which the “res” is a kind itself, rather than an individual thing (SL, pp. 575f.). The resulting judgment of necessity, then, is exemplified by judgments like “the rose (as such) is a plant,” and a new cycle is initiated in which this explicit hylomorphic structure is reflected. In this cycle, the initial judgments will make explicit the essential kind to which the observed object belongs, and this will have consequences that flow from the sorts of properties thought of as essential to such kinds. Characterizing an object as a rose will commit the speaker to consequences that follow from a rose being a plant. One might think that we are here seeing evidence of Hegel’s “conceptual realism”—his idea that kind concepts are indeed real in a quasi-Aristotelian, “mindindependent” way, but this does not capture the direction in which Hegel’s thought is heading. These judgments are indeed modal—they are about “essences” and properties necessarily possessed by instances of kinds, but, remember, so too were the now “aufgehoben” positive judgments of determinate existence, with which the first cycle had commenced. Modal judgments are all contextual judgments, and what makes judgments about “essences” contextual is that they are judgments that hold within some possible world, the actual one, governed by natural laws that hold within it. But the actual world, also, surely contains us. If we replace Brandom’s “objective world” with the “actual world,” then the puzzle of how there could be “appearances” in the world, vanishes. Furthermore, the “truth” of such judgments about essences turn out to be evaluative judgments explicitly about human actions and their products—judgments of the concept—and they seem to be contextual in a very particular way. One might ask: could there really be good and bad things in an objective world that contained no beings that responded in positive and negative ways to the way things are?19 If the interpretation of Hegel I have suggested here for Hegel is correct, we might ask: why would he insist on the primacy and irreducibility of contextual judgments that, as with both the early judgments of determinate existence, and the later much more complex evaluative judgments of the concept, insist on a moment of immediacy

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of the presentation of discrete “objects” that initially characterizes both forms? To try to give an answer to this question would take us well beyond the scope of this essay, but I want to gesture towards one. Tensed or otherwise indexical judgments of perception are sometimes described as “subject-locating” judgments, which is just another way of stating their “ego-reflexive” nature. To directly see an object, rather than to somehow infer its existence, is to be co-located with it. One gets from this experience a sense of where one is in the world. Similarly, to be aware that now is day, is to locate oneself in the flow of time. These are ways in which one gets at least some sense of oneself as existing in some particular where and when in the world, and, more generally, within some particular world, that is, a world that works in the particular way this one does. It is often pointed out that in the type of self-consciousness formalized in Kant’s notion of the transcendental “I” that is meant to accompany all particular cognitions, such self-consciousness is void of any such locating sensory features. Hegel, I believe, thought that this was a serious defect of such self-consciousness. Such topics, however, would become matters stemming from the Self-Consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology, but they would clearly have implications for the nature of consciousness itself. Brandom’s pragmatist semantic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit shows us a Hegel who challenges much of recent philosophy at its own game. It may be a testament to the strength of this reading that at points it brings into focus aspects of Hegel that challenge Brandom himself at his own game of constructing a modern pragmatist semantic-based philosophy.

Notes 1 Kant had toyed with the idea of calling his own “critical” approach a “phenomenology.” 2 Brandom might explain away these features by invoking the role played by allegory in Hegel’s Phenomenology, where the Erlebnisse of characters (those, say, found in Hegel’s descriptions of “Unhappy Consciousness,” “the Law of the Heart,” and so on) are parts of allegorical accounts that can be rendered in non-allegorical terms (see ST, pp. 173ff.). 3 Throughout much of its long gestation, Brandom had described his reading of the Phenomenology as a “pragmatist semantic” one. 4 Pinkard translates “Sinnliche Gewissheit” as “sensous-certainty,” but I’ve retained Brandom’s “sense certainty” for consistency. 5 For the relevance of Sellars to Hegel here, see DeVries 2008. 6 Chapter 4 is the single chapter making up Section AA. Both chapter and section are titled Self-Consciousness. 7 See, for example, Rorty’s linking of Hegel and Proust in Rorty 1989. 8 Hegel’s “also” can be conceived as akin to what Sellars had characterized as Plato’s “leaky bundle of abstract particulars” (Sellars 1967, p. 77)—a simple co-instantiation of indifferently different property instances, the original “atoms” of Hegel’s sense certainty. 9 This was adopted by Quine in the twentieth century with his famous redetermination of the name “Socrates” as the verb “socratizes.” 10 For example, in the Science of Logic Hegel qualifies singularity as “exclusive” (ausschließende Einzelheit) with Ploucquetian sense at GW 12, pp. 124, 162, and 236, and treats particularity as “comprehensive [comprehensiv]” at pp. 73, 104, and 108. 11 The German “Satz” can mean a concrete sentence or the abstract proposition expressed by a sentence. Hegel uses it in the former way, strictly differentiating it from Urteil, judgment, by which he tends to mean an abstract logical structure that can be expressed by a Satz.

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12 The only judgment structures ruled out as true judgments were ones in which the logical determinations of subject and predicate terms are identical, as in “the singular is singular” or “the universal is universal,” the latter being utilized as a judgment type by Leibniz and Ploucquet in their respective attempts to mathematize logic (SL, p. 560). 13 I explore this in greater detail in Redding 2016, ch. 3. 14 Hegel switches between the examples “the rose is red” and “the rose is fragrant.” No logical point hangs on the difference between examples. 15 See, “‘The rose is fragrant.’ This fragrance is not some indeterminate fragrance or other, but the fragrance of the rose. The predicate is therefore a singular” (SL, p. 560). 16 Moreover, what counts as a determinable of any entity depends upon what sort of entity it is. While numbers can be characterized as either odd or even, but not as either red, blue, or yellow, roses can be characterized as either red, blue, or yellow, but not as either odd or even. Aristotle’s hylomorphism is implicit here. 17 The mere denial of “the rose is non-red” cannot restore the determinacy of the original judgment with the structure “the rose is this red,” and so information as to the shade of the rose’s red has disappeared. 18 In the conventional modern approach stretching from Boole to the present, the logical structure of this judgment is given in terms of class relations, but this had to some degree been anticipated in the late seventeenth century by Leibniz, and later by his follower, Ploucquet. As Hegel points out (SL, pp. 602f.), Leibniz and Ploucquet had treated both subject and predicate terms as predicates—that is, as “subsumptive” universals that are linked by the things those universals subsume, thereby going beyond the limitations of Aristotle’s logic. From this conception of judgment structure, “the rose is red” will mean that there is an otherwise indeterminate something that is subsumed under both the abstract concepts ROSE and RED—that is, something that belongs to both classes of roses and red things. 19 Brandom, in the context of arguing that modal vocabulary is sense-dependent but not reference-dependent, claims that objects or situations could count as beautiful, even were there no appropriate responders (ST, p. 83). Elsewhere (Redding 2014, p. 183) I have argued against similar arguments Brandom has used in relation to existential claims.

References Arnauld, Antoine; Nicole, Pierre (1996) Logic or the Art of Thinking: Containing, Besides Common Rules, Several New Observations Appropriate for Forming Judgment, translated by J. V. Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Blackburn, Patrick; De Rijke, Maarten; Venema, Yde (2001) Modal Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2013) “Global Anti-Representationalism?” in H. Price (ed.), Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 85–111. Brandom, Robert (2011) Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent and Contemporary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2000) Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (1994) Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). DeVries, Willem (2008) “Sense-Certainty and the ‘This-Such’,” in D. Moyar and M. Quante (eds.), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 63–75. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2010) The Science of Logic, translated by G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1968–) Gesammelte Werke, edited by the NordrheinWestfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste (Hamburg: Felix Meiner). Kant, Immanuel (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lambert, Johann Heinrich (1764) Neues Organon oder Gedanken über die Erforschung und Bezeichnung des Wahren und dessen Unterscheidung vom Irrthum und Schein (Leipzig: Johan Wendler). Ploucquet, Gottfried (2006) Logik, translated by M. Franz (Hildesheim: Olms). Pozzo, Roberto (2016) “Gottfried Ploucquet,” in H. F. Klemme and M. Kuehn (eds.), The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury), vol. 2, pp. 899–903. Redding, Paul (2016) Thoughts, Deeds, Words and World: Hegel’s Idealist Response to the Linguistic “Metacritical Invasion” (Aurora, CO: Noesis Press). Redding, Paul (2015) “An Hegelian Solution to a Tangle of Problems Facing Brandom’s Analytic Pragmatism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23/4, pp. 657–680. Redding, Paul (2014) “Pragmatism, Idealism and the Modal Menace: Rorty, Brandom and Truths about Photons,” European Legacy 19/2, pp. 174–186. Redding, Paul (2007) Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rorty, Richard (2014) Mind, Language and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers, edited by S. Leach and J. Tartaglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rorty, Richard (1989) “Self-Creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 96–121. Rorty, Richard (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Sellars, Wilfrid (1997) Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty and a Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Sellars, Wilfrid (1967) “Aristotle’s Metaphysics: An Interpretation,” in Philosophical Perspectives: History of Philosophy (Atascadero: Ridgeview), pp. 73–124. Tarlazzi, Caterina (2017) “Individuals as Universals: Audacious Views in Early TwelfthCentury Realism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, pp. 557–581. Venn, John (1881) Symbolic Logic (London: Macmillan Publishers). Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953) Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell).

5 WHERE IS THE CONFLICT IN BRANDOM’S THEORY OF RECOGNITION (AND WHY SHOULD THERE BE ANY)? Georg W. Bertram

In what follows, I want to discuss Brandom’s explanation of the concept of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Brandom, I believe that there are at least three key passages in Hegel’s text that are of particular significance for the determination of his concept of recognition, namely the Self-Consciousness chapter, the explanation of immediate ethical life, and the chapter on conscience. As far as Brandom’s interpretation goes, I will mainly focus on two chapters, Chapter 8 and Chapter 16, which means that Brandom’s concept of robust recognition and his interpretation of forgiveness will receive particular attention. I will argue that the most important aspect of an explanation of recognition comes into view when we ask ourselves how someone who recognizes someone else can have the authority to recognize at all. This may sound astonishing. On first sight, recognition is all about the authority of those who are recognized. If Peter recognizes Paul, Paul gains the status of being an authority for Peter. Peter ascribes, for himself, an authoritativeness to Paul, which seems to imply that he hands over authority to Paul. But the ascription or handing over of authority must itself be understood as an authoritative act. It has to be understood as an act which Peter performs out of his own free will. (If this were not the case, we would not say that Peter recognizes Paul but, maybe, that he is forced to do so, or something like that). The act of recognition has to be conceived of as an act of freedom. But how can Peter claim to freely perform such an act if he hands authority over to Paul? Where does Peter’s authority stem from? In my view, the most important task that an explanation of recognition has to meet is to account for the act of recognition as an act of freedom.1 And I take Hegel to share this view. I will call the explanatory task brought out so far the task of accounting for the authority to recognize. Within Brandom’s account, the authority to recognize plays a decisive role, too. Brandom has often clarified his conception of recognition by relying on common law as a model. According to his common-law model, the practice of judging is

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such that each judge in making a judgment has to decide how to reactualize relevant judgments made in the past and to orient his decision towards an open future in which other judges will in turn have to decide whether the judgment was just and so should serve as a relevant authority for their own judgments. This implies that, according to Brandom, each judge must have the authority to recognize. But I doubt that Brandom can account for this authority. Even though my chapter won’t discuss Brandom’s common-law model as such, I will hint at some implications that my reflections might have for its critique. My considerations will take the following path. I will first consider how Brandom explains robust recognition and argue that his explanations do not allow us to account for the authority to recognize (I). This will prompt me, in a second step to take a look at how, in the Conscience chapter, Brandom explains forgiveness as a form of recognition (II) and to ask whether that chapter offers what I find missing in his explanation of robust recognition. My answer will be negative. This, in a final step, will lead me to examine how Hegel himself accounts for the authority to recognize and to look for an amendment of Brandom’s interpretation (III). Just to give you an idea of where we will end, I want to anticipate my final claim: The authority to recognize is realized through conflicts. By acquiring the capacity to enter into conflict with one another, the conflicting parties acquire the capacity to recognize each other in a way that ensures that the recognition granted (by articulations of their particular, conditional perspectives) has an unconditional aspect. I hope that, in what follows, I can help you get an idea of what that might mean.

I. Robust recognition In his first interpretation of Hegel’s conception of recognition (Chapter 8), Brandom does not purely rely on Hegelian material, but rather extracts some motives from Hegel’s explanations in the Self-Consciousness chapters and combines them into an original systematic account of recognition. As I take it, the basic idea of his account goes like this: Relations of recognition grow out of a practice in which things are treated as significant according to the desires of a living being. Recognition is then explained as the relation in which individuals treat others as beings for whom things have such significances. But, thus understood, recognition is an asymmetrical relation. For it to be conceived of as a symmetrical one, capable of stabilizing social structures, Brandom goes on, it must be explained as a secondorder relation, namely as the relation in which individuals treat others as beings who recognize others in the way just explained. In short: recognition is the relation in which individuals treat one another as recognizers, and hence as equals. Such higher-order recognition Brandom calls “robust recognition.” But, interestingly, Brandom does not explicitly address the question of how robust recognition is achieved. It is one thing to say what robust recognition consists in and quite another to explain how what it consists in is realized. Brandom clearly explains what robust recognition consists in, namely in acknowledging “as authoritative for one’s own takings the takings of the one being recognized” (ST, p. 255), where “acknowledging” has to be explained in practical terms, as “treating

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someone accordingly.” One might think that explaining robust recognition in terms of “treating someone” as authoritative gives us an explanation of how robust recognition is realized. But this is not the case. For treating someone as authoritative presupposes the authority to treat someone as authoritative and hence requires an explanation of the realization of the authority of the recognizer, which is the authority to recognize.2 It might seem that such an explanation could be given very easily. Doesn’t it suffice to look at cases in which recognition is de facto symmetrical?3 In such cases, the recognizer is recognized by whom he recognizes. Since robust recognition is the recognition of someone as authoritative, we then could say: the recognizer gains his authority by being recognized by whom he recognizes. Remember what robust recognition consists in: it consists in the recognition of another individual as a recognizer, as someone who has the authority to recognize. If I get him right, Brandom says: the authority to recognize has to be explained as the authority recognized by others in relations of robust recognition, that is, as the authority that one gains by being recognized as a recognizer. But this does not really help us to answer the questions, first, of how the authority to recognize is gained, and, second, of how to conceive of the authority of those who recognize others. In my view, it is sufficient to highlight one essential aspect that one has to account for if one wants to account for the authority to recognize at all, which is the capacity to withdraw or refuse recognition. (Remember that an act of recognition has to be understood as an act performed out of one’s own free will.) Someone who has the authority to recognize may—with good reasons—withdraw the recognition he has granted or may, if challenged, refuse to recognize another individual. The freedom to withdraw recognition or to refuse to recognize is an essential aspect of what it means that someone has the authority to recognize. (The relation between recognition and freedom can be concretized in this way.) But this aspect is not explained if we merely say: one’s authority to recognize is constituted by being instituted through the recognition of the recognitions that one is committed to. To be sure: Brandom need not deny that the authority to recognize entails the aspect I am highlighting. But his explanation of robust recognition does not account for it. It only accounts for the authority of the recognitions that someone who is recognized holds. So, it seems important to ask: why does Brandom’s conception of robust recognition fall short of explaining the authority to recognize? Consider recognition relations that Brandom understands as cases of simple recognition. In those cases everything is much easier. What it is to recognize someone as being aware that something is significant can easily be explained by saying that the recognizer shares the awareness in question. As Brandom says: “We can start with the thought that in the most basic case, one can take another to be a K-taker only if one is oneself a K-taker” (ST, p. 251). This is to say: in the case of simple recognition, the authority of someone who recognizes others stems from a practice in which individuals act according to shared norms. It is the kind of practice that Hegel explains in terms of immediate ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Hegel states: “There is nothing here which would not be reciprocal […]” (PG/M, §351). But if the authority of those who recognize others in a simple way

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stems from a practice in which individuals act according to shared norms, it is not an authority of the individuals who recognize. In this case, the community as a whole holds the authority in question. (Think of Heidegger’s “Man.”) I take Hegel to claim that, within immediate ethical life, no relations of recognition are realized because, within it, individuals do not have the authority to recognize others. Brandom coins a phrase that aptly captures the deficiency of immediate ethical life when he speaks of Antigone and Creon as “avatars” (ST, p. 483). This is an accurate expression of the problems that immediate ethical life exhibits and that Hegel tries to grasp in terms of recognition. In immediate ethical life, individuals are avatars because they do not have the authority to recognize on their own behalf.4 Here, relations of recognition—if one can speak of recognition at all—are structured such that the individuals are programmed to recognize and be recognized in a particular way. They are programmed by norms instituted by the community. But someone who is programmed to recognize someone else simply does not recognize at all. I now have gathered enough material to reach an assessment of Brandom’s explanation of robust recognition that diverges from that with which we started. The basic problem is that Brandom conceives of robust recognition as a relation that is essentially transitive. He thereby reproduces the structures of recognition that are characteristic of immediate ethical life. One might say that, in immediate ethical life, to recognize is to acknowledge “as authoritative for one’s own takings the takings of the one being recognized” (ST, p. 255). Someone who recognizes Creon as a recognizer recognizes all the others whom Creon recognizes, too. But, within such a framework, no one has the authority to recognize in a full sense. No one is free to perform acts of recognition out of her own free will. If someone has the authority to recognize, her recognition cannot be transitive. Her recognition will essentially entail the possibility that she does not share the recognitions held by the one whom she recognizes. In short: if recognition of someone as a recognizer has to be conceived of as an act of freedom, recognition cannot be transitive. It is important to note that Brandom cannot explain what a judge does, as per the common-law model, in terms of robust recognition precisely because the judge’s recognition is not transitive. A judge recognizes some prior judgments as authoritative and disregards others. It is always possible for her to disregard judgments that judges whom she recognizes have recognized. Thus it clearly makes no sense to conceive of the recognition that the judge grants to other judges as transitive. Brandom cannot stick to his conception of robust recognition if he wants his common-law model to work.

II. Recognition as forgiveness Brandom presents another explanation of how to conceive of recognition in his reading of the Conscience chapter. He focuses especially on the end of this chapter, where Hegel develops a rather strange story about two conscientious consciousnesses (the acting and the judging consciousness), one that confesses and one that forgives. According to Brandom, the forgiving consciousness deserves particular attention because it performs an act of recognition that he takes to be decisive and characterizes

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as an act of “forgiveness,” which he understands as the “recollective labor of finding a concept that is being expressed […] by the conceptions endorsed by those whose judgments and actions are being forgiven” (ST, p. 605). Brandom explicitly understands “forgiving” as “the adoption of a recognitive stance” (ST, p. 608). Once again, the question arises whether the authority to recognize is explained by such a conception, which we might put as follows: where does the authority of those who forgive stem from? If I get Brandom right, his answer is that it stems from an attitude that he characterizes in Hegel’s vocabulary as “edelmütig”—or, in the English translation, as “magnanimous.” Brandom explains: “Edelmütigkeit, generosity or magnanimity, the noble recognitive stance […] consists in treating oneself and others in practice as adopting normative statuses, rather than just changing natural states” (ST, p. 597). I take this to mean that the basis of the authority to forgive is a specific insight that manifests itself in a practical stance that consists in acknowledging the genuinely binding normativity of the normative structures that govern practices within a community. Brandom takes Hegel to say that the authority of the forgiver is based on a theoretical insight manifested by her practical attitudes—on the rightness of her attitudes towards norms. She is right about the “complementary contributions of particularity and universality to individuality” (ST, p. 598). But does an insight like this explain the authority in question? I don’t think so, and I doubt that Hegel does either. The reason for this is quite simple. Within the framework of an explanation of knowledge in terms of recognition (which is Hegel’s framework), an acknowledgement can only count as an insight if it is recognized. Or, put differently: An acknowledgement can only count as an insight if it is explained how this insight is constituted within a recognitive practice. But this seems not to be the case in Brandom’s explanation. The forgiver achieves his acknowledgement by getting things right. Yet, there is no one around him who recognizes him for getting things right. The only one around is the confessor. But the confessor cannot acknowledge the judge (the judging consciousness) for having the right attitude towards norms, as, according to Brandom, the confessor himself has a wrong attitude towards norms. Thus, the forgiver is not recognized and has, if we grant Brandom that the forgiver’s insight is indeed the basis of his authority to recognize, no authority to recognize and to forgive. So, I propose to read Hegel in a different way and to understand the interaction between the confessor and the forgiver as dialogical in a full sense. I propose to start with the following question: Why is Hegel so concerned about the figure he calls the “hard heart”? Does he blame it for not getting things right? In my view, Hegel argues that the “hard heart” stands in the way of recognition by making the realization of a dialogue impossible. Hegel says: “it repels this community.”5 So Hegel thinks that the confession already has contributed to the institution of a community. 6 What could this mean? I propose to understand the confession as an act of reflection of recognition of particularity. This may sound puzzling. What do I mean by a “reflection of recognition of particularity”? The confessor does not merely recognize the particularity of the other. Nor does he merely put forward his own particularity. Although the confession implies both, it is more than this. It is a

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reflection of the fact that both the acting and the judging consciousness each have a particular point of view and hence are able to recognize each other on this common ground. Hegel is very clear about this when he describes the act of confessing in the following way: “Intuiting this equality and giving voice to it, he confesses this to the other […]” (PG/P, §666). According to Hegel’s explanation, the confessor contributes to the realization of a community which is already there without being fully realized. The act of confession is reflective. It reflects a structural community that the conflicting conscientious consciousnesses have already partially realized by dissenting. Thus, according to Hegel, recognition is realized by reflective acts. The act of confessing is the reflection of a community realized by that very reflection. This is why a one-sided confession is insufficient. Hegel continues the sentence cited above by saying that the confessor, as he confesses, “equally expects that the other, just as he has in fact placed himself on an equal plane to him, will reciprocate his speech and in that speech will pronounce their equality so that recognitional existence will make its appearance” (PG/P, §666).7 Hegel states that the confession has to be complemented by another act, which he calls forgiveness. So, in my view, forgiveness has to be explained in the very terms in which I have explained confession. It is an act that reflects the recognition of the particularity of those in play. That the acts of confession and forgiveness complement each other can be explained by saying that they reflect each other, that they gain their significance by mutually referring to one another. In this context, “reflection” has a double meaning. On the one hand, the confessor and the forgiver refer to each other as being equal in their particularity. “Reflection” in this sense means: revealing to the other what one takes him to be. On the other hand, the acts of confession and forgiveness have a self-referential structure (a reflexive structure, in Brandom’s sense). The confession refers to the recognition it grants to the other. To confess does not only imply that the other is recognized as someone who can assess the confession as such. It implicitly comments on the recognition as well. The comment could be verbalized by saying that the recognition of the other is justified by the fact that both individuals in play hold particular views. “Reflection” in this sense is thematizing: a thematization of the recognition which those who recognize each other share or could share. Hegel’s judge does not make his decision by relating his judgment to the past and by referring to all the judges that may follow in an open future. He gains his capacity to judge by being recognized by others by way of the concrete conflicts he comes into with them. But Brandom’s interpretation makes it look as though the act of forgiveness would have to stand by itself in a way. Although Brandom need not deny that the act of forgiveness is a reaction to the act of confession, he does not depict the specific way in which the act of forgiveness gains the relevant authority to recognize precisely through the other’s act of confession. By recognizing the particularity of the other, the act of confession grants to the judge (to the other) the authority to speak out of her or his particular perspective. Thereby, the confessor presupposes that such authority will be granted to him as well. His confession has to be understood as an act that anticipates that it is granted the

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authority that it requires. This gives us a first insight into how to conceive of the authority in question. We might put it as follows: Someone has the authority to recognize if and only if, by her acts of recognition, she realizes a community with those whom she recognizes. This is what Hegel takes the act of the confessor to exemplify. The confession reflects a community that is constituted by the very act of reflection: the community of the particularity of both the confessor and the judge.

III. The essential role of conflict But the explanations gathered so far do not allow us to understand why Brandom does not take on board Hegel’s account of the authority to recognize. To answer this question, we have to say more about how Hegel accounts for it. I will try to do so in two steps. First, I will argue that it is important to grasp the basic distinction that organizes Hegel’s reflections in the Spirit chapter (a). On this basis, I will, second, focus on the essential role of conflict in Hegel’s conception of recognition (b). (a) Brandom takes the chapter to be organized by the distinction of “edelmütig” and “niederträchtig” attitudes, which, as we have already seen, he understands as a distinction of different accounts of a normative and hence of a recognitive practice. By contrast, I believe that Hegel is interested in a more basic distinction—one that is important for the constitution of relations of recognition and hence the authority to recognize as such. This becomes more apparent if we once again take a look at the beginning of the Spirit chapter. In his explanations of the duality of human and divine law, Hegel brings a specific form of authority into play. It is the authority of a family member who has died. Such a family member has his specific form of authority by deserving to be recognized unconditionally. Hegel speaks of him as “der unwirkliche marklose Schatten” (TWA 3, p. 332), an unreal shadow without properties.8 The dead family member is recognized regardless of what he has done. According to divine law, recognition is an unconditional relation in that someone is recognized no matter what he has done. This is different from the (avatar) recognition realized within the scope of human law (the law of a polis). Here, recognition is grounded on strict conditions. The norms that are instituted in a community are the conditions for granting recognition. According to human law, recognition is conditional. In my view, grasping that Hegel analyzes a tension characteristic of relations of recognition from the very beginning of the Spirit chapter gives us a clue for an interpretation of what he develops in the rest of it. It is the tension between a conditional and an unconditional aspect in relations of recognition. In our context, the tension in question may be explained by saying that recognition is a relation of both: of constraint and of freedom.9 I cannot, within the confines of this chapter, retrace Hegel’s explanations, throughout the Spirit chapter, of the basic tension between the conditional and the unconditional in relations of recognition.10 But I want at least to articulate in what sense this tension is relevant to the explanations of the interaction between confession and forgiveness that I

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have already commented on. Let us consider confession, once again. If the acting consciousness confesses its particularity and thereby reflects the recognition of particularity of both individuals in play, the confession is a determinate act. The confessor presents himself in his particularity. “It is me”11 is Hegel’s paradigmatic articulation of such presentation. But the recognition the confessor grants to the other is not based on the condition that the other share his particular convictions. The recognition of the other’s particularity is a reflection to the effect that both have something in common in holding particular views. It is a recognition that the other one can present herself in her particularity as well. And this means that the act of recognition has an unconditional aspect to it: the other’s particularity can be articulated without precondition. In the confession, the other (the judging consciousness) is recognized in her specific particularity, which enables her to act according to her own specific perspective, according to her own convictions (this is what conscience, understood correctly, is all about). Confession is thus an act of recognition through which recognition is realized as a conditional– unconditional relation. It is conditional insofar as it is brought forth by particular articulations—as a presentation of the confessor in her particularity. And it is unconditional insofar as it grants the other the capacity (freedom) to act according to her own perspective.12 (b) But what does it mean to say that the other is granted to act according to her own perspective? In my view, this has to be explained in terms of practices, namely in terms of practices of conflict.13 Thus, we have finally reached the point where we can come to appreciate the importance of conflict in Hegel’s explanation of the realization of recognition (the struggle for life and death, Creon and Antigone etc.). Three claims should allow me to outline how I take Hegel to account for the realization of the tension between a conditional and an unconditional aspect within relations of recognition. (i) If individuals are not able to reflect on the normative situation they find themselves in, they cannot enter into conflict with one another. (ii) By acquiring the faculty to reflect on the norms in play, they acquire the capacity to enter into conflict, too. (iii) Someone who enters into conflict with another individual recognizes the other in an unconditional way: her conflicting articulations signal to the other that she is open to react to whatever he will say in response to her. As to (i), I propose to have a look at Hegel’s reflections on the tragedy in ethical life, one last time. The essential problem that leads to the breakdown of immediate ethical life consists in that neither Antigone nor Creon has the means to settle the dispute in which they happen to find themselves. Antigone is stuck to divine law, Creon to human law. Neither of them is able to distance her- or himself from the law that makes her or him into what she or he is. So, neither Antigone nor Creon is able to articulate the conflict in which they stand to one another. They are not even able to understand that there is a conflict at all. In short: they are not able to enter into conflict and to settle their dispute. I take Hegel’s diagnosis to clarify another important aspect of the authority to recognize. It is essential for one to be able to distance oneself from the norms that are in play in order to be able to realize a recognition of others. An explanation of the authority to recognize has to account for the capacity to articulate one’s own perspective on the norms that are

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binding in the specific situation one finds oneself in. And, according to Hegel’s analysis, this capacity has to be understood as essentially tied to the capacity to enter into conflict. So, Hegel has to look for an explanation that allows him to hold onto (ii). He continues his explanations by asking what enables individuals to entertain a distant stance towards the norms they are dealing with. His answer to this question is strongly bound up with the concept of alienation.14 It is through alienation that those who act in a normative space acquire the means to distance themselves from the norms they are bound by and hence the means to reflect on the norms and the normative relations they stand in. In short: Hegel conceives of alienation as a productive element with regard to the realization of recognition. To be productive, alienation must be developed within a specific framework. Hegel makes the case that alienation is destructive if it prompts the individual to reflect on her own. (Kant is blamed for the development of the most consequent account in this direction.) On the contrary, alienation is productive if it is an element of a practice by which a community is realized. Reflection is productive within the framework of a practice of conflict. This is what Hegel shows by his considerations in the Conscience chapter. The conflictive interaction on which Hegel draws here is one in which both parties (the acting and the judging consciousness) demand to be recognized for their particular perspective. They demand to be recognized conditionally. But, since the conditions they want to have recognized are different, they are not able to recognize each other. So, at first, it looks as if we had returned to a structure reminiscent of the conflict between Creon and Antigone. But, then, a significant difference emerges. The conflicting parties have learned to reflect their specific conditions by learning to articulate what they take these conditions to be. By saying “It is me,” the confessor initiates a practice of reflection via an explication of his particularity.15 This reflection is productive because it allows the individuals to enter into conflict with one another.16 We can now move to (iii). By showing how the capacity to entertain a distant stance towards the norms in play is directly related to the capacity to enter into conflict, Hegel gives an explanation of the realization of an unconditional aspect within a relation of recognition. The reflection developed by the confessor is a reflection that grants to the other the authority to act on his perspective, and hence to act unconditionally. This does not mean that he can articulate whatever he wants. Rather, it means that each one is responded to by the other’s articulations.17 Each one can articulate their perspective on specific norms in play or on the normative relations they stand in and thereby enter into conflict with someone else. In this way, to enter into conflict with another has to be explained as realizing a relation of recognition in which conditional and unconditional aspects are combined. Both aspects which, according to my reading, are essential for the Spirit chapter, are also essential for an understanding of the interaction with which the chapter ends. This interaction realizes what Hegel has been looking for all along: a tension of conditionality and unconditionality in relations of recognition. Brandom’s explanation of recognition misses the essentially conflictive structure in the constitution of relations of recognition that Hegel argues for. It misses

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Hegel’s claim that the realization of recognition is based on the development of a practice in which relations of recognition gain an unconditional aspect: on the development of a practice of conflict. Or, to be more precise: Brandom misconstrues the unconditional aspect within relations of recognition by understanding it as magnanimity: Those who are recognized in an unconditional way cannot contribute to the realization of the unconditional aspect. Since they have judged in the past, they are doomed to keep silent. But, to realize the unconditional aspect that is granted to them, they have to react and see whether the judge is really willing to respond to whatever they present as their perspective, and thus must themselves be prepared to act in the very same way. Thus, the unconditional aspect can only be realized in interaction. To sum up: At present, you might understand why I take Hegel to make the following claim: The authority to recognize is realized through conflicts. By acquiring the capacity to enter into conflict with one another, the conflicting parties acquire the capacity to recognize each other in a way that ensures that the recognition granted (by articulations of their particular, conditional perspectives) has an unconditional aspect. In my view, this claim articulates an answer to the question of how robust recognition is realized. Robust recognition is the recognition of the other as one who has the authority to recognize. But to take the other as one who has the authority to recognize does not mean to take over her takings. It means to expose one’s own takings to her reaction, to be prepared to react to her takings, and to expect her to do just the same. (This is the reason why recognition is essentially symmetrical.) Or, put differently: it means to have the capacity and to be prepared to enter into conflict with the other. In this way, the realization of robust recognition is the realization of the authority to recognize.18

Notes 1 The reason for this may be explained as follows: Recognition is an activity for which it is essential that those who recognize others can be challenged in what they do. They can fail to recognize whom they should recognize and recognize whom they should not. But the possibility of success and failure presupposes that recognizing is an act of freedom. (As I will highlight in the first part of my chapter, this implies that those who recognize can refuse to recognize or withhold a recognition they have once granted.) I thus completely agree with Robert Pippin’s claim that freedom is the answer to the question of what recognition is for Hegel (Pippin 2000). In my view, the mutual dependency of recognition and freedom can best be captured by asking how the authority to recognize is realized. 2 The necessity to account for the authority to recognize is indirectly articulated by Terry Pinkard when he writes: “To be such a genuinely free agent, one must be socially recognized as having the authority to do, feel, and believe what is not fully set by the bounds of traditional social authority” (Pinkard 2012, p. 68). 3 Brandom seems to choose this path when he says that “if recognition could be shown to be de jure transitive, then any case in which it was also de facto symmetrical (reciprocal) would be one in which it was also de facto reflexive” (ST, p. 254). But, by relying on a de facto symmetry of relations of recognition, Brandom begs the question. All relations that are de facto symmetrical presuppose that recognition is realized and thereby presuppose what Brandom wants to explain in terms of de facto symmetry: the authority, and hence the self-consciousness, of those who recognizes others.

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4 Robert Stern captures the insufficiency of the avatar-conception of recognition within immediate ethical life by claiming that “the Greek ethical world collapsed because it had insufficient space for ‘the individual’” (Stern 2002, p. 142). 5 In Miller’s translation it is: “it repels this community of nature” (PG/M, §667), but I don’t think that this is faithful to Hegel’s text. 6 According to Brandom’s interpretation, the confessor holds a subjectivist view. Someone who holds such a view can by definition not contribute to the institution of a community. Rather, he erodes whatever community there could be. 7 Miller’s translation (“Perceiving this identity and giving utterance to it, he confesses to the other, and equally expects that the other, having in fact put himself on the same level, will also respond in words in which he will give utterance to this identity with him, and expects that this mutual recognition will now exist in fact”) is unfitting in some regards. Hegel’s wording is: the confessor “erwartet ebenso, daß das Andere, wie es sich in der Tat ihm gleichgestellt hat, so auch seine Rede erwidern, in ihr seine Gleichheit aussprechen und [somit] das anerkennende Dasein eintreten werde” (TWA 3, p. 490). 8 Miller translates: “unreal impotent shadow” (§451)—“impotent” seems to me not a very accurate translation of “marklos.” It might be helpful to translate more prosaically with “without properties” and in this sense “not marked,” “being without marks.” Pinkard translates: “unreal shadow without any core.” 9 I refer to Brandom’s important 1979. I take my explanations to show that Hegel is not a partisan of the (Kantian) conception that explains freedom and constraint by reference to norms, but rather holds a conception according to which freedom and constraint (of subjects) can only be understood in terms of the relations of subjects to one another. 10 For a more thorough interpretation, see Bertram 2017. 11 Miller translates: “I am so” (§667), Pinkard: “I am he.” 12 In his first explanations of the generic structure of recognition, Hegel explains the last step in the constitution of recognition as a “letting the other go free”: “but secondly, the other selfconsciousness equally gives it back again to itself, for it saw itself in the other, but supersedes this being of itself in the other and thus lets the other again go free” (PG/M, §181). 13 For a more systematic account of recognition in terms of the capacity to enter into conflict, see Bertram and Celikates 2015. 14 Brandom takes Hegel’s conception of alienation to express a subjectivist exaggeration in one’s attitude towards norms. He thereby misses the specific productivity of alienation that Hegel underlines. For a more detailed account of how I propose to read the Spirit chapter, see Bertram 2008. 15 Admittedly, to articulate one’s particularity by saying “It is me” is very empty. At this point, we may get a glimpse of how Hegel wants the Religion chapter to systematically follow the Conscience chapter: He conceives of religion and art as determinate articulations of particularity that are developed in relation to specific cultural practices. Thus, religion and art are for Hegel concrete ways of saying “It is me.” 16 According to Hegel, the productive practices of reflection are not only to be understood as a communal reflection. They are to be understood as a communal constitution of rationality as well. This is why Hegel continues his explanations after the Conscience chapter by explaining media of reflection that are essential for the constitution of rationality. According to Hegel, art, religion, and philosophy have to be understood in this way. An essential connection can be drawn at this point: not before absolute knowledge, and hence not before philosophy as a medium of reflection is realized, is it possible to develop the science of logic and thereby to give an account of the structures of rationality. 17 I believe that it is essential to understand the community constituted by the interaction of confession and forgiveness as a community of conflictive interaction in the way explained above. In my view, Pinkard, for instance, is mistaken to explain it as an “absolute community” that is the revenant of immediate ethical life: “This community now has the possibility of understanding and structuring its institutions and practices so that they are not alien impositions on its members but continuous with their sense of who they are” (Pinkard 1995, p. 219). It is possible that Pinkard has implicitly revised his

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position. In his new book on Hegel’s philosophy, one can read: “The flexibility about the irreducibility of individuality and the demand for wholeness were both equally profound aspects of the modern social space, and the depth of the demands from both directions meant that certain types of human possibilities were to become more or less permanent figures in the modern scene” (Pinkard 2012, p. 185). 18 I would like to thank Adam Bresnahan and Gilles Bouché for helping me with the English text and for helpful suggestions.

References Bertram, Georg W. (2017) Hegel’s »Phänomenologie des Geistes«: Ein systematischer Kommentar (Stuttgart: Reclam). Bertram, Georg W. (2008) “Hegel und die Frage der Intersubjektivität: Die Phänomenologie des Geistes als Explikation der sozialen Strukturen der Rationalität,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 56/6, pp. 877–898. Bertram, Georg W.; Celikates, Robin (2015) “Towards a Conflict Theory of Recognition: On the Constitution of Relations of Recognition in Conflict,” European Journal of Philosophy 23/4, pp. 838–861. Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (1979) “Freedom and Constraint by Norms,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16/3, pp. 187–196. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1986) Werke in 20 Bänden mit Registerband, edited by E. Moldenbauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pinkard, Terry (2012) Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pinkard, Terry (1995) Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pippin, Robert (2000) “What Is the Question for Which Hegel’s Theory of Recognition Is the Answer?” European Journal of Philosophy 8, pp. 155–172. Stern, Robert (2002) Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Routledge).

6 INTENTIONAL AGENCY AND CONCEPTUAL IDEALISM Brandom on Hegelian reason Dean Moyar

After one of his more ornate descriptions of mediation and “absolute cognition” in the Preface of the Phenomenology, Hegel writes that it all amounts to the claim that “Reason is purposive activity” (PG/M, §22). We see from this slogan why Hegel’s account of action in the Reason chapter of the Phenomenology is especially important for Brandom’s overall reading in A Spirit of Trust. Action is not one topic among others in the Phenomenology, but the topic that reveals Hegel’s distinctive understanding of reason, of idealism, and of philosophy itself. Having already laid out in great detail the structure of consciousness and the recognitive relations of self-consciousness, Brandom turns in Chapter 11 to an account of intentional action based rather loosely on the Reason chapter, and then in Chapter 12 expounds his own semantics on the model provided by Hegelian action. Through this analysis we get a full understanding of the conceptual idealism that Brandom holds to be the final stage that builds on Hegel’s conceptual realism and objective idealism. I share Brandom’s view that Hegel’s idealism is fundamentally an inferentialism, and I agree that action is the key concept for understanding Hegel’s philosophy. The critical dimension of my contribution focuses on the relation of realism and idealism, which roughly tracks Brandom’s semantic treatment of reference and sense. His opening gambit is to distinguish between the apparently absurd idea of the referencedependence of objects on thinking, on the one hand, and the much more palatable idea of the sense-dependence of objects on thinking, on the other. He denies that Hegel endorses reference-dependence, for he takes Hegel to be a realist who holds that there is a world out there whether we think it or not. Yet Brandom argues, and claims that Hegel argues, that there are no referents that contrast with senses in the end, for referents turn out to be ideal senses. What then becomes of the original denial that Hegel’s idealism includes a claim of reference-dependence? More generally, how does Brandom keep a realist dimension while doing justice to the radicality of Hegel’s idealism? Does the model of intentional action provide Brandom with a way to thread

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the needle between a dualism of facts and interpretations, on the one hand, and unconstrained interpretation, on the other?

I. “Making realism intelligible” Brandom sets up his discussion of action by recalling two of the main building blocks of his reading of Hegel: conceptual realism and objective idealism. Conceptual realism is the “platitudinous” view that the world—the “non-mental world” (ST, p. 363)—really is structured by modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion. I am not at all sure that this view is self-evident or non-controversial, for it does involve modal realism, but I cannot adjudicate that issue here. This is a “conceptual” realism because on Hegel’s “non-psychological” view concepts are “relations of material incompatibility and (so) consequence” (ST, p. 58). Later Brandom complicates this realism by saying that it is also a claim about “the ontological homogeneity of content between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness” (ST, p. 418). The claim that Brandom extracts from the first three chapters of the Phenomenology and the transition to Self-Consciousness is what he calls objective idealism. This is the view that there is a “symmetrical sense-dependence of the concepts articulating subjective processes of concept use and concepts articulating objective conceptual relations” (ST, p. 365). Such a sense-dependence view contrasts with a reference-dependence: According to this thesis, although there could and would be lawful connections among properties even if there were no self-conscious creatures to codify them in counterfactual reasoning, it is not possible to understand what laws are without appealing to the distinctive sort of reasoning they support (and vice versa). Although there could and would be objective facts (say, about the melting point of copper) even if there were no language users to discover and assert them, one cannot say what a fact is without appealing to the possibility of asserting one […]. (ST, p. 365) Brandom admits that this idealism might not seem idealistic enough, or “crazy enough,” to be Hegel’s view.1 Objective idealism describes more of a truce between the objective and subjective than a priority of the subjective suggested by some of Hegel’s bolder pronouncements about the essential subjectivity of substance. Brandom gives to the more radical idealist component of Hegel’s view the name of conceptual idealism, which he formulates as an “explanatory asymmetry” (ST, p. 369). Conceptual idealism is “the claim that the relations of sense-dependence objective idealism asserts to obtain between the concepts that articulate our conception of objective relations of material incompatibility, on the one hand, and subjective processes of acknowledging incompatible commitments, on the other, must be understood in terms of the processes that institute those relations” (ST, p. 369). Intentional agency is a central topic in Hegel because it brings to the fore this conceptual idealism; the content-instituting processes just are those intentional actions “that constitute self-conscious

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individual selves” (ST, p. 369). The essential idea is that determinate conceptual content is to be modeled on self-conscious, purposive activity. Brandom summarizes the importance of intentional agency as follows: “The discussion of agency in Reason is of pivotal importance in the Phenomenology because we are to understand all of these sorts of identity-through-difference on the model and in the context of the sort of identityin-difference that is the actualizing expression of individuality through its purposive activity” (ST, p. 379). Intentional agency best exhibits the “historical-developmental” structure that explains the interrelations among all the incompatibilities and social structures that Brandom lays out in the chapters leading up to this one. Brandom brings out the methodological import of action by contrasting two models of “the unity and the disparity that action involves” (ST, p. 379). On the first model, which he calls LCD, for local, contingent, and disjunctive, there is either an identity in action (which thus counts as a success) or a disparity (which thus counts as a failure). It is contingent whether or not I actualize my intention in the action, and the identity (and thus success) is adjudicated in a case-by-case, or local, way. The LCD account generates a vulgar conception of the success or failure of an action. An action succeeds if the intended purpose is identical with the content achieved, and fails if that content is not identical with the purpose. It is vulgar in that it is all or nothing, and works with a paradigm of simple actions such as a ball going through a hoop. On Brandom’s alternative global, necessary, and conjunctive (GNC) view, every action necessarily includes a unity and a difference of intention and result. The contrast between the LCD and GNC accounts tracks that between the Understanding and Reason, where what is distinctive of the understanding is that it takes the determinate content of the action as something given. The GNC account, on the other hand, goes together with a conception of Reason according to which the determinate content is only first intelligible through the process of determining the content in performing actions. The relation between intention and its realization is so important to Brandom’s account because it is the central case of expression, of making the implicit explicit. Brandom thinks that Hegel’s distinctive conception of expression comes out when one pays attention to the difference in the paradigmatic actions for Hegel and for someone like Davidson. Instead of “momentary, punctiform events such as flipping a switch or letting go of a rope, the paradigms of the actions Hegel addresses are to be found rather in complex, extended processes such as writing a book or properly burying a slain brother” (ST, p. 400). Hegel’s paradigmatic actions have the complex structure typically associated with planning agency, in which there is an overarching goal and various subgoals. This structure enables us to tell a story that connects the original intention to the achieved result, a story that will unite the intention and the achieved result in some progressive manner (thus securing the unity side of the conjunctive view), even if the action is a failure in the vulgar sense. So too, no vulgarly successful achievement of an intention is pure in the sense of realizing exactly what the abstract intention contained, for there are always contingencies that enter into the process of realization (thus securing the side of difference). This treatment of action is fundamental to conceptual idealism because the GNC structure holds not only for intentional actions, but for the development of

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conceptual content in general. In this sense the structure and unity-in-difference of conceptual content is the same as the structure and unity-in-difference of intentional action. Brandom thus writes, The way this works for the case of agency will then be available to serve as a model of the process in terms of which we are to understand the relation of necessity to contingency (norm to actuality) through which determinateness arises or is revealed as traditions of concept application develop. […] the key to the development/expression of determinate conceptual norms through the incorporation of contingency in agency is the distinction of historical perspective between prospective and retrospective perspectives on actions (the distinction between purposes and intentions). (ST, p. 405) We learn here that the thesis of conceptual idealism will rely on the conception of a dynamic process conceived of as a tradition. Brandom specifies this process through the concept of action as a certain kind of cycle or loop. There is a feedback loop in an extended action that allows subjects to recalibrate their intentions in response to contingency in the world. “Fulfilling a complex intention is a cyclical process of intervention according to a plan aimed at a goal, observation of the results of the intervention, adjustment of the plan, further intervention, further observation of its results, and so on” (ST, p. 411). This loop is operative not just in intentional action, but in traditions of conceptual content development in general. In his reformulation of conceptual idealism at the end of the chapter, he writes that “the constellation of objective, conceptually articulating relations and subjective, conceptually articulating processes should be understood in the first instance in terms of the recollective phase of the process that is the cycle of intentional action” (ST, p. 419). While the specifically semantic themes of Brandom’s reading largely stay in the background in Chapter 11, they return to the forefront in Chapter 12, “Recollection, Representation, and Agency.” The chapter opens with an extended comparison of Hegel with Frege on sense and reference, terms that Brandom has used throughout A Spirit of Trust but that are given a full Hegelian explication here. He begins with the bold mapping of several Hegelian oppositions onto that of sense and reference: for consciousness and in itself, phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality. While the “senses” are the way that objects and relations are presented to us, the “referents determined by and presented to us by those senses are the objective things and relations our thoughts and (so) judgments are about” (ST, pp. 422f.). Referents “set standards” (ST, p. 423) for the assessment of our cognitive and practical activity. In the Fregean picture, senses are “what we are saying or thinking” (ST, p. 423), the content, whereas referents are “what we are talking or thinking about” (ST, p. 423). In the Phenomenology, we begin from the way things appear to us, and the reality “is to emerge from consideration of dynamic features of the expressive development of those appearances” (ST, p. 424).

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According to Brandom, Hegel’s account of sense and reference diverges from Frege’s on a number of basic points: Hegel is a holist while Frege is an atomist. Brandom himself has defended a non-atomist interpretation of Frege, but here he writes that “however it might be with Frege himself, many contemporary neo-Fregean theories are thoroughly atomistic about senses” (ST, p. 426). Hegel has a comprehensive view that examines the sense of cognitive and practical activity, whereas Frege deals only with “theoretical or cognitive activity: paradigmatically, judging” (ST, p. 426). Hegel endorses the “categoreal homogeneity” of sense and reference, whereas for Frege “senses and referents are different kinds of things” (ST, p. 426). This last point contrasts Frege’s conception of senses as “ontologically sui generis” with the Hegelian point, key to his conceptual realism, that “[n]oumena are a kind of phenomena” (ST, p. 427). The final main difference between Hegel and Frege “concerns the determinateness of senses” (ST, p. 429). Brandom notes that Frege understands senses as determining “classes of referents whose boundaries are sharp, fixed, and complete” (ST, p. 429). Brandom thus thinks that Frege would fall prey to the same criticism that Hegel directed against Kant, namely that he is not critical enough about the conditions of conceptual determinacy. Such conditions require nothing less than the whole Hegelian program in which development and process play central roles. Brandom’s functionalist theory of reference is complex, and getting it straight is crucial for understanding his overall account. He takes from Kant the idea that the “explanatory function” of reference (of a conception of what one is referring to) is “a normative function” (ST, p. 432). Objects or referents “provide a standard for assessments of the correctness of judgments and deeds” (ST, 432). Hegel’s pragmatist move is, according to Brandom, to ask the following question: “What must one do in order thereby to be taking it that one’s cognitive and practical commitments answer to such a standard?” (ST, p. 433). It is essential to conceptual contents that they have an “of” dimension, a representational dimension of being “directed at objects” (ST, p. 433). On Brandom’s view of Hegel (this is also Brandom’s own view), this dimension “can be understood to begin with” in terms of taking the conceptual contents “to stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. That is, taking it that commitments to some contents preclude or exclude commitments to some others, and include commitments to still others” (ST, p. 433). Just as we learn in the cycle of intentional action which steps are incompatible with our original intention, so too we learn of any content that it is incompatible with other content. Brandom preserves his realist element in holding that “how [things] are in themselves swings free of how they are for the subject” (ST, p. 434). The question of what is referred to cannot be answered through some kind of direct inspection or by Fregean “truth,” but can only be answered by “correct inferences,” or “the truth process” (ST, p. 435). There is no other way to think of reference except in terms of sense. “The notion of what things are in themselves is the notion of how what things are for us ought to be. Hegelian referents are expressively ideal senses” (ST, p. 435). It follows from this view that reference can only be constructed with others who can challenge one’s commitments, or by an individual over time through a series of experiences, in

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which the commitments of earlier selves are joined in a narrative of self-correction with her current commitments. The sense–reference relation for Brandom’s Hegel comes down in the end to telling a certain kind of retrospective story about one’s experience. One must “perform a recollection,” providing a “rational reconstruction” of conceptual content that exhibits that content “as the culmination of an expressively progressive trajectory selected from one’s actual experiential past” (ST, p. 437). One leaves out the “wrong turns, blind alleys, and retrograde steps” (ST, p. 437) in one’s actual experience in order to show how one’s current commitments were always implicit in one’s previous experience. Brandom is happy to call such recollection “Whiggish history,” triumphalist in ignoring the retrograde in favor of the progressive. He continues, “performing such an Erinnerung is treating all the senses as cognitively presenting the referent, in that they actually produce knowledge of it as the culmination of the reconstructed trajectory through the actual course of development” (ST, p. 439). Tying the sense–reference claim back to his main argument for conceptual idealism, Brandom argues that the expressive “truth process,” a continuous process of improvement recounted after the fact, “secures the semantic and cognitive relations between senses and their referents” (ST, p. 440). The conceptual idealism and conceptual realism turn out to be mutually supporting, for “a realist commitment is implicit in practically acknowledging the representational dimension of concept use. As Hegel often tells us, following Kant, his idealism is his way (he claims, the only ultimately satisfactory way) of making realism intelligible” (ST, p. 440). Just as our initially abstract intentions become intelligible in becoming actual, the real world of facts becomes intelligible through our theoretical and practical engagement with the world.

II. Three issues In this section, I raise questions about how three elements of Brandom’s view impact the conceptual realism–objective idealism–conceptual idealism triad. One aspect of these two chapters that separates them from the adjacent chapters is that Brandom does not thematize the dynamics of recognition here. This abstraction from the intersubjective processes of giving and asking for reasons makes it easier to draw out some essential tensions in his interpretation. For each of these three issues, I suggest an Hegelian solution that I believe is implicit in Brandom’s view, but whose absence makes his conclusions less clear than they could be. My suggested corrections will be sketchy and tentative, but will gain definition in section IV when I turn to Hegel’s text. My first concern is with a potential bait-and-switch move in Brandom’s realism and the sense–reference distinction. With his initial appeal to conceptual realism as a claim about the mind-independence of the world’s relations of incompatibility, and his treatment of objective idealism as fully compatible with that realism, Brandom invites the reader to think of Hegel’s view as a sober interpretive superstructure on an already constituted realm of objective relations. Brandom first introduces the sense–reference distinction into his interpretation of Hegel in laying out the nature of the objective idealism claim. The objective relations and subjective processes are said to be

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“reciprocally sense-dependent.” Opposed to this is the (genuinely crazy) claim of “reference-dependence,” which he glosses as a claim about existence.2 But—and here comes the switch—the sense–reference distinction seems to break down in the Chapter 12 discussion, and Brandom seems to aim to break it down with a deflationary understanding of reference. The claims that “referents are expressively ideal senses” (ST, p. 435) and “referents are a privileged kind of sense” (ST, p. 436) are claims about referents as normative standards revealed in processes of sense-making. The problem is that it is not clear where that leaves his initial claims about realism, or the initial claims about the reference-dependence that contrasts with sense-dependence. When he moves to the claim that senses produce the referents, I really start to lose my grip on how the distinction could underwrite the conceptual realism and the objective idealism. It seems that the reciprocal sense-dependence claim, suitably amped up, becomes a reciprocal reference-dependence claim. His conceptual realism seems to disallow this, but it is hard to tell how it would be avoided in the end. Is there enough left of the sense–reference distinction to preserve the realist point? The first thing to note in sorting out this issue is that Brandom’s conceptual realism is not quite as baldly realist as it seems. It is, from the beginning, a claim about conceptual content, where this content is for consciousness. Reference is a relation to be achieved from the side of consciousness, so it is not like Brandom begins with an endorsement of naive or direct realism, even though some of his formulations do make it seem that way. Even with this softening of the initial realism, there remains the issue of what kind of realism results once the conceptual idealism argument has been completed. What counts as reality once we have accepted that the “whole constellation” of sense and reference is to be understood on the basis of subjective processes? Does Brandom aim to leave the world the way it was anyhow, and the idealism is just a question of our access to that world? He does seem to have Wittgensteinian leanings in this direction, but I do not think that is his view. Or, to put it slightly differently, it ought not to be his view of Hegel. Granting that there is some kind of natural scientific realist level (involving such claims as Brandom’s favorite example of the melting point of copper), the question is how to leave that in place while arguing that Hegel’s idealism goes beyond that in its attention to normativity. My suggestion is that what Brandom ought to say is that there is an order of the real that is constituted by conceptual activity, and in particular by the element of self-reference that looms so large in Hegel. Brandom’s conceptual idealism can seem like a thesis adding another metalayer to material already constituted anyway. We should read it instead as the elevation to the status of reality of the ideal processes of sense-making through which we understand ourselves and put other items in the world in their place. My second question is closely related to the first, for it concerns the way in which senses and referents are supposed to relate to each other. Brandom holds that the role played by truth in Frege’s version of the sense–reference relation is played in Hegel “by concern for correct inferences, for what a sense or content really follows from and is really incompatible with what” (ST, p. 435). There must be a way that things are independent of our attitudes, but we cannot access this directly. We must, rather, approach how things really are through making inferences about how things show up for us,

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present themselves to us. Brandom clearly wants to have it both ways here: to adhere to a realism about how things really are, but to determine how things really are only through how they appear, so that the best current story about appearance really is how things are.3 This seems unstable as a truce between realism and idealism. The realists will always feel like the account is one step short of saying what the really real amounts to, and the idealists will feel like the account only aims at discovery of what is already there. To the realist Brandom’s Hegel will seem like a radical social constructivist, while to the idealists the view will seem to be, to use Pippin’s phrase, an “inferential positivism” (Pippin 2005, p. 392).4 Once again the challenge is how to do justice to the theoretical paradigm of the world as it is anyway while giving priority to the practical activities of reasoning. The issue, which Hegel presents most explicitly in the third part of The Science of Logic, is how to relate “the Idea of the true” and “the Idea of the good.” Hegel’s answer there would fit Brandom’s view in so far as Hegel stresses the superiority of the practical inference of action to the merely theoretical inferences. Hegel calls the practical inference “the inference of the self-subsistent free Concept” (GW 12, p. 159). In Hegel’s view there is a certain givenness in the theoretical conception of the true that makes it inferior to the practical conception of the good. Brandom does pick up on this in emphasizing the active character of the subjective processes. But I would take this one step further and emphasize the evaluative character of the practical inferences, the way in which they incorporate and subordinate the causes and effects of the theoretical inferences in making the world conform to our purposes. This brings me to my third and final question, which concerns the relation of “modeling” that Brandom invokes to connect the theoretical and practical domains. This is basically a question about his pragmatism, and about how he sees pragmatism informing Hegel’s idealism. Take, for instance, Brandom’s claim that “[i]ntentions in this sense are the guiding norms on the practical side that we are to use as the model of facts that guide the development of concepts on the theoretical side” (ST, pp. 443f.). What kind of model is this? One way to read this would be Deweyan, and roughly instrumentalist. Treating intention as an experimental hypothesis, we could say that the action-experiment consists in putting the hypothesis-intention into effect, and the successful experimental result is the realization of the hypothesis. On this parallel, the intention-like facts are contained in the hypothesis, and should the hypothesis need to be revised as a result of the experiment, the facts would change along with it. The hypothesis or intention plays the role of fact by partly determining the circumstances of its own application upfront, in the construction of the experiment. We aim for a certain theoretically specified determination of the facts, and the agreement or disagreement of the results with the hypothesis will lead us to revise our conception of the facts, or in Brandom’s language, our commitments. This makes good sense on Brandom’s view, as long as we keep in focus that there is a “cycle of action” involving both intentions and the facts modeled on them. My worry, though, is that this talk of intention-like facts is too indeterminate. The talk of facts leads us to expect something that is independent in some sense from the subject. We may access facts through what we do (especially through revision of our commitments), and in this limited sense the

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facts would be the result of our action. This threatens to reduce the conceptual idealism to the objective idealism, for it amounts to the claim that the processes of cognition determine the sense-dependence of objects and concepts. It is not clear what extra work the metalevel subjective processes are supposed to do. To locate the advance beyond objective idealism through the cycle of action we should attend more to Hegel’s insight that there are different kinds of objects, different kinds of facts, where the distinguishing feature of the facts is their level of self-determination. Instead of seeing the facts as modeled on intention, Brandom should see the intentional as the paradigm kind of fact in terms of which all other facts are evaluated. One of the most striking omissions from Brandom’s account of Hegel is an in-depth discussion of the living, of organic entities, but it is precisely there that we have objects or facts that have an internally self-revising process within them. Of course, in one sense Brandom is constantly talking about such an entity, for human community or Geist is the ultimate form of the living. The worry, though, is that in his realism–idealism discussions too much attention is paid to the epistemological project of making sense of facts that are already there, and not enough to the specific relations within the internally purposive, living wholes.

III. Two comparisons In this section I will attempt to home in on Brandom’s conceptual idealism by comparing it to two other accounts inspired by Hegel. The first comparison is with Brandom’s own teacher, Richard Rorty. In this case, Brandom has in effect done much of the comparative work for us in his essay on Rorty’s pragmatism entitled “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism.” There he worries about elements in Rorty’s position that bear no small similarity to elements of the position he extracts from Hegel in A Spirit of Trust. In what follows, he may, like the natural consciousness in the Phenomenology, thereby “suffer violence at his own hands.” If so, I hope it is with similarly productive results. Since he advocates measuring one’s previous selves by one’s current commitments, Brandom could eliminate (as retrograde) his earlier text from his performative recollection, but I am guessing that he would not.5 As the title of the piece indicates, the concern throughout is with Rorty’s emphasis on our vocabularies, where vocabularies are the vehicles of meaning and truth. The criticism of Rorty around which Brandom bases his essay turns on Rorty’s Davidsonian claim that “[t]he world consists of things and their causal relations, and they can only cause and not justify a claim or a belief” (VP, p. 161). Justification is inferential, and what justifies a claim or a belief is only another claim or belief. Every truth and fact depends on a human vocabulary, so that without vocabularies there are no truths and no facts (VP, p.161). Brandom chastises Rorty for doing away with facts that can make claims correct or incorrect. That is, he criticizes Rorty for doing away with the realistic core that Brandom attributes to Hegel. Rorty could be said to rely for justification solely on the subjective processes that figure in the reciprocal sense-dependence claim of objective idealism, for a vocabulary just is such a sense-making. Rorty has the metalevel story or metavocabulary—Brandom calls it the metavocabulary of vocabularies (VP, p. 169)—

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that is pivotal for conceptual idealism, but he is lacking the conceptual realism and thus has no anchor for the content in the world. My question here is whether Brandom himself can still retain his conceptual realism in light of the two varieties of idealism, or whether his own reading of Hegel falls prey to the same criticisms that the earlier Brandom had leveled against Rorty. Is his phenomenological semantic reading of Hegel just what it sounds like—a doctrine of appearances or vocabularies that floats free of realistic constraint? Brandom’s summary of Rorty’s view presents the link to action in Deweyan terms. We assess the success or failure of a vocabulary based on its instrumental success as a tool to achieve our purposes. Brandom thematizes the difference between naturalistic and historicist modes of assessment of the success of vocabularies. He characterizes the historicist mode in much the same language that he uses in A Spirit of Trust to characterize Hegel’s conceptual idealism: success can only be judged retrospectively, and he uses as his example the proposal to “rewrite the history of art Whiggishly” (VP, p. 171) from the perspective of nineteenth-century realist painting. One of the nice things about reading this essay in conjunction with Chapter 12 is that Brandom actually expresses here some of the worries that come naturally in reading Brandom’s own endorsement of Whiggish history. He writes, “Historicist pragmatism courts the dangers of smugness and empty self-satisfaction. For it is far too easy to tell Whiggish retrospective stories, rationally reconstructing one’s tradition as a monotonic approach to the pinnacle of one’s current vocabulary” (VP, p. 171). He also states nicely the dangers of the naturalist pragmatist, who, runs the risk of “reductionism and philistinism” (VP, p. 171) by indexing all progress to the basic goals of welfare. Though Brandom clearly favors the historicist approach, he does think that the naturalist perspective is a good antidote to the “self-satisfied parochialism” (VP, p. 171) that is the hazard of the historicist. In the end, Brandom largely agrees with Rorty in arguing for a pragmatism of complementary vocabularies, each able to check the excesses of the others, and all subject to the metavocabulary of vocabularies, a modestly metaphysical, inclusionary semantics. In his reply, Rorty is doubtful that Brandom’s move to the social is enough to get a robust account of “facts” off the ground. Rorty is especially doubtful that any such account of facts is desirable. Encouraging a view in which there are “hard facts” accessed through immediate perception seems to give too much comfort to the enemy, that is, to the “authoritarian” view that treats hard science as having a privileged kind of reality compared to literature or baseball (2000, p. 187). This argument highlights an interesting tension in Brandom’s view: the tension between conceptual realism as an abstract thesis about the independence from human practices, on the one hand, and the intelligibility of that realism as a thesis about sense-making and the subjective social processes of reason-giving, on the other. Brandom does not say that the world is “well lost,” yet he is willing to say that we make and remake the world with our developing conceptual arsenal. It is striking that Rorty is happy to take on board Brandom’s shift to metavocabularies, for that move promises to further distance us from the truth-making qualities of facts that Brandom had proposed as an antidote to Rorty’s view.

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One further noteworthy point from this reply is Rorty’s remark that Brandom exposes himself to the charges (frequently leveled against Rorty himself) of “pseudo-aristocratic condescension and ivory-tower aestheticism” (2000, p. 189). In the essay, Brandom had joined Rorty in saying that contributing to the great conversation of humanity is what fundamentally gives us moral worth. The danger with focusing on these most distinctively human capacities is not hard to find in Brandom’s claim (flagged by Rorty) that “pain, and like it various sorts of social and economic deprivation, have a second-hand, but nonetheless genuine, moral significance” (VP, p. 178). One could summon a similar unease in reading A Spirit of Trust because its focus on expressivity does not encourage us to dwell on the basic needs and travails of the finite, embodied agent. Another Hegelian, one of a decidedly more conservative bent, who developed the concept of a historical tradition as a response to the shortcomings of analytic moral philosophy, is Alasdair MacIntyre. Reading A Spirit of Trust alongside MacIntyre’s account in After Virtue raises the question of whether the concept of tradition entails substantive commitments that Brandom might not be willing to accept. MacIntyre is dealing specifically with moral vocabulary, and advocating a return to an Aristotelian teleology, whereas Brandom’s account is semantic and for the most part stays in a deontological register, but both are focused on the Hegelian issue of determinate content. MacIntyre writes in an unmistakably Hegelian vein, “Without those moral particularities to begin from there would never be anywhere to begin; but it is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good, for the universal, consists. Yet particularity can never be simply left behind or obliterated” (1984, p. 221). This is not far from the idea of the common law as an interpretive tradition that Brandom endorses. For MacIntyre we are “bearers of a tradition” (1984, p. 221) whether we like it or not, and yet he has a surprisingly open-ended, self-critical view: “A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition” (1984, p. 222). For MacIntyre, the notion of a tradition puts some substantive constraints on what a coherent moral theory and practice could be. Specifically, a tradition is closely bound to a unified human life. Tying his discussion into his overall polemic, MacIntyre writes, “Unsurprisingly it is the lack of any such unifying conception of a human life which underlies modern denials of the factual character of moral judgments and more especially of those judgments which ascribe virtues or vices to individuals” (1984, p. 225). From MacIntyre’s substantive moral standpoint, it is not clear whether Hegel is part of the solution or part of the problem. Is Hegel’s modernism a decisive break with the Aristotelian tradition? Or is it a heroic attempt to reconcile a Kantian Enlightenment view with Aristotelian naturalism and teleology? The comparison with Brandom gets even more interesting when we look at MacIntyre’s postscript to the second edition of After Virtue. There he cites Rorty as drawing the consequences of the breakdown of the Kantian distinctions, and as showing that analytic philosophy’s “competence has been restricted to the study of inferences” (1984, p. 267). On this view of inferences, they can only stand in justificatory relation to each other, and coherent systems of such inferences can be

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immunized from critique by the others. This has the effect that analytic, non-historicist philosophy “can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope” (1984, p. 267). What is interesting here is that Brandom’s conception of philosophy, and his effort to move analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian phase, shares MacIntyre’s concerns about the inadequacy of ahistorical, anti-realist inferentialism to meet the purposes of philosophy. MacIntyre’s historicist conclusion about the need for rethinking what counts as a successful theory also resonates with Brandom: our situation in respect of theories about what makes one theory rationally superior to another is no different from our situation in regard to scientific theories or to moralities-and-moral-philosophies. In the former as in the latter case what we have to aspire to is not a perfect theory, one necessarily to be assented to by any rational being, because invulnerable or almost invulnerable to objections, but rather the best theory to emerge so far in the history of this class of theories. So we ought to aspire to provide the best theory so far as to what type of theory the best theory so far must be: no more, but no less. (1984, p. 270) I take it that Brandom has given us in his Hegel interpretation just such a meta-theory. We might worry, though, about whether the inclusionary, pragmatist pluralism of his meta-theory will really admit of genuine judgments about specific theories, or about specific moral and political practices. We need not even focus on the best practices, but only on better and worse, in order to generate this worry. How do we get beyond coherence as a standard for our recollective narratives? What kind of arguments can we make to justify one coherent story as superior to another?

IV. Locating conceptual idealism in the Phenomenology I have not yet said much about Brandom’s views in Chapters 11 and 12 as a reading of Hegel. Brandom’s exegetical style has at times caused undue suspicion of the inferentialist interpretation; there is a tendency to assume that he is imposing his own concerns on Hegel rather than accurately expressing what is already there. This tendency is unfortunate, because Hegel is an inferentialist, and Brandom’s interpretations generally are well-grounded in the text. That being said, the path from Hegel’s texts to Brandom’s formulations is harder to make out in Chapters 11 and 12 than in other parts of A Spirit of Trust. Where exactly in the Reason chapter does Hegel make an argument for conceptual idealism? Brandom writes that the thesis “emerges” in the course of the chapter, and his own account places the emphasis on the account of action at the beginning of Reason C. On the face of it, Reason C is a treatment of early modern individualistic forms of agency, and thus does not seem fit to bear the weight that Brandom assigns to it. Yet I do see a

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textual basis in Reason for an idealist thesis similar to Brandom’s, and I will take this closing section to draw it out in relation to Brandom’s view. Why should we think that anything like Hegel’s distinctive brand of idealism emerges in Reason? The chapter is strange, to say the least, consisting of a first long section on Observing Reason which deals mainly with the emerging natural sciences, a section entitled The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through Itself, and finally a third section Individuality Which to Itself Is Real in and for Itself. While the importance of Hegel’s discussion of action has been recognized by many commentators, the lessons of the chapter have most often been construed negatively: the failure of “observation,” the failure of one-sided reference to one’s own standards of morality, the failure of individualist models of action. There is strong evidence that Hegel’s change in plan for the Phenomenology happened in the middle of writing the Reason chapter, which only adds to the conundrum of what exactly is accomplished in these three sections. The most efficient way to get a grip on the systematic function of the Reason chapter is by looking at Hegel’s recapitulation of the argument in Absolute Knowing. Much of that enigmatic text is Hegel’s attempt to join together the structure (he says “form”) of objectivity laid out in Chapters I–III with the social and historical account in Chapters V and VI. (Chapter IV is not thematized in detail, but it does play a crucial role.) Hegel’s recapitulation is oriented by the goal of overcoming consciousness, which means uniting the form of objectivity in the Consciousness chapters with the account of Self-Consciousness and Spirit in the rest of the book. He describes the joining of the two accounts as the “reconciliation of Spirit with its own genuine consciousness” (PG/P, §793) and the “reconciliation of consciousness with self-consciousness” (PG/P, §794). These formulations indicate that something fundamental for Hegel’s idealism is captured in the unification of the two accounts, and Hegel does indicate that this unification gets under way within Reason. He describes in more detail just what has happened in Chapters V and VI as follows: This overcoming of the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly, as showing that the object is returning into the self, but rather, it is to be taken more determinately, both that the object as such exhibited itself to the self as vanishing, as well as being instead the self-relinquishing [Entäusserung] of selfconsciousness that posits thinghood, and that this self-relinquishing does not only have a negative meaning but rather a positive one as well, and not only for us, or in itself, but also for self-consciousness itself. (PG/P, §788) What follows this passage is a summary description of the structure of objectivity in Chapters I–III, culminating with a description of the inferential structure resulting from the “inverted world” at the end of Force and the Understanding. There are four principal conceptual moments: (1) immediacy (Sense-Certainty), (2) relation or determinacy (Perception), (3) essentiality or law (most of Force and the Understanding), and (4) holistic inferential relations (inner difference and infinity). In his recapitulation, Hegel aligns (1) with the end of Observing Reason, (2) with the “utility” that

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is the truth of the Enlightenment, (3) with the Kantian moral worldview, and (4) with conscience, including confession and forgiveness.6 There are a host of interpretive problems raised by this mapping. Why is phrenology such a significant concept within Reason? Why does Hegel skip from Observing Reason all the way to utility, which had seemed like a relatively minor moment in Bildung? The recapitulation clearly does emphasize the end of Spirit that looms so large in Part 3 of A Spirit of Trust (and in my own 2011), the recognition of conscience as agency in confession and forgiveness. A full account of action in the Phenomenology would indeed need to focus on that holistic culmination, but we can get a grip on the main issue through looking just at the first two moments. First, let us try to reconstruct Brandom’s argument in light of Hegel’s statement of the recollective task of Absolute Knowing. In Brandom’s argument for objective idealism, the key idea is the reciprocal sense-dependence of relations of objectivity (Hegel’s categories of Consciousness) on the subjective process of experience (Hegel’s Self-Consciousness). This bring us up to Chapter V, Reason, setting up the project of understanding how the objective relations of nature are related to the subjective processes of living human beings. Conceptual idealism, then, is the answer to a choice that Brandom presents as follows: do we understand the constellation of objective relations and subjective processes through “the relational categories of objectivity or the practical-processual categories of subjectivity?” (ST, p. 369). Conceptual idealism is the claim that there is an explanatory priority of the latter categories, and intentional agency is so important because it is the prime exemplar of those processes. In light of Hegel’s recapitulations in Absolute Knowing, one might think that something has gone very wrong in Brandom’s interpretation. The point of the Absolute Knowing presentation is not to choose between different categories of objectivity and subjectivity. Rather, Hegel’s argument is that those categories are fundamentally the same. Overcoming the form of the object means reconciliation with the structure of consciousness through demonstrating that subjectivity has produced a world which allows it to experience itself as objective, as embodying those very same relational categories. So, whereas Brandom asks us to choose between two sets of categories, Hegel takes his own demonstration to show that there is only one set of categories. The reconciliation of consciousness and self-consciousness is the realization of that identity in the rationally reconstructed history of Spirit. But this criticism of Brandom is too simplistic. Looked at in another way, we can read Hegel’s account in Absolute Knowing as the claim of a certain kind of priority. In the last part of the description above (from PG/P, §788), Hegel writes that in Reason and Spirit, the categorical structure of the object is shown to originate in the activity of self-consciousness itself, and to gain a meaning that is known by selfconsciousness as the product of its own (self-alienating, or “self-relinquishing”) activity. This can be seen as supporting Brandom’s conceptual idealism in that the objective relations considered on their own are subordinated to the self-conscious form that they take in the subjective practices and processes of Reason and Spirit. Conceptual idealism would then be the claim that the practical, processual versions of immediacy, relation, essence, and holistic infinity take priority over the versions

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of those categories that seem to structure the world independently of whether or not there are subjects to know it. Viewed in this light, it is certainly misleading for Brandom to talk about two sets of categories, but his basic point about the priority of the subjective processes is sound. Returning to my concerns from section II, I would like now to suggest how Brandom’s framework could give a more robust priority of the practical while also more clearly preserving the objects of the theoretical domain. I criticized his account as wavering between doing too little to the theoretical (leaving alone the realist core) and doing too much (replacing referents with senses, etc.). When we examine the practical recapitulation of the Phenomenology, what we find is a shift from the theoretical to the practical that maintains a difference but establishes a clear superiority and priority of the practical. A closer look at Hegel’s description of the transition from Observing Reason will bring out what I think Brandom should say about conceptual idealism’s subjective processes. Hegel’s recapitulation of the transition from phrenology to active reason and the Enlightenment conception of utility does support a version of conceptual idealism similar to Brandom’s. Hegel writes, Thus, with regard to the object, insofar as it is immediate and is an indifferent being, we saw observing reason seeking and finding itself in these indifferent things, i.e., as consciously aware of its doing as external doing as much as it is consciously aware of the object merely as an immediate object.—We also saw its determination at its highest point expressed in the infinite judgment that the being of the I is a thing.—namely, as a sensuous immediate thing. […] Taken in that way, that former judgment is spiritless, or instead spiritlessness itself. However, according to its concept, it is in fact the richest in spirit, and this, its inner, which is not yet present in the concept, is what is expressed in the two other moments which are still to be examined. (PG/P, §790) Hegel criticizes physiognomy and phrenology for trying to predict human action, to read intention and character, by observing the face and the shape of one’s skull. Hegel thus clearly argues against theories that try to give priority to “objective relations” of face and cranium over the subjective processes of action. But he finds in the judgment that expresses the extreme version of Observing Reason the key to overcoming the observational conception of knowledge, the key to introducing the priority of the subjective, of the I. How does Hegel justify the switch from the spiritless to the most rich in spirit? By a reversal of consciousness, which in this case takes the form of a reversal of the judgment “The I is a thing.” Phrenology leaves us with the result that Spirit is a bone. But if we reverse sides, taking what is for-consciousness as the new in-itself, we find that the identity of Spirit and thinghood is our new object. We henceforth can treat things in the world as material expressions of Spirit.

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This transition is so momentous because it represents a shift from fact to value, where the trajectory henceforth is to show that value and valuing have a rational structure. A clue to this reading comes in the Absolute Knowing recapitulation in Hegel’s quick (and rather jarring) move to the Enlightenment.7 He writes, The thing is I: In fact, in this infinite judgment, the thing is sublated. The thing is nothing in itself; it only has any meaning [Bedeutung] in relationships, only through the I and its relation to the I.—In fact, this moment emerged for consciousness in pure insight and Enlightenment. Things are purely and simply useful and are only to be considered in terms of their utility. (PG/P, §791) Utility is a way to think about meaning in relation to human purposes. It is a value term that enables us to think of the items in the world as potential for human agency. The counterpart of utility in Consciousness is the perceptual category of relation, which consists of two moments, for-itself and for-another. Utility provides a substantive correlate of this relationality in terms of a world of value and a form of agency that views objects as nothing more than functions of its purposes. So, let us ask again Brandom’s conceptual idealism question: what gives the subjective inferential processes priority over the objective inferential relations? Brandom stresses the pragmatist dimension: there is something we must do, a normative act, a question of responsibility that is not determined, and cannot be determined, by the objective inferential relations alone. This is fine, as far as it goes, but I think the explicit introduction of value into the picture gives us something more to say, something that makes better intuitive sense of the idealism in play here. On the value reading we can say that the subjective processes take priority because they are what determine relationships of value—most basically, what is essential and what is inessential. That is true of science as an active practice, but also, and more importantly, of ethical practice. The true is what is good in the way of belief, and the ethically good (Hegel’s “Idea of the Good”) incorporates and subordinates the world that consists of merely objective causal relations. The priority of process in this absolute idealism should be cast as the priority of practices of value over matters of fact. (I would also stress that there is an underlying structure of valuing that we can identify with the Concept, but I cannot go into that argument here.) This value-oriented conclusion should really not be that surprising once the importance of action has been acknowledged. Sometimes Brandom’s emphatic deontology gets in the way, but in so far as meaning and value are closely related concepts, I think that this shift towards value can be seen as implicit in Brandom’s inferentialist reading. His specific analysis of action lends itself to interpretation in terms of value conceptions such as utility. While utility does not involve the fullblown distinction between Brandom’s intentional and consequential conceptions of action, Hegel’s description of the object of action as involving the contradiction between for-itself and for-others does clearly highlight the tension between the two sides of that distinction. In fact, we could say that the Enlightenment’s utility-

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based ethics is an initial stabilization of the tension between the intentional (foritself) and consequential (for-another), though one destined to give birth to the French Revolution and then to destroy itself because of the absence of stable patterns of value.8 Critics of modernity such as MacIntyre basically think that the dead end of the Revolutionary terror is the ultimate fate of modern freedom. The question for Brandom’s reading of the Spirit chapter is whether his Hegel can demonstrate that recognition and conscience can save modern freedom from itself. The question for my value interpretation is whether it leads to an overly edifying picture of philosophy that rests on a wishful Platonic value metaphysics. Hegel did worry about one-sided claims for the primacy of the practical, but that does not mean that his ultimate goals were merely theoretical. Hegel’s philosophy is an ethical idealism, and his theory of value is crucial for understanding his metaphysics as well as his practical philosophy. If we see value as standing in irreconcilable opposition to the real or to the true, that is our fault, not the result of a fissure in the concepts or in reality itself. Brandom is right to stress that this reconciliation is our responsibility, something that is up to us. Before we can make the claim that the good is the measure of the real and the rational, we have to do the work, theoretical and practical, to demonstrate that we are entitled to that identity.

Notes 1 Brandom responds to Pippin’s charge (in Pippin 2005) that his idealism is too “anodyne” (ST, pp. 213ff.). 2 “That is, even if the concept nail is sense dependent on the concept hammer, it would not follow that it was impossible for there to be nails without there being hammers to drive them” (TMD, p. 195). 3 Brandom’s view is similar to that of Peirce, who wrote, “Upon our principle, therefore, that the absolutely incognizable does not exist, so that the phenomenal manifestation of a substance is the substance, we must conclude that the mind is a sign developing according to the laws of inference” (1981–, vol. 2, pp. 241f.). 4 See Bernstein’s essay in this volume for further reflections on this point. 5 The piece is in fact included in one of Brandom’s more recent collections of essays, Perspectives on Pragmatism. 6 I give a more thorough treatment of this recapitulation in Moyar 2017. 7 It is especially strange that Hegel switches right away to the Enlightenment, since he already introduces these relational considerations in the first paragraph of Reason B. The basic issue here is the curiously overlapping histories of Reason and Spirit: there is a sense in which the shapes of Reason B are also Enlightenment shapes, even though they are not presented as shapes of a world. 8 This view of the relation between intention, consequence, and value is supported by the placement of “subjective value” in the Philosophy of Right §122, where Hegel thematizes means–end chains.

References Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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Brandom, Robert (2011) Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2002) Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2000) “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in R. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 156–183. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard (New York: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by A. W. Wood and translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1968–) Gesammelte Werke, edited by Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste (Hamburg: Felix Meiner). MacIntyre, Alasdair (1984) After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). Moyar, Dean (2017) “Absolute Knowledge and the Ethical Conclusion of the Phenomenology,” in D. Moyar (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 166–196. Moyar, Dean (2011) Hegel’s Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Peirce, Charles Sanders (1981–) Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition, edited by the Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Pippin, Robert (2005) “Brandom’s Hegel,” European Journal of Philosophy 13/3, pp. 381–408. Rorty, Richard (2000) “Response to Robert Brandom,” in R. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 183–190.

PART II

With an edifying intent

7 SEMANTIC SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS Terry Pinkard

Since the 1840s, the dominant reading of Hegel’s philosophy has been more or less Neoplatonic, which, to put it in brief, amounts to reading Hegel as a version of Schelling’s exuberant metaphysics of spirit with some sort of logic attached to it. This was the version propounded in H. M. Chalybäus’ influential book, Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel, of 1839—translated into English in 1854, with a laudatory preface by no less an authority than Sir William Hamilton—and it has stuck. Along with that interpretation, an overall view gradually settled into AngloAmerican philosophy, that of the continental–analytic divide. It was always slightly ambiguous where the divide originated—at first it was said to be with Kant, then later it transferred to Fichte, and then much later, Heidegger came to be seen as the point where there was a parting of the ways—but everybody agreed that there was a divide (see Gordon 2010). In Tales of the Mighty Dead, Brandom upset the proverbial apple cart and redrew that historical narrative. Instead of an analytic– continental divide, there was a hidden history of inferentialism. Instead of the train lines breaking at Station Fichte, with one line going from there all the way up to Derrida and another breaking at Fichte to Quine, the train now moved from Kant to Hegel to Frege to Heidegger to Wittgenstein to Sellars and Rorty. (Current stop: Brandom’s own inferentialism.) This was a much different Gestalt than had been the case. The old excuse—I don’t read Hegel because he has nothing to say to my concerns—in that new Gestalt began to look a little lame. His general summary of what Hegel is trying to achieve more particularly in the Phenomenology is this: The “final lesson,” he says, is that “semantic self-consciousness, awareness of the transcendental conditions of the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes, of thinking, believing, meaning, or intending anything, consists in explicitly acknowledging an always-already implicit commitment to adopt generous recognitive attitudes of reciprocal confession and recollective

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forgiveness” (ST, p. 615). I think that, in large part, the emphasis on “semantic self-consciousness” is correct. What I want to do here is raise some worries about how Brandom takes that specifically to be at work in Hegel and ultimately to raise some worries about how we are supposed to take it, period.

I First, there is the common ground to be sought. To do this, I am going to appropriate A. W. Moore’s recent way of distinguishing “making sense of things” from “making sense of making sense” (Moore 2013). Moore’s distinction is helpful precisely because it is so broad—when we say, “making sense of things,” we are faced with lots of possible ways of making sense of things, and there is no reason to rule out any of them at the outset. It also helps to throw into relief the great turn that Kant made so prominent: The idea that in order to know what kind of sense we can ultimately make of things (in some appropriate sense of “ultimately”), we first have to lay down the rules for making sense in general. Hegel followed up on that suggestion. So did Heidegger. And so does Brandom. Nonetheless, Brandom sees Hegel through more or less Kantian eyes. For Brandom, Hegel is a transcendental philosopher. Once one sees Hegel as seeking something like the conditions of the very possibility of experience, or, in Brandom’s refinement of that, “the transcendental conditions of the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes” (ST, p. 615, see also TMD, p. 214), there is going to be much of the book that is going to appear at least at first as problematic. The entire chapter titled Spirit, which seems to have some kind of historical progression in it from ancient Greece to Rome to modern Europe, will seem odd. Is Roman legality really a transcendental condition for “the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes”? The Enlightenment’s struggle with religion and superstition? Even chunks of the Reason chapter will seem strange. The “law of the heart” as a transcendental condition for “the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes”? And in Religion? The “luminous essence” as a transcendental condition? Brandom has an ingenious story to tell about why these passages occur where they do. On his line of thought, the overall story that Hegel is telling us is about the nature of objectivity. It turns out that there are two mistakes we can make about this. We can take norms to be perfectly objective and to have nothing to do with our attitudes to them (which he characterizes as “hyperobjectivity”), or we can go to the opposite extreme and take norms to be established by our attitudes (“hypersubjectivity”).1 Very roughly, on Brandom’s telling, hyperobjectivity characterizes the ancient world.2 All of the Phenomenology is, in essence, an account of how we develop from hyperobjectivity to hypersubjectivity—from ancient to modern—and then finally to a reconciliation of the two which is the truth of the matter (or to the what-comes-after-the-modern). Now, on the one hand, it would seem as though, if that were the case, the history that the Phenomenology traces out would be an odd one. It would be a history of engaging in hyperobjectivity, failing over and over again to make it stick,

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then moving to hypersubjectivity, failing over and over again to make it stick, and then finally getting it right. This is reminiscent of the quote floating around on the Internet to the effect that doing something over and over again and failing but expecting nonetheless a different result is the mark of insanity. (The quote is usually, erroneously, attributed to Einstein.) If so, then the Phenomenology is really the history of, if not insane, at least very thickheaded consciousness. Brandom points out that the Phenomenology, especially in its original title, is a theory of experience, which involves “a conception of experience as a single process that is at once the application and the institution of conceptual norms” (ST, p. 568). On his view, therefore, once we have understood everything to which that phrase commits itself, we will understand why the Phenomenology is primarily a theory about the nature of objectivity. In particular, we will understand what it is for a self-conscious agent to be such an agent; or, to use his phrasing of it, we will understand this: “To be for oneself a historical being is to constitute oneself as in oneself a special kind of being: a self-consciously historical being” (ST, p. 236). In particular, we will comprehend why modern subjects have had such a hard time making sense of themselves, namely, that they took themselves wrongly in the first place. Reading the Phenomenology as a piece of transcendental philosophy, Brandom is led to conclude that what might look to the untrained eye as different accounts having something to do with the essential historicity of matters—Rome succeeding Greece, Europe succeeding Rome—must really be therefore extended allegories (or “parables”). All the stories about the mistakes involved in hyperobjectivity and hypersubjectivity are each separate allegories concerning the kinds of odd results that come from being so one-sided. Each is just another way of getting the same thing wrong. To see how this allegory unfolds and why some kinds of Hegelians might find it troubling, it is best to jump to a particular passage that Brandom takes to be important enough to make into the real centerpiece of his overall interpretative project. Hegel counters the well-known aphorism that no man is a hero to his valet by remarking that this is because the valet is merely a valet. Brandom takes this to be a crucial point in the ongoing set of allegories about normative attitudes and norms themselves, and he makes sense of it by saying that what is lacking in the valet is any real sense of what norms require. The valet takes all norms naturalistically (and therefore as not real, as merely the shadows of normative attitudes). The valet is therefore logically incapable of acknowledging any true normativity on the part of the hero. Why? The valet is a philosophical naturalist.3 (Strangely, to my mind at least, Brandom attributes the lowly status of being a moral valet to Gilbert Harman, since they are both naturalists.4 One supposes that Nietzsche and the utilitarians—even Mill?—also end up in the same boat.) How far can we go with this? First of all, if Hegel really is just offering an allegory about naturalistic philosophy, it seems like an odd choice to use valets and masters for this. Moreover, Brandom’s way of seeing the valet as endorsing a “base” (niederträchtig) naturalism ignores a key element of what Hegel takes over and transforms of Kant’s so-called “incorporation thesis” (as Henry Allison has famously dubbed it). Kant claimed that “an incentive can determine the will to

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an action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim” (Kant 1960, p. 19).5 Now, if it is true that no sensible incentive can become a motive unless it is made into a motive, then there simply is no way of prying apart incentive and motive in a self-conscious agent (in an analogous way that a selfconscious agent in the terms of Kant’s first Critique also cannot be aware of an “unsynthesized” intuition). If that is right, so Hegel argues, then what can look like a struggle between the pull of animal desire and human reason is really a struggle of reason with itself. There is no sharp separation of the motive of the action from the evaluation of the action. For self-conscious agents, the evaluations are built into the motives. In the Reason chapter in the Phenomenology, Hegel had put that idea to use when he contrasted the knight of virtue to the way of the world. The knight of virtue thinks he is struggling to realize “the good” as opposed to the agent who embodies the wicked way of the world. The knight of virtue makes reason his motive, whereas the agent characterized as “the way of the world” is moved only by natural self-interested desire. However, as Hegel puts it, this amounts only to shadow-boxing (Spiegelfechterei) since what is at stake is what counts as a good or overriding reason for each of them. The way of the world wins out not because animal passion triumphs over virtue, but because the constellation of reasons at work in the emerging early modern world win out over the reasons at work in the antiquated conceptions of virtue embodied in the knight of virtue’s practices. After authors such as Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees had already made the claim that in the newly emerging modern world, private vice could actually be public virtue, Hegel broadened considerations like that into the view that the structure of reasons that we have can itself only be comprehended in terms of its sociality and historical embeddedness.6 The moral valet is therefore not a naturalist. The valet just thinks that the “hero” is somebody who is doing what is of personal interest to him, and, as the flip side of the knight of virtue, he thinks that demonstrates that the hero is not motivated by highminded principle but only by narrow personal interest. The hero takes a personal interest in high-minded action. The moral valet thinks that the real reasons that move him are those calculated to enhance his self-interest, not because the valet has a theory, but because the valet, seeing the hero up close, can’t see the wider picture. Brandom generalizes the remark about the moral valet into a principle for interpreting the entire Phenomenology. This leads him to interpret Hegel’s conception of alienation as the view that we are alienated when we identify ourselves with our subjective attitudes (which, as Brandom argues, is untenable).7 Brandom uses this view to provide the broad structure of Hegel’s so-called philosophical allegories. Ancient life (Greece in particular) was not alienated. Modern life is. What will come after Hegel, if only we read him carefully, will be a non-alienated life, but in a different key than Greek life. This dovetails nicely with Brandom’s historical claim that Greeks were hyperobjective, moderns are hypersubjective, and (with Hegel’s help) we whatever-comes-after-the-moderns will be something like subjective–objective (that is, there will be an explicit linkage between sensedependence and reference-dependence, in Brandom’s helpful terms).

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Now, this seems entirely dubious to me as an account of the distinction between the ancients and the moderns, so even if it is Hegel’s view, it is going to be difficult to make it acceptable. However, is it really Hegel’s view? For Brandom, what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit—“ethical life,” in the usual term of art for translating it—is just “the authority of normative statuses over normative attitudes,” where that idea is fleshed out with the claim that the immediacy of “the sittlich practical attitudes” means that the standpoint of Sittlichkeit “treat[s] norms as objective matters of fact, whose normative force owes nothing to the attitudes of those who are by their nature bound by those norms” (ST, p. 483). In other words, Sittlichkeit is hyperobjectivity. Brandom understands each section of the Phenomenology as an individual allegory, as it were, a story illustrating all the ways in which hyperobjectivity and hypersubjectivity (and all the subsidiary issues that come with those types of accounts) fail to make their case as adequate philosophical accounts of agency. Now, as we noted, the arrangement of the Spirit chapter that moves from what looks like Greece to Rome to early modern Europe seems to create difficulties with being placed in that grid. Brandom has a response: We are to interpret the more obviously historical arrangement of the different allegories with an analogy to Anglo-American case law in which there is a ruling by a judge that functions as the administration of a norm (assessing the truth and success of what other judges have said) based on the precedents set by earlier judges.8 Once one judge has established a precedent, the succeeding judges must adhere to it, even though the successor judge must also decide what counts as the correct application of the norms enunciated by previous judges. Eventually that drives Brandom to interpret forgiveness and reconciliation as the way a later judge “forgives” the earlier judge for thinking that the norm called for that and not this.9 For Brandom, this is the principle behind the infinite process that constitutes Hegelian thought (construed in this way as “Reason,” Vernunft, and not “the Understanding,” Verstand). As an account of historical change itself, the model of common-law judges as a model for the Hegelian account of history is a bit of a stretch. When Rome assumed control of Greece, it did not do so in terms of extending the precedent Greek culture had established. It sacked Corinth and burned it to the ground. A slightly better model might be the establishment of common law itself: After violently subjecting the Anglo-Saxon king and his subjects at Hastings, William sent out judges to various parts of his new domain to establish his own version of the English “common law” already in place. There the object was not simply to rationally extend some old rulings but to displace many of the old rulings root and branch and replace them with a new authority, one backed up by more than semantic sanctions. There was little to no “forgiveness” practiced there, or, for that matter, by the Romans to the Greeks. (Eventually, by the time of Henry II, what came to be called the English “common law” emerged out of the mix of Norman power and past practice.) Of course, Brandom is not speaking of what actually happened. He is interested in a rational reconstruction that also shows us how things ought to proceed and how best to understand how they might have proceeded. It is a kind of rationalist genealogy. It gives us an account of one way that it could have happened, even if it did not happen that way at all, all of it in service to an account of semantical content.

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On Brandom’s view, hyperobjectivity is to be found in Hegel’s conception of Sittlichkeit, which in Brandom’s version is the paragon of hyperobjectivity. However, this seems dubious as a claim to what Hegel was after in his conception of Sittlichkeit in the Phenomenology. Sittlichkeit involves what Philippa Foot has called “fact-stating evaluations” (Foot 2001). Just as corals do best in water temperatures below 64 degrees, people do best in such and such communities where such and such virtues are cultivated. Greek Sittlichkeit is paradigmatic in this regard also because if each person in the community exercises his or her appropriate virtues according to his or her own place in the whole, then the result is a spontaneous harmony, a matter of beauty. It is not that Sittlichkeit ignores the attitudes, but that it has a more unified account of how attitudes and norms might hold together. It is not that the Greeks had no subjectivity or ignored it. In the Iliad, Hector’s speech to his wife about why he must fight Achilles—a speech explicitly quoted by Hegel in his lectures on philosophy of art—displays all the passions and inner life that would be expected of a poet singing of “subjectivity.”10 What changes with the moderns is the authority granted to this inner life—for example, to there being a reason to attending to one’s own needs as distinct and even contrary to the social whole—and not something else. Moreover, looking at the Greeks as if they were hyperobjectivists misconstrues, I think, the role that tragedy plays in that shape of life. For Brandom, tragedy has to do with not-knowing. As Brandom states it, Oedipus is a tragic figure because he cannot know what he is doing.11 That fits one tragedy, but it hardly does justice to the stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Orestes, et al. Greek tragedy concerns itself not just with the failure of some cognitive power or status, but with the way in which gods and people seem to be interacting in a way that dooms otherwise good people to a bad end. Tragedy occurs when human beings are not in harmony with their world such that their best actions betray them and thereby lead to their suffering or destruction. For Hegel, the Greeks make tragedy into a form of art whose aim is to show us not only how we fall out of harmony with the world, but also what shape a restoration of that harmony needs to take and why that shape would be reconciliatory for us—reconciliatory in the sense that we comprehend that this makes sense, this is the way it had to be.12 However, what tragedy as art actually introduced into Greek life was the disturbing idea that the whole did not really make sense at all. The clashes in human life are in many ways mirrors of the clashes of the gods among themselves, and those clashes are for us unintelligible. It gets worse: it seems that the gods themselves are subject to a necessity that for them is unintelligible, that of “fate.” If Sittlichkeit is based on a core trust that the whole will spontaneously harmonize if all do what is required of each, or that the harmony can be restored through divine or human practices of punishment, then when the whole starts to look unintelligible, the trust itself starts to dissolve, and with the dissolution of that trust, so does the social whole. What each experiences is not the calm practice of a common-law judge seeking to lay down the law in light of what the precedents mean, but the breakdown and dissolution of a shape of life itself and the constellation of principles

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and passions that held it together. The breakdown of such a shape of life is accompanied by alienation, but not in Brandom’s sense of identifying immediately rather with one’s own subjective attitudes. It amounts to carrying on in terms of principles that no longer make sense. One is carrying on without understanding what one is doing or at least without understanding the point of it. In the ruins of such a breakdown, the people living through it pick up the pieces, keep what still works, discard what no longer makes sense, and fashion something new out of the rubble. The German term for that in Hegel’s thought is Aufhebung. (At best, the practices of common law are a small subspecies of Aufhebung, not its basic model.) Likewise, the view that tragedy is essentially about not-knowing forces Brandom to conclude that “heroism” for Hegel consists in agents identifying with their deeds, fessing up, as it were, to the buck stopping with them even when the deed itself—the consequences of the action—was wholly unintended and unforseeable.13 For Brandom, heroes are thus a consequence of “immediate Sittlichkeit.”14 This view of tragedy and heroism thereby seems to force him to the conclusion that the tragedy of Greek life consisted in its not being modern.15 Hegel, on the other hand, describes heroes as mythical or at least mythically colored figures. They occur in the periods prior to the formation of states. Indeed, one of the things they do is to found states.16 Heroes are aesthetic exemplars of freedom, not figures in real life.17 In heroes, we have a sensuous picture, as it were, of what it means for an agent to act without regard for principle and for the action necessarily to come out right. The hero exemplifies what a full “beingat-one-with-oneself” (Beisichsein) would look like, which is a status only attainable in an aesthetic (that is, mythical) form.

II Once Brandom has set up the dialectic in the way he has done, the only conclusion he can draw about the chapter on forgiveness and reconciliation is to see it as a “parable” of the difference between the normative and natural. The confession by the judging consciousness that he is evil can only be an illegitimate assumption on his part that it is only his own normative attitudes that count.18 With his own “common law” model of historical transition, this also leads him to the conclusion that the judge “forgives” the other in terms of offering a rational reconstruction of the concepts used by the one who is to be forgiven as having a precedential significance but being modified in light of new circumstances.19 What Brandom calls “forgiveness” is thus the progressive, self-described “Whiggish” nature of his conception of history as exhibiting something along the lines of decision-making within the common law. The confession by one of the parties amounts to saying, “I got (or may have gotten) some concepts wrong” (which for a fallibilist means that such confession goes on forever), and forgiveness amounts to “recasting the previous actual applications of concepts so as to exhibit them as a cumulative, expressively progressive revelation of the contents of Verstand-determinate concepts that show up as having been always already all along the ones knowers and agents were binding themselves by” (ST, p. 613).20 Moreover, this endless cycle, as

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Brandom describes it, of confession and forgiveness has by his lights its historical roots in the Pietist tradition that sees the creation of the kingdom of God here on earth as an endless task, which, although Hegel was not raised as a Pietist and only had some ancestors who were Pietists, Brandom thinks he nonetheless assumed. (Brandom justifies this interpretation by what he takes to be the extreme concision of the chapter itself.21) This seems like an odd interpretation of forgiveness as something more akin to scientific progress. (Einstein would be “forgiving” Newton on this picture.) It also is at the very least contentious as an interpretation of the relevant chapter in Hegel. Forgiveness is admittedly a hard concept to pin down, but it involves forgiving a wrong done by one person to another (or perhaps to another community). The one who forgives freely exercises a power not to reshape the wrongdoer’s concepts, but to make the wrongdoer no longer ethically or morally beholden to them. If it seems odd to say that earlier judges have wronged later judges and must be forgiven, at least it is not Hegel who is making that point. Newton did not wrong Einstein. If anything, Hegel’s own discussion seems to hark back to the way Hegel takes up Kant’s “incorporation thesis” as a statement about “radical evil.”22 For Kant, radical evil is the human propensity to subvert the moral law in favor of one’s own projects, and it lay in a feature of human agency that had to be inscrutable to us, since it did not fit into (Kant’s own) conception of the free causality of agency.23 However, for Hegel, radical evil involves a struggle of reason with itself. (This is something brought out by Kant’s own idea of its inscrutability.) It is in particular the unavoidable human tendency to see one’s own reasons as somehow pushing out other considerations—whether these reasons be those of self-interest or the perceived interest of one’s group. Reason goes awry, and the passions triumph. If anything, it is not like the Pietist conception of the endless task of realizing the kingdom of heaven on earth—a version of which, together with Schelling and Hölderlin, Hegel did hold in his youth—but more like the necessity of bringing the heart (the passions and emotions) into play in breaking down the hard heart. The confessing agent in Hegel’s language confesses, “Ich bin’s” (“I am he”; PG/P, pp. 385f.)— probably a reference to Isaiah 47:10 in Luther’s rendering: “Denn du hast dich auf deine Bosheit verlassen, da du dachtest: Man sieht mich nicht! Deine Weisheit und Kunst hat dich verleitet, dass du sprachst in deinem Herzen: Ich bin’s, und sonst keine!”24 The confessing agent admits to having cleaved only to his own way of judging. The other agent, who becomes the hard heart, refuses this overture, not because it has fallen into some naturalistic doctrine about itself or because it lacks some concept of fallibilism, but because it cannot admit that it has done, or could do, wrong. One, the acting consciousness, says to itself that it never acts until it has taken into account all the reasonable facts of the case and thus that it never does wrong. The hard heart, the judging consciousness, fights back, denying, as Hegel says, its “continuity” with the other. It too claims that it never acts until it has all the facts and for that reason never acts, thereby keeping itself pure. Both at first fanatically cling fast to the idea that somehow, as the biblical citation suggests, only his own inner (and therefore to others invisible) reality counts. (Hegel notes that he also

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takes himself to be a beautiful soul, and he is thereby “für sich,” which seems to mean more than that he is simply self-relating and not that he has made himself explicit.)25 Each is an extreme version of the Kantian agent acting out of duty, something which no other agent (and sometimes not even the acting agent himself) can on Kantian grounds observe. Such agents acting on duty alone are in this respect invisible to other agents: You cannot know whether I am acting out of duty or interest, but then on the other hand nor can I. For the innovative novelists of Kant’s time, this was an invitation to fashion an omniscient narrator who could do what none of us can: peer into the minds of acting agents to see what they are really doing. Kant even tries his own hand at giving such a narrative in his example of the grief stricken philanthropist in the Groundwork. Hegel has a different way out. As Hegel tells the story, the hard heart at first simply responds with silence, refusing even to enter into talk with the other, since any action would sully the purity of his beautiful soul.26 Ultimately, the hard heart breaks in light of the same necessity that prompts the confession in the first place: The idea of a singular individual—“Ich bin’s, und sonst keine!”—whose own subjective life is ultimately invisible makes no sense. His inner life, construed in that way, is unintelligible, and he thus becomes unintelligible even to himself. Its confession is thus not merely to fallibilism. It confesses to making no sense at all. In the aspect of mutual forgiveness, not morality per se, but a moralistic way of life— that of overly individualistic beautiful souls—simply breaks down. It is not the omniscient narrator that breaks that isolation. What drives the move is language itself as the existence (Dasein) of spirit. Language is neither active nor passive, nor is it hyperobjective nor hypersubjective in Brandom’s sense. It is instead the medium in which the agents move and in terms of which the kind of invisibility that Cartesians and even Kantians end up with vis-à-vis subjectivity itself is only a relative, not absolute invisibility. It involves therefore not the mediation between the two that is itself mediated by rules (as is the case in Brandom’s version) but a direct encounter between subjectivities, which is why Hegel says that they each “intuit” the other.27 The opposition between “universality” and the “singular individual” is sublated when it becomes apparent to the two agents that the act on the part of each is not the purely singular act each of them took it to be (either judgmentally or by directly acting itself). The singular act is not the instantiation of a general rule but is rather the exhibition of the background practice itself, and the practice itself does not exist except insofar as there are practitioners. Nor do the practice and the practitioner co-produce each other. That would be an example of what Hegel calls Wechselwirkung in his Logic, which gives way to the logic of the concept as the medium of meaning in terms of which the various agents engage in their singular ways. The practice and the practitioner are two sides of the same dialectical coin, not two elements coordinating with each other. At the end of the story, each of the two agents performs an Aufhebung of itself, picks up the pieces, and fashions a new shape for both.28 In the narrative of the Phenomenology, they do that at first in a non-discursive way, in terms of feeling (Empfindung), which makes its first appearance in religion.29

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III There is, it seems to me, a deeper reason driving Brandom’s reading. It has to do with his commitment to his own (and his mentor, Rorty’s) overall view of mind and world. That overall picture—which Rorty stitched together, as we might put it, out of two parts Sellars, one part Davidson—sees three things all working together. There are language-entrance rules, which are the causal inputs from the world on our sensory apparatus. There are language-exit rules, which are the learned causal outputs from our mental apparatus (such as “say ‘red’ when you see a red thing”). In between, there is the inferential network of concepts of various sorts. In that picture, the world impinges upon us, those inputs get linked up with a normative, conceptual inferential network, and we learn to respond to these episodes by doing or saying certain things. Brandom summarizes this in his nice formula of a “reliable differential responsive disposition” (TMD, p. 350). We share these dispositions with a number of other things (machines, other animals, etc.), but what sets us apart is our sapience, our ability to move around in the conceptual world of reasons, not of causes. Part of the force of Brandom’s view is his sophisticated account of how all the moving parts of that general account have to mesh together to make it work. His own idea of forgiveness as based in a kind of fallibilism is an important link in that account. However, this saddles him with a view of reasons that is only contentiously Hegelian and just as contentiously an account of reasons at all. For Hegel, practical reasons at least are the significance that things have for us, given the possibilities we have as the creatures we are. Reasons thus have to do with matters about which “success” and “failure” are appropriate assessments, and reasons are thus part of life, not on any metaphysically abstruse grounds, but because significance (and the possibility of failure) only arise against the background of the evolution of life itself. On this view, the zebra has a reason to start running when it sees the lion charging. The spider has a reason to move when its web starts humming in a certain way. What neither of them has, of course, is the ability to put those reasons into anything like an inferential whole, or a narrative account, or even a non-discursive pictorial showing. That is something that only self-conscious primates possess. Only self-conscious primates can stitch “Gründe” (reasons) into “Vernunft” (reason). What renders such primates problematic is that they are also historical creatures, whose possibilities change for them in large part by virtue of the institutions and practices they themselves develop, and they therefore make what counts as a reason into a moving target for reason itself. What counts as a reason for them depends on what possibilities they have, which depends on the kinds of bodies they have and on where they stand in a historical line. Nonetheless, “reasons” (as Gründe) appear at a much different place in the story for this kind of Hegel than they do for Brandom’s Hegel. This is where Hegel’s metaphors about the “organic” pay off: failure, for example, to act on a reason has to be explained in a way analogous to the way we explain disease—as something lying in the nature of things that prevents (or places barriers to) achieving the goals appropriate to a form of life, which in this case is that of rational agency. However, many of the problems with agency are not those of external factors

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(as in disease) thwarting the appropriate functioning of our powers of knowledge and action but have to do with how our powers can be thwarted in themselves, when they impose impossible conditions on themselves or make the lives lived in terms of those reasons unlivable. This is where dialectic arises, not when we simply find ourselves holding incompatible empirical commitments.30 These contents only show up to creatures whose nature is such that these and no other things can show up. What is distinctive about those self-conscious creatures is thought, and, so goes the Hegelian thesis, there is nothing that cannot show up for thought, even if there are things in the world that cannot show up even to selfconscious creatures until they have extended thought all the way to science. For Hegel, to be is to be intelligible, as Robert Pippin (2018) has convincingly shown in his recent work on the Science of Logic. Brandom’s Hegel has its historical precedents: Since it begins with a conception of itself as transcendental philosophy, it resembles Fichte’s system. Fichte, for example, concluded that full and equal recognition between subjects was a condition of the possibility of agency at all, and did not, as Hegel did, conclude that such reciprocity was a social achievement driven by deeper—we could even say “existential” problems—in living out a life based on inequality of recognition. Not acknowledging the reciprocity of recognition is, for Fichte, committing a philosophical error.31 For Hegel, not acknowledging it is the first step in a dialectic that leads to a different historical complex with a different conception of the requirements for full agency. Lack of reciprocity fails in Hegel’s system because the slave society that institutionalizes it cannot ultimately make sense to itself as it tries to carry on in that way in historical time. In Fichtean philosophy, there is a continual, infinite search for the conditions of possibility of “determinately contentful attitudes, of thinking, believing, meaning, or intending” (ST, p. 615) but there is no dialectic. In Hegel, there is little to no transcendental search, but there is dialectic. Likewise, Hegel does not, as Brandom does, begin with a minimal set of elements and then see what he has to add onto that minimal element in order to arrive at a predetermined goal. This is the method favored by many philosophers nowadays, although the predetermined goal differs—sometimes it is “what is given in an adequate phenomenology of experience,” sometimes it is “what is consistent with an overall naturalistic picture of agency,” sometimes it is “what we need to incorporate our semantic practices,” etc. Hegel, on the other hand, has a developmental approach. We do indeed start with something minimal, but the development of that conception forces us to a new one. For example, something like “Sensuous-Certainty” does not collapse because, measured against “Perception,” it fails to include that extra element that perception does include. Rather, Sensuous-Certainty itself develops into Perception out of the way in which the proponents of Sensuous-Certainty end up not making sense in those very terms themselves. The agency that Brandom attributes to Hegel is one that Hegel himself thinks we have reached only through the progressive Entäußerung—or emptying, pouring out—of our subjectivity in history. The word was Luther’s rendering of the Greek Kenosis, the way in which God supposedly thinned himself out in order to become

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human. For Hegel, it was a secular-theological thinning out which, so Hegel thought, promises to be refilled in modern Sittlichkeit. The modern notion of an agent—as a creature that acts according to intentions for reasons of which it is conscious—may be the central philosophical concept at work nowadays, but it is the historical product of a certain Western tradition. It makes it hard to situate such agency in a natural world without reducing that agency to a naturalist function or falling back on a nature–norm dualism. Hegel took himself to have avoided that, and to get back to that Hegel from Brandom’s Hegel, we are going to need a different form of naturalism than the one Brandom is ascribing to him.32

Notes 1 “So the claim is first that when the hyperobjectivity 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” (ST, p. 496). 2 Brandom on the dispute between Antigone and Creon: “The other’s attitude shows up rather as the expression of merely subjective, contingent particularity. The intransigence of the dispute is thus a consequence of the immediacy of the sittlich practical attitudes: treating norms as objective matters of fact, whose normative force owes nothing to the attitudes of those who are by their nature bound by those norms” (ST, p. 483). 3 “The most general issue Hegel is addressing in his discussion of the Kammerdiener is that of reductive naturalism about normativity” (ST, p. 556). Also: “The Kammerdiener stands for a niederträchtig, relentlessly naturalistic alternative to this edelmütig, normative description of concept use […] Reasons are traded for causes” (ST, pp. 557f.). 4 “Thought of at this level of generality, the moral-psychological valet stands for a kind of nihilism about norms that has more recently been championed by Gilbert Harman for the special case of moral norms” (ST, p. 552). 5 “[…] the observation, of great importance to morality, that freedom of the will is of a wholly unique nature in that an incentive can determine the will to an action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim (has made it the general rule in accordance with which he will conduct himself); only thus can an incentive, whatever it may be, co-exist with the absolute spontaneity of the will (i.e., freedom).” For the “incorporation thesis” itself, see Allison 1990. 6 Hegel notes in the lectures on the philosophy of history: “If I put something into practice, I must have an interest in doing so. I must be personally involved in it and hope to attain some satisfaction through its accomplishment. My own interest must be at stake. It must be my end. Nothing can happen unless the individuals concerned can also gain satisfaction for themselves as particular individuals” (Hegel 1975, p. 70). 7 “But that form of self-consciousness is alienated. Roughly, it cannot understand individual self-consciousnesses as at once creators of conceptual norms and creatures of them. It does not see that these are two necessarily complementary aspects of one process, and that it is only by suitably understanding the role they play in such a process that either individual concepts or individual selves are intelligible as determinately contentful” (ST, p. 454). “Alienation is not identifying with those normative statuses, not acknowledging the authority of norms over one’s attitudes by being willing to sacrifice attitudes for norms” (ST, p. 493). 8 “And that responsibility of the present judge to the past—to the actual content of the concept in question—is administered by future judges, who will assess in turn the precedential authority of the present judge’s construal of precedent, in terms of its fidelity to the content they recollectively discern as having been all along implicitly setting the standards of correctness of applications and assessments of applications of the concept” (ST, p. 619).

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9 “I think the answer is that forgiveness is a kind of recollection (Erinnerung […]). […] By way of a model, think once again of the situation of the judge at common law […].” (ST, p. 601). “For a later judge concretely to forgive the earlier judge is to incorporate the decision that was the subject of confession into a retrospective rational reconstruction of the tradition of applying the concept in question, as having precedential significance” (ST, p. 602). “This is the final story about the relation of norms to nature, concepts to causes, and statuses to attitudes. Confession, forgiveness, and trust are what we must do, recognitively, in order to find objective, determinately contentful conceptual norms being applied cognitively in judgment and practically in action” (ST, p. 628). 10 Or consider this passage from Hegel’s Aesthetics: “This force of individuality, this triumph of concrete freedom concentrated in itself, is what we recognize especially in the works of art of antiquity in the cheerful and serene peace of their shapes. And this results not at all from a mere satisfaction gained without struggle, but on the contrary, only when a deeper breach has rent the subject’s inner life and his whole existence. For even if the heroes of tragedy, for example, are so portrayed that they succumb to fate, still the heart of the hero recoils into simple unity with itself, when it says: ‘It is so.’ The subject in this case still always remains true to himself; he surrenders what he has been robbed of, yet the ends he pursues are not just taken from him; he renounces them and thereby does not lose himself. Man, the slave of destiny, may lose his life, but not his freedom” (Hegel 1988, pp. 157f.). 11 “The tragic aspect of the heroic conception just is that one cannot know what one is doing, does not have the power to avoid crime and guilt, can know what one has made oneself responsible for only after the fact” (ST, p. 490). 12 I discuss the precarious role that reconciliation plays in Hegel’s conception of tragedy in Pinkard 2015. 13 “The premodern practical conception of agency is heroic, in that agents identify with what they have done in the broader sense, not the narrower—with the Tat, rather than just the Handlung” (ST, pp. 489). 14 “Immediate Sittlichkeit also involves the heroic conception of agency. Individuals take responsibility for their deeds under every description: the unforeseen consequential ones as well as the acknowledged intentional ones” (ST, p. 490). 15 “The heroic aspect is that one takes responsibility for the whole deed, the Tat. The tragic side is that one actually has authority only over what one intends and can foresee, the Handlung” (ST, pp. 491–92). 16 “Within the state, heroes are no longer possible: they occur only in the absence of civilization. The end they pursue is rightful, necessary, and political, and they put it into effect as a cause [Sache] of their own. The heroes who founded states and introduced marriage and agriculture admittedly did not do this as their recognized right, and these actions still appear as [a product of] their particular will. But as the higher right of the Idea against the state of nature, this coercion employed by heroes is a rightful coercion, for goodness alone can have little effect when confronted with the force of nature” (Hegel 1991, pp. 120f., §93 addition). 17 “Such a state of affairs is the one we are accustomed to ascribe to the Heroic Age. Which of these situations, however,—the civilized and developed life of the state, or an heroic age—is the better, this is not the place to explain; here our only concern is with the Ideal of art, and for art the cleavage between universal and individual must not yet come on the scene in the way described above, no matter how necessary this difference is for other ways in which spiritual existence is actualized. For art and its Ideal is precisely the universal in so far as the universal is configurated for our vision and therefore is still immediately one with particular individuals and their life./ (αα) This occurs in the socalled Heroic Age which appears as a time in which virtue, in the Greek sense of ἀρετή, is the basis of actions […] But this immediate unity of the substantial with the individuality of inclination, impulses, and will is inherent in Greek virtue, so that individuality is a law to itself, without being subjected to an independently subsisting law, judgment, and tribunal. Thus, for example, the Greek heroes appear in a pre-legal era, or become themselves the founders of states, so that right and order, law and morals, proceed from

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18

19

20

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them and are actualized as their own individual work which remains linked with them. In this way Hercules was extolled by the ancient Greeks and stands for them as an ideal of original heroic virtue” (Hegel 1988, p. 185). “He confesses to being evil—confesses that his apparent respect for the norms (universals) is a guise for the pursuit of personal (particular) ends. Adopting this reductive naturalistic characterization of his own doings is the ne plus ultra of alienation. For the self-consciousness that makes this confession (recognizing itself in niederträchtig terms) becomes unintelligible to itself as a creature and creator of norms, hence as a knower and agent at all. The reductive stance acknowledges only attitudes” (ST, p. 590). “[…] forgiveness is a kind of recollection (Erinnerung—cf. [PG 808]). What one must do in order to forgive the confessor for what is confessed is to offer a rational reconstruction of a tradition to which the concept-application (theoretically in judgment or practically in intention) in question belongs, in which it figures as an expressively progressive episode. Telling such a story is a substantive undertaking, one that the magnanimous (edelmütig) would-be forgiving assessor may well not be able to accomplish. Indeed, what the assessor confesses, in his turn, is his subjective inability successfully to forgive everything he is committed to forgiving./ By way of a model, think once again of the situation of the judge at common law, which has been invoked at many points along the way as helpful for understanding Hegel’s views about the development of concepts” (ST, p. 601). “What the Verstand version of the determinateness of concepts leaves out is the crucial contribution made by the cycle of confession (the acknowledgment of error and failure, of the distinction that cognition and agency involve, between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness), forgiveness (recasting the previous actual applications of concepts so as to exhibit them as a cumulative, expressively progressive revelation of the contents of Verstand-determinate concepts that show up as having been always already all along the ones knowers and agents were binding themselves by), and confession of the ultimate inadequacy of that forgiveness (the residual difference between what things are for that forgiving consciousness and what they will turn out to be in themselves). On Hegel’s picture, then, a proper understanding of the nature and origin of the determinateness of thought—of the conditions of both its intelligibility and its actuality—requires acknowledging the crucial role played by edelmütig attitudes of confession and forgiveness” (ST, pp. 613f.). “Given the momentous significance of the lesson we are to learn from the parable of confession and judgment, and the breaking of the hard heart in forgiveness and reciprocal confession, the only conclusion to draw from the extreme brevity and concision of Hegel’s discussion of it is that he understands it as having to serve the function only of a template, as providing a framework on which to assemble lessons we have already learned from the developments expounded in the body of the book” (ST, p. 600). “For a later judge concretely to forgive the earlier judge is to incorporate the decision that was the subject of confession into a retrospective rational reconstruction of the tradition of applying the concept in question, as having precedential significance. Doing that is recharacterizing and re-presenting the content of the concept (what it really is, what it is in itself) as gradually emerging into the daylight of explicitness through a sequence of applications of it to novel cases, each of which reveals some hitherto hidden feature of it, and exhibiting the forgiven judge’s decision as having played that role” (ST, p. 602). “Hence we can call this a natural propensity to evil, and as we must, after all, ever hold man himself responsible for it, we can further call it a radical innate evil in human nature (yet none the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant 1960, p. 28). “When we say, then, man is by nature good, or, man is by nature evil, this means only that there is in him an ultimate ground (inscrutable to us) of the adoption of good maxims or of evil maxims (i.e., those contrary to law), and this he has, being a man; and hence he thereby expresses the character of his species” (Kant 1960, p. 17). In the twenty-first-century King James Version: “For thou hast trusted in thy wickedness; thou hast said, ‘None seeth me.’ Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, ‘I am, and none else besides me.’”

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25 “The judging consciousness repels this community from itself and is the hard heart which is for itself and which rejects any continuity with the other.—The scene is hereby reversed. The one who confessed sees himself repulsed and sees the other as in the wrong, sees the other as somebody who refuses his own inwardness making the step into the existence of speech and as somebody who contrasts the beauty of his own soul to the soul of the one who is evil.” (“Es stößt diese Gemeinschaft von sich und ist das harte Herz, das für sich ist und die Kontinuität mit dem Anderen verwirft […]. Dasjenige, das sich bekannte, sieht sich zurückgestoßen und das Andere im Unrecht, welches das Heraustreten seines Innern in das Dasein der Rede verweigert und dem Bösen die Schönheit seiner Seele, dem Bekenntnisse aber den steifen Nacken des sich gleichbleibenden Charakters und die Stummheit, sich in sich zu behalten und sich nicht gegen einen anderen wegzuwerfen, entgegensetzt.”) PG/P, pp. 385f., §667. 26 For whatever it is worth, this interpretation of the hard heart diverges in some key ways from that given by me in Pinkard 1994. 27 “However, the latter renounces the divisive thought and the rigidity of its being-foritself holding fast to itself for the reason that it in fact intuits itself in the first agent” (PG/ P, p. 387, §670). 28 “Each of the I’s, for itself just through the contradiction of its pure universality which at the same time strives against its equality with the other and separates itself from it, sublates itself in its own self.” (“Denn dieser Gegensatz ist vielmehr selbst die indiskrete Kontinuität und Gleichheit des Ich = Ich; und jedes für sich eben durch den Widerspruch seiner reinen Allgemeinheit, welche zugleich seiner Gleichheit mit dem andern noch widerstrebt und sich davon absondert, hebt an ihm selbst sich auf.”) PG/P, p. 389, §670. 29 This transition is stated more concisely by Hegel himself in the lectures on the philosophy of history where he says: “In the first instance this reconciliation must take its point of departure in the subject, in his conscious feeling [Empfindung]; the subject must assure himself that spirit dwells in him—that, in the language of the Church, his heart has been broken and with that a breakthrough to divine grace has come about. By nature man is not what he ought to be; only through a transformation [Umbildung] does he arrive at truth. The universal and speculative aspect of the matter is just this—that the human heart is not what it should be” (Hegel 1969, p. 504). 30 Perhaps this is not so very far off from the view that Brandom explicitly endorses of a non-psychological conception of reasons. Things, for example, stand in relations of incompatibility to each other, not just in terms of how they stand to each other once they have been put into some theory or another. (If something is red, it really is not green, and that is not a matter simply of how we talk about it.) On Brandom’s account, the world is determinate, and those conceptual contents simply are what they are in things. Pure copper melts at a certain temperature whatever we think about it. Those contents can appear in subjective or objective form. 31 “Thus the relation of free beings to one another is a relation of reciprocal interaction through intelligence and freedom” (Fichte 2000, p. 42). 32 I have made a stab at that in Pinkard 2012 and 2017. See also Khurana 2017, and Ng, forthcoming.

References Allison, Henry (1990) Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2002) Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Chalybäus, Heinrich Moritz (1854) Historical Development of Speculative Philosophy from Kant to Hegel, translated by A. Edersheim and with a preface by W. Hamilton (Edinburgh: Clark).

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Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (2000) Foundations of Natural Right: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, edited by F. Neuhouser and translated by M. Baur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Foot, Philippa (2001) Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Gordon, Peter (2010) Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard (New York: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by A. W. Wood and translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1988) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Know (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1975) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1969) Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Kant, Immanuel (1960) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (New York: Harper). Khurana, Thomas (2017) Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Moore, Adrian (2013) The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ng, Karen (forthcoming) Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pinkard, Terry (2017) Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Pinkard, Terry (2015) “Tragedy with and without Religion: Hegelian Thoughts,” in J. Billings and M. Leonard (eds.), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 137–158. Pinkard, Terry (2012) Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pinkard, Terry (1994) Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pippin, Robert (2018) Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

8 IS BRANDOM A POSITIVIST? Notes on alienation, trust, confession, and forgiveness J. M. Bernstein

I. The charge of positivism In his acute review essay of Tales of the Mighty Dead, Robert Pippin compellingly argues that Robert Brandom’s Hegel-inspired social pragmatist inferential holism is, from an Hegelian perspective, “indistinguishable from a kind of ‘inferential positivism’” (2005, p. 392). This strikes me as partially correct, pointing to a patent lacuna in Brandom’s first formulation of his inferential semantics. I understand the formative gesture of both Hegel’s phenomenological method and the bare bones of Brandom’s inferential semantics to be abstractions and generalizations from the great insight of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction that the logical functions of judgment responsible for the unity of judgment would be epistemically idle unless they corresponded to or were isomorphic with (Brandom’s favored locution) the categories articulating the represented objects of judgment: transcendental syntax projects a transcendental semantics, a concept of an object in general. Generalizing Kant’s claim from his preferred set of categories to any proposed categorial set generates the idea that any sufficiently articulated form of consciousness will project its own truth concept, and hence its own transcendental syntax–transcendental semantics couplet, and—with some modest additions the nature of which will be central to my argument—the idea of a wholly internal process of self-correcting experience on the model of Anglo-American case law. The case-law formulation is Brandom’s; its conceptual presuppositions, I will argue, are Hegel’s. The fault line in Brandom’s argument at this juncture is the absence of an account of how we have come to see what the commitments of epistemic life are, and thus the kind of collective normative undertaking the pursuit of knowing is. Without selfconsciousness about the meaning of conscious knowing, the difference between dogmatism and rationalism dissolves. This occurs because Making It Explicit locates the source of normativity in, we might say, consciousness and not self-consciousness.

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Hence, Brandom contends that we can and should be satisfied with “the permanent possibility of a distinction between how things are [the normative status of being objectively correct] and [the normative attitude of] how they are taken to be by some interlocutor [that] is built into the articulation of concepts” (MIE, p. 597). But why should we be so satisfied? The forms of epistemological realism Hegel interrogates in the Consciousness section of the Phenomenology are driven precisely by the desire to overcome the divide between knowing and world, and show thereby how the world itself can be a truth-maker. The rise of the notion of “infinity” as the explicit entrance of inferentialism into knowing at the end of the chapter on Force and Understanding is not presented as only a dissolution of the realist framing of the problem of knowing, but as also, oppositely, the beginning of the quest for rational reassurance that there is no thing in itself, no ultimate super-fact that could intelligibly be regarded as the knowledge-transcendent guarantor of empirical knowing. But what finally secures and legitimates that reassurance is insight into and rational acceptance of the individual and collective normative commitments involved in sustaining the permanent possibility of a distinction between “how we take the world to be” and “how it is,” that is, insight into and acceptance of the formation of mutual recognition involved in the normative constitution of a community of knowers. Brandom’s positivist misidentification of the locale and character of the normative underpinnings of cognition is even more emphatic when the objects of reflection are practical rather than theoretical, when what is being examined are the norms that are meant to regulate social interactions themselves. As Pippin rightly underlines, the “issue Hegel is most interested in is one we would now call the basic difference (if there is one) between the matter-of-historical-fact normalizing practices of the score-keeping police and some sort of progressive normative development” (2005, p. 392). There are overwhelming reasons to think that pre-Spirit Brandom would have denied the intelligibility of the distinctions Hegel is most anxious to draw because they lie outside the ambit of a pragmatist approach; pragmatism is that denial. The problem with normalizing practices as Brandom originally conceives of them, at least with respect to how the account bears on the norms regulating social practices themselves—remembering all the while that cognition too is a social practice—is their consequent inability to acknowledge the difference between “the administration of social power (perhaps complete with the ‘willing’ submission of docile subjects) and the achievement of a form of life in which the freedom of one depends on the freedom of all” (Pippin 2005, p. 397), where the latter is patently Hegel’s grand ambition. Pre-Spirit Brandom can not only be charged with being an inferential positivist, he seems to have embraced that idea as a pragmatism without apologies, leaving his account well short of the kind of ambitions that drive Hegel who, at each turn, is attempting to overcome the dilemmas and contradictions of the Kantian program. Most obviously, Hegel thinks that experience culminates in absolute knowing, where achieving that end is meant to demonstrate that the path of experience has been truly progressive (and not just seemingly so), so displacing Kantian transcendental necessity with the necessity of a retrospective narrative; that the retrospective narration is made possible by the achievement—in principle if not in fact—of mutual recognition; and,

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finally, achieving unconditioned knowing entails, therapeutically at least, becoming satisfied that there is no rational or intelligible way of raising the specter of some knowledge-transcendent fact of the matter, some super-fact, some thing in itself that our wholly conceptually mediated modes of knowing—both knowing and world integrally conceptually articulated—represses, erases, or elides. Surprisingly, perhaps, connecting mutual recognition and absolute knowing in this way appears to be the ambition of A Spirit of Trust; it is what marks out Brandom’s grand reading of Hegel from his earlier, more pragmatist writings—or so a generous reading of the text might urge. Part 3, “From Irony to Trust: The Spirit Chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology” provides support for Hegel’s developmental, three-stage grand narrative that moves from the immediate ethical life of the Greeks, through the alienated ethical life of early and modern Europe, to a moment in which, for the first time, there emerges a wholly self-conscious act of mutual recognition of a kind that promises the possibility of a new form of ethical life that would be premised on mutual recognition. Brandom thus seems to be here providing for the first time the kind of normative material—true as opposed to seeming mutual recognition—and thick narrative history that Pippin plausibly argues is Hegel’s own response to the problem of positivity (2005, pp. 397–400). At the center of the reading of the Geist chapter is a constellation of new terms: alienation, trust, confession, and forgiveness. Brandom argues that these terms are at the center of his doctrine: I take it that this point is the punchline of the Phenomenology, the final lesson [Hegel] has organized the whole book to teach us: semantic self-consciousness, awareness of the transcendental conditions of the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes, of thinking, believing, meaning or, intending anything, consists in explicitly acknowledging an always-already implicit commitment to adopt generous recognitive attitudes of reciprocal confession and recollective forgiveness. (ST, p. 615; my emphasis) Brandom’s version of the “consciousness presupposes self-consciousness” doctrine is that semantic self-consciousness could not provision even a happy positivism without “explicitly acknowledging,” that is, without being sublated by practices of mutual recognition framed by “generous recognitive attitudes of reciprocal confession and recollective forgiveness.” Brandom sometimes writes as if the objectivity of conceptual norms could be purchased without the normative materials provided by the logic of confession and forgiveness via the “always-already implicit commitment.” But that implicit commitment must idle on its own: if theoretical reason is normatively only a modality of practical reason for Hegel—the embedding of consciousness within self-consciousness, of reason in spirit—then the “generous recognitive” attitudes necessary for the completion of practical reason, that is, necessary for the actuality of practical reason, are also the attitudes necessary in order to ground and make actual the normative practices regulating theoretical reason. Said somewhat differently, the self-moving educational and developmental mechanism for social learning that Hegel announces in his

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Introduction as the method of phenomenological inquiry, and that forms the inaugural model for Brandom’s common-law conception of cognition, only becomes fully actual and justified in the account of confession and forgiveness. Hence, even if one thinks that Brandom has pragmatically abbreviated Hegel’s conception of knowing, it remains plausible to argue that the essential anti-skeptical argument in Hegel does involve the framing of consciousness within self-consciousness, reason in spirt, and hence that it is the robust account of mutual recognition as involving generous attitudes of confession and forgiveness that secures the unconditionality of absolute knowing. Without a categorical commitment to forgiveness, without seeing how falsehood is ingredient in the coming to be of truth and accepting the liabilities and responsibilities of that insight, the sequence of failed forms of consciousness could not terminate in the achievement of absolute knowing. For Hegel the full force of this thesis depends on the comprehension of evil—the permanent possibility of practical falsehood ingredient in historically contoured social action—rather than epistemic falsehood; again, the latter (falsehood and conceptual change) can only be normatively understood through the former (transgression and the transformation of law).1 That said, there are evident substantial issues at stake in Hegel’s new normative vocabulary. If we take trust as a secular transcription of the Christian notion of faith, and confession and forgiveness as patently Christian concepts, two immediate problems emerge: First, are these notions merely heuristic metaphors useful for understanding the idea of mutual recognition, or, rather, does mutual recognition truly involve them in some robust way? And second, if the latter, then can these three concepts be provided with a fully secular pedigree? Are trust, confession, and forgiveness constitutive concepts for the possibility of ethical experience in general? Hegel’s philosophy is committed to claiming they are as fundamental to our ethical self-understanding as, say, the notions of freedom and responsibility. But for that claim to kick in appropriately, it must first be the case that the grand narrative that Brandom analyses under the rubric of alienation is of such a kind that only the achievement of mutual recognition and the promise of a form of life premised on mutual recognition can resolve its dilemmas; only the achievement of mutual recognition bound by the terms of confession and forgiveness can overcome positivism, including the pragmatist positivism of Brandom’s own first version of inferential semantics. How plausible is that three-stage philosophy of history? I will pick up these issues by looking first at the grand narrative of alienation in relation to the role of trust, and then turn to Brandom’s account of confession and forgiveness.2

II. Alienation as loss of trust in the world The history of Geist, Brandom claims, “boils down to one grand event […] its structural transformation from a traditional to a modern form” (ST, p. 469). This modern form, our form of life, is not, however, Geist’s destination, as some readers of The Philosophy of Right read Hegel as arguing.3 On Brandom’s vastly darker reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history, modernity is a transitional moment in which modern individualism with its right of subjectivity—the right of each to judge for herself what

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is moral, thus to judge for herself what social norms are authoritative and obligatory— takes precedence over the claim of communal norms. After the devastations of the French Revolution, and fulfilling a fundamental developmental trajectory of modern experience, we moderns have become Kantian or conscientious subjects who take no individual law or moral rule as having authority for us unless each one of us individually, conscientiously, takes it to be authoritative and obligatory.4 Each of us must bind herself to a norm, legislate it for herself, in order for it to be obligatory. That Kantian, Enlightenment view of what fulfills the developmental history of humanity leading to it is not Hegel’s. As Brandom rightly claims, for Hegel the mark and meaning of Sittlichkeit, is a “matter of the bindingness (‘Gültigkeit’) of norms” (ST, p. 473), where bindingness comes down to the “force” of norms, not just our identifying with them, but their being obligatory for us. For Hegel, “normative bindingness or validity is intelligible only [my emphasis] in the context of a recognitive community, in which the attitudes of recognizing and being recognized, claiming authority and undertaking responsibility for oneself and attributing those statuses to others, play an essential role” (ST, p. 479). For an Hegelian, this is an easy inference: if to be a self-consciousness is to be recognized as a self-consciousness, where “[t]o recognize someone is to take her to be the subject of normative statuses—that is, of commitments and entitlements” (ST, p. 245), then having moral authority only comes about by being recognized as having moral authority; from this it follows that even individual moral authority is a social achievement and status, and thus inseparable from being a member of a suitably normatively constituted recognitive community. You can only be independent from—have independent moral authority to judge and to act—what you are essentially dependent on for that independent standing. Brandom does misidentify Hegel’s opponent here in claiming that “[o]nly attitudes, not genuine norms, are visible in alienated Geist” (ST, p. 475); as I shall say more about below, Hegel’s primary critical targets at this juncture are Kant’s and Fichte’s moral rationalism, the moral worldview and the insistences of conscience. Modern moral individualism argues that it is the right of subjectivity, the right of conscience not to be obligated by any law that has not been individually accepted as morally binding. While this claim can sound morally anodyne—who would deny the right of conscientious judgment in the final instance?—as it figures in modern moral individualism, it rules out the claim that the moral/normative force of law is ethically privileged, and so rules out the idea that the source of the normative force of binding norms is social and ethical, sittlich, rather than individual, or that moral attitudes and judgments are ethically answerable to socially instituted norms. For Kantian modernity in its moral individualist mode of self-understanding, morals stay firmly (finally) in the self-consciousness of the moral subject. Hence, even where social normativity exists (there are valid positive laws), it does not exist (they have no overriding moral authority). Modern legal positivism is the quintessential expression of modern alienation, “the structural denial that subjective attitudes are responsible to norms which, as authoritative, count as independent of those attitudes” (ST, p. 495).

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The overwhelming authority of moral individualism as constitutive of modernity and the necessity for overcoming it is what structures Hegel’s understanding of the history of Geist. Part of the purpose of Hegel’s Phenomenology is to allow us to achieve self-consciousness about our modern alienated status, hence coming to see through our alienated condition to the historical and social conditions that make it possible. However, the reason why this story needs telling is because arguably one dominant experience of modernity is our failure to experience our condition as alienated. On the contrary, a primary modern mood is one of affirmative self-assertion, the mood and experience Hegel labels “Reason.” Hegel’s presentation of alienated modernity is stereoscopic in its telling: it is told first from the affirmative inside in “Reason” in a manner that itself calls forth the repressed history of losing Sittlichkeit, and hence the dilemmas of modernity presented in the chapter on Geist as—now seen as part of an actual historical process—the development of moral individualism that occurs, from the opposing angle, as the ongoing alienation from, longing for, and/or suppression of recognitive community. The primary example of a double telling of the same form of consciousness is the double account of Kant’s moral philosophy: in Reason, the Categorical Imperative is presented as the monologic effort of achieving universality through the obligation to test one’s maxims of action against the demand of reason to count in all other moral agents equally. In the Geist chapter, moral consciousness is presented—through a critical reconstruction of the “Postulates of Pure Practical Reason”—as alienated from its own moral actions, as dissembling whether it has acted morally or merely intended to, and as renouncing happiness (desire, pleasure, satisfaction) while nonetheless morally demanding it—The Moral Worldview and Dissemblance. Brandom’s elision of Kantian moral reason as the high point of alienated modernity in Reason distorts Brandom’s account of what it means to overcome modernity through mutual recognition, as we shall see. For present purposes, what needs underlining is that the explicit statement of the three-stage philosophy of history, which makes the present a moment of transition rather than achievement, in fact occurs in the middle of the chapter on Reason. The first question that thus needs addressing here is simply: why does the most robust account of ethical community occur in the middle of the chapter on Reason? Indeed, why is Sittlichkeit introduced there at all? Reason arrives on the scene as being certain of being all reality (PG/P, §235); its certainty is dependent on its having forgotten the path through which it has arrived at its affirmative self-understanding (PG/P, §233). While this forgetfulness of the social and historical conditions that make it possible is sufficient for understanding how Observing Reason misfires—the continual suppression of its social and historical conditions of possibility—that construal is insufficient for Active Reason. If Observing Reason is the historical actualization of Consciousness, then Active Reason is Self-Consciousness as historically realized: “At first, this active reason is aware of itself only as an individual […] Thereupon, however, while its consciousness elevates itself into universality, it becomes universal reason and is consciously aware of itself both as reason, or, aware of itself as already recognized in and for itself, which in its pure consciousness unites all self-consciousnesses” (PG/P, §348). Hegel then inquires into what exactly it is we phenomenological observers have in front of

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us in a self-consciousness that takes itself to be recognized as authoritative (as reason), and further theoretically understands itself (has a “pure consciousness” of itself) as what unifies all self-consciousnesses. Seen sideways on, Active Reason can be seen to possess all the elements fundamental to ethical life: “For ethical life is nothing but the absolute spiritual unity of the essence of those individuals in their self-sufficient actuality” (PG/P, §349). In order to understand Active Reason at all therefore we need to understand what ethical life is, and hence Active Reason’s relation to it; this, then, is Hegel’s inaugural and defining account of the relation between modern moral individualism and ethical community. Hegel begins, surprisingly, with as fulsome a statement of ethical life as is to be found in his writings, beginning with a bravura moment of mutual recognition: It is in itself a universal self-consciousness, which, to itself, is actual in another consciousness in such a way that this other consciousness has complete selfsufficiency, or is a thing for it, and it is just therein conscious of the unity with the other self-consciousness, and it is in this unity with this objective essence that it is first self-consciousness. (PG/P, §349) Hegel goes on to describe how it is solely in the life of a people that “the concept of the actualization of self-conscious reason has in fact its consummate reality;” and how, while that condition involves the ethical unity of each with the other, nonetheless each equally finds what Hegel calls “my being-for-myself” (PG/P, §350). In the following paragraph, we get an unequivocal statement of the ethical ideal of being at home in the otherness of social practices and fellow citizens: “Hence, within the universal spirit, each has the certainty of himself, and each finds in existing actuality nothing but himself; he is as certain of the others as he is of himself” (PG/P, §351).5 If, in reading this grand encomium to ethical life, we have forgotten our topic, Hegel immediately reminds us: “For that reason, in a free people reason is in truth actualized” (PG/P, §352). Ethical life is reason actualized.6 Hence Active Reason, in taking itself to be actual, stands in an emphatic relation to reason’s actualization in ethical life. But in what kind of relation? It is here that the problem of alienation and Hegel’s three-stage history come properly into view for the first time. It is utterly unclear when we are reading the passages about ethical life what kind of description it is; it can feel like a dream of ethical life. And in a way it is, for Hegel now abruptly claims that ethical life, as something about which we can be conscious, exists either in the mode of what has been “lost” (PG/P, §355) or as “not yet attained” (PG/P, §356). Modernity is thus the “broken middle” (Gillian Rose’s lovely phrase) between an ethical life that has been lost (and that needed to be lost), and an ethical life that has yet to be attained. The “not yet attained” makes unequivocal the thesis that our Kantian modernity is not itself the arrival of a formation of ethical life that can square individual moral authority with ethical life, but, exactly, a moment of transition. It is the “lost” and “not yet attained” framing of alienated modernity that structures the actual Whig history Hegel narrates in the chapter on Geist.

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It is also here, in explicating the loss of immediate ethical life, that for first time Hegel introduces trust. Hegel argues that having insight into or self-consciousness of the reason for the authority of the principle that “[w]isdom and virtue consist in living in conformity with the ethos of one’s people” (PG/P, §352) is already to leave ethical life behind simply because in knowing it, one has departed from it. Limning the same thought in practical terms, “the singular consciousness, as it immediately has its existence in real ethical life, or in the people, is thus an unalloyed trust [… and, as a consequence, it] also does not know itself as being for itself pure singularity” (PG/P, §355). Immediate ethical life, which will later be analyzed in terms of Greek ethical life, is here presented in the mode of “unalloyed trust.” Unalloyed trust is one’s taking for granted that one is authoritatively recognized as a full member of the ethical community; it is, thus, the immediate, unreflective acceptance of one’s absolute dependence on one’s ethical others for one’s own self-certainty. Because unalloyed trust is immediate and unreflective, then trust is the invisibility of trust: in unconditionally trusting one’s others, it is them and the world shared with them that is in view—and not trust itself. Consciousness of trust, consciousness that trust is required inevitably marks an absence of trust. Trust then is the ethical substance of everyday living in being that form of mutual recognition—of recognizing and being recognized by one’s others—whose actuality is its invisibility. What is precisely forgotten or invisible in trust is one’s dependence on and thus vulnerability before others. Trust is thus the ethical norm internal to relations of mutual recognition because trust is the acknowledgement of physical and ethical (normative) vulnerability and dependence. If the specificity of Hegelian normativity is the role of dependence as a condition of independence, then trust is the ethical relation that most fully actualizes and expresses that normative relation—it expresses dependence by letting it be forgotten.7 Unalloyed trust, innocent trust, is trust without self-conscious individuality. Hence, the moment individuality comes on the scene, as when Antigone must not merely enact her ethical role as sister whose sittlich duty is to bury her brother, but must self-consciously assume that duty as her personal and so individual responsibility, then, in staking herself on what she takes to be her duty, she opposes herself to the written laws of the land; in so doing, she sets herself ethically apart from her immediate ethical others—sister, betrothed, king, and choral community. All too painfully and acutely, Antigone can no longer trust her ethical world—not even (especially not) her gods. For Hegel, Antigone’s suffering alienation is the truth of both the authority of Sittlichkeit and its being lost with the dissolution of the possibility of unalloyed trust. Nonetheless, in staking herself on her duty, Antigone was making herself into a protomoral subject, a moral subject in a world in which de jure there was no such thing, and thus announcing all the history that is to proceed from this moment. As a result of her becoming ethically self-conscious her ethical world becomes lost to her, and trust in the world is shattered. Although it is right to say that what marks immediate ethical life is its presumption of its naturalness, the deeper issue is that immediate ethical life had no space for radical ethical contingency, for individuals to innovate new ethical

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responses to new ethical circumstances, for individuals to take upon themselves the judgment of what ought to be done. The collapse of immediate ethical life directly demonstrates the necessity for individual responsibility, and hence for some idea of moral individuality of a kind that can contest, challenge, and transform given ethical norms, and thus the idea of an ethical subject that can reform the law by breaking the law. One obvious point that follows from the introduction of trust in this setting: the ethical ideal of trust is original to ethical life. As a consequence, although trust enters the Geist narrative in the mode of faith (ST, p. 527), trust is not a translation of faith into a secular setting; rather, oppositely, faith is alienated trust, the displacement of the need for ethical trust in a world that seeks the elimination of relations of radical dependence. While faith may indeed have been the immediate historical antecedent to the emergence of the ethical idea of trust, trust itself is original to ethical life; what faith reveals is the intransigence of the claim of trust, which is the intransigence of the claim of ethical life itself. It is perhaps not altogether surprising then that the great proponent of moral autonomy should also be a proponent of practical faith. More precisely, and this bears on Brandom’s displacement of Kant’s role in Reason, Kantian moral reason can emerge only through the suppression of constitutive trust; Kantian deliberative morality is another version of the distrust of trust.

III. A right to recognition and the obligation to forgive In order for confession and forgiveness to play the role Brandom (rightly) assigns them in Hegel’s argument, they must satisfy three conditions: (i) they must be necessary to overcoming alienation, and hence they must directly address the causes of alienation; (ii) they must not only enable mutual recognition, and be modes of mutual recognition, they must be categorial conditions for recognitive community (otherwise the response to (i) remains contingent); (iii) the analysis must allow them to have an unequivocal secular content that is detachable from the origin of these practices in Christian belief. The most obvious question about confession and forgiveness as potential categorial features of ethical experience is: What is confessed? What must be forgiven? The obvious answer to both questions is: evil. What then is evil? Brandom— giving undue centrality to the great “moral valet” passage in which Hegel acknowledges that all actions can be seen from “the aspect of the singularity of individuality” (PG/P, §665)—mistakenly takes up the position of judging consciousness, so taking the part for the whole, and thus misdescribes the original debate between acting and judging consciousness. Brandom claims that the “concept of evil in play here is of actions that disregard normative considerations of what the agent ought to do, what it would be right to do, and respond only to the agent’s personal wants, desires, and other attitudes. In this case, assessing the doing as evil is taking it not to have been performed out of a pure respect for duty—that is, not [to have been] just the application of a norm, the acknowledgement of a commitment” (ST, p. 588). And having set up the issue thus, Brandom consistently goes on to claim that “[the agent] confesses to being evil—

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confesses that his apparent respect for the norms (universals) is a guise for the pursuit of personal (particular) ends” (ST, p. 590). While Brandom is right to set up the issue as one between moral individualism and social normativity, he is wrong to think that a certain “reductive naturalism is the culmination of modern alienation” (ST, p. 591); the contrast between the hero and valet positions does not take us very far. What forced natural consciousness’s departure from immediate ethical life was not the disqualification of its self-interested attitudes; Antigone’s evil was the breaking of existing law for the sake of (new) law. Evil, most naturally and intuitively, is transgression, law breaking. What makes evil in this sense into a general problem for moral agency is that all serious actions that go beyond existing rules and norms are law breaking. But it is just that fact—the inevitability and necessity of breaking the law for the sake of the law, the necessity of innovating new law, the acknowledgement of contingent but morally demanding circumstances that demand individual judgment about what is to be done—that requires the formation of some version of moral individuality in the first instance. If we comprehend acting and judging consciousness as modern avatars of Antigone and Creon respectively, and we should—I take the confession of the evil one “I am he” (PG/P, §667) as an intended echo of Antigone’s “I did it and don’t deny it”—then what their confrontation is meant to resolve could not be resolved in the original confrontation. (Hegel clearly means to conclude Geist with the final vindication of his moral hero whose fate initiated the travails of Geist.) A necessary condition for the resolution of the original conflict is the development of moral individuality, the development of individuals with the defeasible authority to judge and act for themselves; the social and historical cost of that development has been the effective dissolution of Sittlichkeit, hence the dissolution of the force of law, either explicitly in the case of the French Revolution or implicitly in the stance of Kantian moral individualism. There is a tight conceptual connection between transgression, new law, and individuality: new law appears as “this” law that is necessary here and now; so new law must be asserted here and now as what lawfulness (justice, goodness, morality) requires; and in making that assertion, “I” put myself and the law “I” am proposing in place of existing law. New law appears through an individual act of proposing new law in opposition to old law; so new law appears in the guise of “this new law” against universal law, and so as “I” opposing existing universal law. But this can be generalized: each appearance of a law, of a moral universal, each moral action and each moral judgment is necessarily my action and my judgment. When what is present is something other than habitual or customary action—which is equally to say, when what is present is a new concept or new propositional truth—the law can only appear through or as “my” law (“my” concept), my putting myself in the place of “the law.” And this is precisely what Hegel says: It in fact confesses to being evil through its affirmation that it acts according to its own inner law and conscience in opposition to what is recognized as

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universal. If this law and conscience were not the law of its singular individuality and its own arbitrary free choice, then it would not be something inward, not be something its own, but instead be what is [already] universally recognized. (PG/P, §662) Pace Brandom, what is thus confessed is not individual desire, inclination, or selfinterest; that is judging consciousness’s false judgment of acting consciousness. Rather, what is confessed is the moment or aspect of moral individuality (epistemic individuality) itself, the negation of existing law (existing conceptuality) involved in the act of inserting oneself and new law (new conceptuality) in the place of and as opposed to existing law (existing conceptuality). The point of the breach of law is not tawdry self-interested opposition to law, but the actual shape of lawfulness “for us”; nonetheless, since that new formation of lawfulness can only appear through breach and negation, there is something to confess. And what thus must be forgiven is that aspect of ethical individuality, the moment of transgression and negation, the individuality of the appearance of new law, since new law means to be just law, universal law, what is morally right—just as conceptual trespass and negation means to install a new conceptual truth, innovate a new concept.8 When judging consciousness asserts existing law against the new law, judging it evil, it puts itself forward as the law, failing to see that its judging is an individual ethical action exactly parallel in form to what it condemned in acting consciousness, and thus that even sustaining existing law involves the inward assuming and individual assertion of the law (PG/P, §663). And it is this that acting consciousness perceives as their shared condition, and hence confesses: there is no possibility of acting or judging without individuality becoming the actuality of the law here and now. If this is right, then although there is deep philosophical interest in Brandom’s detour through Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit, and even more in his way of sorting through the respective claims of Handlung versus Tat, they plainly are not Hegel’s primary target: Kantian moral rationalism and Fichtean conscience are the emphatic achievements of moral individualism that require displacement—then as now. The categories of confession and forgiveness are necessary for the overcoming of alienation because they are categorial features of individual action and individual judgment that are the recognitive surplus that acknowledges the necessary moment of individuality and negativity integral to social normativity itself in both its practical and theoretical formation. When engaging in a significant action, I must simultaneously confess that I am breaking existing law, placing myself and my new law in the place of universal law, but solely for the sake of universal law: my individual action means to initiate a new normativity and the recognition of my fellows. In confessing, I am thereby also acknowledging that I am dependent on ethical community and “our” law for authority to act, and for the determining and determinate fate of my action. Significant ethical action in recognitive community must thus occur with an attendant confession whereby I confess and acknowledge my dependence on you in the very act of repudiating our existing social bond, the law you and I are. Equally and conversely, when I judge new law, I must forgive the other’s transgression as a

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condition for coming to see it as (potentially) new law; I thus take responsibility for the deed as my own, as our own, as a component of who we are. All action is confession and all judgment is forgiveness when action and judgment are moments in the life of an ethical community.9 What holds for new law holds pari passu for conceptual change and conceptual innovation for the community of knowers: all acts of conceptual innovation are confessions of transgressing existing truth, and all judgments of acts of conceptual innovation must begin with a forgiveness of the original act of transgression as a condition for beginning its evaluation of the new claimant to truth. In the act of forgiving, judgment is explicitly acknowledging the necessary role of falsehood in the coming to be of truth. Again, although Brandom mistakes what of individuality needs confession and forgiveness—effectively taking up the judge’s view that the debate is between individual self-interest and universal law, rather than the role of individual action and judgment in universality—he nonetheless does claim that it is the unavoidable moment of individuality in ethical life that requires confession and forgiveness; this is how his view comes to be aligned with the Hegelian view I am pressing. In Brandom’s account the “all action is confession, all judgment is forgiveness” principle becomes the idea of there being a “right to recognition.” Such a right would potently capture the dual factual and normative character of the “all,” while immediately profiling confession and forgiveness in wholly secular terms. This is a rich and novel claim by Brandom that he only states one time (ST, p. 620), but which I am reading as the normative kernel of his account. The right to recognition is not explicit in Hegel; but in giving Hegel’s ethical scenario an explicitly political-legal articulation, Brandom is meaning to reveal what must be promised in the scene of mutual recognition. The right to recognition would be the actuality of mutual recognition as constitutive of ethical community. The right to recognition is the reformation of law necessary to acknowledge the emergence of moral personality; the right to recognition is hence the thought of the transformation of the unity of self and people “within the ethos and laws of a people” which is its “universal language” (PG/P, §351). Moral personality on its own is alienation; and positive law in modernity is alienated from itself through its displacement by moral personality. Only the right to recognition—the right of all persons to recognition everywhere as a person before the law, which is the same as authorizing their moral (rational, epistemic) authority—would displace moral personality into law, and return to law its overriding authority. In order to catch the full strength of Brandom’s proposal, a brief moment of framing is necessary. Brandom states what I have termed the necessity of moral individuality as the thesis that there are no norms independent of attitudes—a valid thesis that modern moral philosophers mistakenly take to entail that no (social) norms exercise authority over attitudes.10 Reformulating Hegel’s critique of Kantian moral formalism—as the penultimate attempt to salvage moral individualism against social normativity—in semantic terms, Brandom states that conceptual content must have a social and historical structure beyond individual reflection. Conceptual content cannot be contentful, however, unless that content includes

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the normative force—the commitments—involved in the actual exercise of a concept. As Brandom usefully articulates the thesis: Along the social dimension, I deliberate and decide about what claims to make and what practical projects to undertake, but then others administer the conceptual norms by which I have thereby already bound myself, assessing the truth of what I have said and the success of what I have done by standards I have subjected myself to. Along the historical dimension, the contents of the concepts I apply derive from the previous actual applications of those concepts in judgment and action. (ST, p. 559) From this, it follows directly that an individual cannot choose or decide to simply opt out of the social norms governing a social world, say by taking an ironic view of them, because any actions done or judgments made that have a determinate content are therefore always already practically committed to those contents, and thereby practically involved in the specific structures of authority, commitment, and responsibility composing “that” particular conceptual content in a concrete social world. The idea that we are necessarily always already normatively bound to a normatively contoured social world in which the recognitive structures of authority, commitment, and responsibility are effectively operative, Brandom defends as the unavoidability of each taking the Edelmütigkeit stance (ST, pp. 577, 581); without conceding that thesis, there would be no grounds for folding the history of moral transformations into the history of Geist that those participating in that history were unaware of. But while the Edelmütigkeit stance—recognizing the other as possessing social authority of a kind to issue determinately contentful actions and judgments that must be responded to in kind—is necessary for recognitive community, I cannot see how it answers the positivism charge, or thus why we should think of confession and forgiveness as mere species of it. Indeed, the fact that Brandom’s first temptation is to read the recollective effort of forgiveness in terms of the common-law model (ST, p. 601) he had earlier proposed as a model for Hegelian experience doubles the worry, since it then appears as if he is subsuming what is difficult about forgiveness under the two-phase, prospective and retrospective, structure of experience already announced in the Introduction rather than seeing the full weight of the commitment to retrospection as requiring the logic of forgiveness. And the claim that there is no final story (ST, p. 607), while true on one level, flattens in a positivist way what Hegel is trying to accomplish through the categories of confession and forgiveness—including making the social learning rehearsed throughout the Phenomenology possible. As Brandom knows, absolute knowing can only occur through the massive act of forgiveness that underlies and regulates phenomenological recollection. Until forgiveness intervenes, the social learning that occurs throughout the Phenomenology happens behind the backs of the forms of consciousness it travels through. Hence while the phenomenological method of the Introduction presupposes the possibility of self-consciousness learning, it also insists that the standpoint enabling such learning must be achieved; which is also to say, the procedures for

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phenomenological development are only proleptically announced in the Introduction, and they are only achieved with arrival of forgiveness and absolute knowing. Absolute knowing grounds the procedures that bring it into being.11 On my reading, Brandom seems to know this. So in a final flurry, Brandom does appear to powerfully press past his own inferentialist formalism (which is one way of stating the positivist charge) in urging that: “Confession is not just a petition for recognition as forgiveness, it is the assertion of a right to recognition through forgiveness” (ST, p. 620). Christian confession is petition, and forgiveness the work of grace; God cannot be obligated to forgive. However progressive the introduction of forgiveness for sin and transgression is, in its Christian format it appears as a work of supererogatory spontaneity: no one deserves forgiveness a priori, nor can it be earned. When it comes, it comes as grace. The ethical ugliness of the idea of grace is precisely its structure of permanent asymmetric dependence. Dependence is the great toil and difficulty of recognitive life and community. But, as I argued earlier, we in fact do have an ethical-normative conception of what dependence without obeisance and humiliation is: the mutual dependence of equals that is trust. Faith is full consciousness of dependence, which thus includes a moment of genuflection before what is superior. Trust, I have argued, is the robust normative confidence that one is always already recognized to such an extent that the fact and extent of dependence can be forgotten. Trust, again, is, ideally, the invisibility of trust. Trust’s invisibility is the best explanation of how it is that we might be already immersed in recognitive community without our recognizing this immersion; and when the lack of trust emerges, then, under alienated conditions, the inference is drawn that really those social relations are Hobbesian, and trust a covering over of the depth of threat and vulnerability. In alienated modernity, trusts tends towards the ethical distrust of trust; Kantian reason is, finally, the culmination of that distrust, or, what is the same, a certain culmination of stoical consciousness. Trust, when realized appropriately, is “both acknowledging the authority of those trusted to forgive and invoking their responsibility to do so” (ST, p. 621, my emphasis). The responsibility to forgive is the obvious ethical corollary of the right to forgiveness. There is no avoiding dependence, and hence that there is some insistent existential difficulty—the depth and unsurpassability of the vulnerability of each human before her others—that needs acknowledging. We moderns, however, are coming to consider all others as obligated to recognize our equal standing, so that when we act we ideally could both trust others to forgive, and normatively take ourselves to be entitled to expect that all others will forgive the singularity or individuality of the act for the sake of its contribution to shared life. But to say we normatively expect to be recognized is to say that others have the responsibility to recognize through forgiveness. Confession and forgiveness, as the normative realization of the moments of dependence and independence, of mastery and slavery in self-consciousness, provide the essential framework for mutual recognition that does not suppress the moment of asymmetric dependence that makes mutuality difficult. Making confession both a work of trust and a normative demand, and forgiveness an obligation jointly provides not just a criterion of mutual recognition that

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implicates a generalized right to recognition, but a normative form in which we become collectively responsible for ethically constructing what satisfying the obligation to forgiveness concretely amounts to. On my hearing, when Brandom announces that there must be a right to recognition—not solely a moral right (that is the contraction strategy), but an affirmative positive right (the expansion strategy)—he is asking us to consider what would count as the institution of forgiveness, the authorizing institution or practice through which the normative authority of each is installed and protected. (The Fourteenth Amendment was the dawning recognition of the necessity for such a provision.) Of course, it is Hegel’s view that no institutions of forgiveness yet existed, that the failure of the French Revolution that has the fate of modernity pass into German philosophy precisely marks both the absence of institutions of the right to recognition, and the consequent judgment that the present is a moment of transition, a moment in which the right to recognition has not yet become actual. Again, what we need to forgive is each mark of individuality that transgresses ethical universality and so separates the individual agent from it. Forgiveness brings the transgressor back in; and, as Brandom underlines, forgiveness, if it is to be meaningful, is difficult (ST, p. 598). To forgive an act of civil disobedience is to ask what its protest against existing law is and whether that protest is justified, if existing law requires overturning or transformation; and if not justified, what statements and justifications are owed the protester, how does existing law expand its meaning to acknowledge the protest and yet insist upon its rightness. To forgive a criminal trespass—which was Hegel’s first exemplar of forgiveness as recognitive—is to construct a path through the toils of the penal system through which re-entry into full participation in the life of community is the terminus; any pathway that did not include re-entry would make punishment solely a form of revenge, that is, a mechanism of exclusion and de-authorization. In general, if there is to be a right to forgiveness, then an ethical community is involved in the infinite task of interrogating, critiquing, and reforming all the laws and institutions constitutive of ethical life as they are addressed by claims of individuality that lead to exclusion from or domination within ethical life. All things being equal, the same infinite task of interrogating, critiquing, and reforming is required for the laws and institutions constitutive of theoretical life, a thesis theorized and exemplified by the Phenomenology of Spirit. But as Hegel’s argument demonstrates, until the standpoint of forgiveness is explicitly adopted, theoretical reason operates in alienation from its true vocation, that is, again, social learning throughout occurs behind the backs of its bearers. The analogy with civil disobedience is precise here: new law and new knowing (a new concept) occur along precisely the same lines with the same normative requirements. There is thus a difference between recognition itself (consciousness) and the recognition of a right to recognition (self-consciousness) because only with the latter can the determinate negation of an existing conceptual cluster and the innovation of a new conceptual cluster occur as a self-conscious

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process. If that is right, then Brandom’s original program of social pragmatist inferential holism either implicitly depended on a standpoint it disavowed or it was simply a part of the alienated theoretical life that A Spirit of Trust helps us to diagnose and overcome.12

Notes 1 In comments on the penultimate draft of this essay, Gilles Bouché argued that Brandom conceives of his semantic account of the concept as essentially complete prior to the analysis of confession and forgiveness. I am arguing that this is not so for Hegel, and therefore cannot be so for Brandom, at least logically. While I originally thought Brandom was fully on my side of this argument, I now think that the evidence is equivocal between my and Bouché’s reading. 2 For my own earlier effort on this, see Bernstein 1996. 3 For grounds for contesting this arrival in emphatic principle, see Bernstein 2017. 4 In telling this narrative, Brandom fails to make explicit the kind of “wound” the French Revolution is, and hence the way in which Kant and what follows in German philosophy simultaneously inherits, seeks to resolve, and suppresses the fatal dilemmas of the Revolution. For the best account of all this, see Comay 2011. 5 I am taking as given that Hegel never retreats from the claim that “laws express what each individual is and does,” and that the requisite ethos refers to the habits, passions, and the like that keep that authority alive. Alienation, then, is perhaps best expressed as laws existing without the ethos appropriate to them as composing the essence of ethical life. 6 The issue of this occurring in a “free people,” and thus only within a certain kind of state is central to Hegel’s argument: freedom for him is always essentially political. 7 For a defense of these claims about trust, see Bernstein 2015, pp. 111–130. 8 It is this thought that demonstrates why conflict is and must remain constitutive of recognitive life and recognitive community. It is this logic, rather than the problem of freedom, that makes conflict essential to recognition and authority. For a fine working out of the freedom view, see Bertram’s contribution to this volume. 9 Although it would take another chapter to demonstrate, I take it that in accordance with Hegel’s syllogistic understanding of the concept, judging consciousness is generally the placeholder for particularity (the simple empirical instantiation of the law), while acting consciousness is the placeholder for singularity or individuality. Judging consciousness sees singularity only as deviance; in insisting on this, it becomes singular in itself. 10 I have demurred from Brandom’s attitude talk because while capturing Hobbesian modernity, it fails to sufficiently underline Kantian modernity—in which there is both modern individuality and the necessity of self-binding, and some idea that norms exercise an authority over attitudes. It is because Kantians believe that they have crossed the line from attitude to normative authority, that Kant’s moral philosophy sticks in the craw of the Phenomenology, forcing Hegel to engage it twice over as the block standing between moral individualism and social normativity. 11 On the explicit role of the logic of confession and forgiveness in Absolute Knowledge, see Moyar 2017. After quoting the passage on confession and forgiveness from PG/P, §796, Moyar states: “Confession and forgiveness are the proper movements or inferences of the Concept because they arrive at the fundamental mediation and unity from each of the two opposed directions, one as the agent giving up its individuality and the other as the self-righteous judge giving up its ‘unmoved universality.’ In the reconciliation of the two self-consciousnesses, there is a mutual recognition that is an awareness of the inferential whole of the Concept […]” (2017, p. 188). 12 I am immensely grateful to a posse of sage students of Brandom and Hegel for their criticisms of earlier versions of this essay. In particular I would like to thank: Gilles Bouché, Anna Katsman, Karen Ng, Terry Pinkard, and Rocio Zambrana.

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References Bernstein, J. M. (2017) “‘Our Amphibian Problem’: Nature in History in Adorno’s Hegelian Critique of Hegel,” in R. Zuckert and J. Kreines (eds.), Hegel on Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 193–212. Bernstein, J. M. (2015) Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bernstein, J. M. (1996) “Confession and Forgiveness: Hegel’s Poetics of Action,” in R. Eldridge (ed.), Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 34–65. Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (1994) Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Comay, Rebecca (2011) Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2018) The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Moyar, Dean (2017) “Absolute Knowledge and the Ethical Conclusion of the Phenomenology,” in D. Moyar (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 166–195. Pippin, Robert (2005) Brandom’s Hegel,” European Journal of Philosophy 13/3, pp. 381–408.

9 SPIRIT AND ALIENATION IN BRANDOM’S A SPIRIT OF TRUST Entfremdung, Entäußerung, and the causal entropy of normativity Italo Testa

Alienation is a key issue in Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. First, it is the overarching concept of his reconstruction of the Geist chapter. Since Brandom rightly assumes that, by the end of the chapter, the conceptual structure of Absolute Spirit has emerged and the whole story of the book has already reached its conceptual end, it is fair to say that alienation is at the core of his whole interpretation of the second half of the Phenomenology. Second, alienation is at the core of Brandom’s understanding of Hegelian modernity. As Brandom argues at the beginning of Part 3 of A Spirit of Trust, Hegel is the first philosopher not only to take up modernity as a philosophical topic, but also to understand it as the philosophical topic of world history (ST, p. 469). In Brandom’s compact characterization, modernity is linked to the rise of subjectivity—the achievement of historical self-consciousness, understood as a form of self-understanding of ourselves as essentially self-conscious beings—together with the loss of traditional Sittlichkeit. Since the loss of Sittlichkeit is simply equated by Brandom with alienation, modernity, for him, turns out to be a constitutively alienated form of life. The philosophical problem of modernity is to overcome alienation—or to reintroduce Sittlichkeit—without sacrificing subjectivity. And since Brandom assumes that alienation is constitutive of the modern form of life, he embraces a postmodern reading of Hegel according to which modernity is only a way station, a transition towards what is expected to be an essentially novel, nonalienated, conciliated rational postmodern form of life. In what follows, I will first trace back Brandom’s understanding of alienation to his understanding of skepticism in the first and second parts of A Spirit of Trust. I will then analyze, in this light, his take on alienation as both a defective metaphysical structure and a meta-attitude and unveil some tensions that arise between these two aspects and are due to the prevalence of the latter. In the second part of my chapter, I will develop some thoughts on the fact that Brandom seems to

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ignore the distinction between Entäußerung and Entfremdung, and thus, on the one hand, assigns to alienation only the negative meaning of estrangement (ignoring the structural process of alienation as externalization or objectification, which can assume both a negative and a positive meaning) and, on the other hand, conceives alienation basically as subjective alienation (ignoring the objective side of alienation as a structural phenomenon). Finally, I will argue that, once the distinction between Entäußerung and Entfremdung is taken into account, the relations both between alienation and domination and between alienation and work, and consequently the relation between Spirit and nature, should be reconsidered in a way that puts into question the bootstrapping model that Brandom supports.

I. Brandom’s alienation I.1 Normative skepticism Skepticism becomes a topic in Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology both in his analysis of the Einleitung and in his analysis of the Freiheit des Selbstbewusstseins section of the Selbstbewusstsein chapter. The kind of skepticism Hegel presents in the Einleitung as a consequence of the “instrument or medium” theory of knowledge (PG/M, §74) is designated by Brandom as “epistemological skepticism” and defined as “a failure to make intelligible the idea of knowing how things are in themselves” (ST, pp. 35f.). Epistemological skepticism is seen as a consequence of a more fundamental “semantic skepticism” (ST, p. 48) which creates a gulf of intelligibility between representations—taken to be intrinsically intelligible—and what they semantically represent. By contrast, Brandom interprets the notion of “Skeptizismus” introduced in the Freiheit des Selbstbewusstseins section as a refusal of normative commitment: as a skepticism about norms that leads to the refusal “to endorse or commit itself to anything […] to allow its consent to be compelled” (ST, p. 353). Normative skepticism may be seen as a more radical form of semantic skepticism, since it is semantic intelligibility as such—not just the intelligibility of what is represented—that is put into question. Skepticism is located here at the logical rather than epistemological level: Brandom rightly observes that it has nothing to do with the dream hypothesis. It figures here as an equipollence method—as the ability to take both sides of any question: As Brandom puts it, skepticism “will appeal to some claims to point out flaws in the warrant of another, but when pressed to defend those retreats, denies commitment, and points out reasons for disbelieving them as well” (ST, p. 357). And the equipollence method is in turn understood as a denial of normative commitment. To Hegel scholars, Brandom’s reading of skepticism may seem indifferent to the sharp distinction Hegel makes in his Skeptizismus-Aufsatz (1802, in GW 4, pp. 197– 238) between modern skepticism—an epistemological skepticism based on the dogmatic assumption of the immediacy or givenness of the facts of consciousness, which Hegel rejects—and ancient skepticism—seen as a consequent criticism of finite determinations, based on the logical method of the ancient tropes of Agrippa,

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which for Hegel is to be integrated within true philosophy as the negative side of the Absolute. But, if we read Brandom more accurately, we see that what is philosophically interesting in such a semantic characterization of skepticism is precisely that it cross-cuts the Hegelian distinction between ancient and modern skepticism: both can be seen as instances of a form of thought that denies, to various degrees, semantic intelligibility. Since the way “things are in themselves” is itself, according to Brandom, a normative notion—which is given to consciousness in the dative sense—, even modern skepticism is already implicitly a position that refuses the intelligibility of some norms: it refuses to commit itself to some epistemic norms, to “representeds,” while affirming a normative epistemic commitment to “representings,” which are supposed to have an immediate givenness we cannot refuse to endorse. Ancient skepticism appears in Brandom’s reading of Freedom of Self-Consciousness as a more deep and radical form of philosophical thought just because it puts into question intelligibility as such and unveils the fact that skepticism turns on the denial of normative commitment. Even though this seems to somehow do justice to Hegel’s idea of the superiority of ancient over modern skepticism, one might still argue that, in Brandom’s reading, skepticism, even in its most sophisticated form, is much more a “specter” (ST, pp. 97, 108) to be banned than a genuine agent of true philosophy. It may not be by chance that, in his reading of the Einleitung, Brandom assumes as a guiding thread the quote where skepticism figures as a “way of despair” (PG/M, §78), but does not even mention the crucial quote where Hegel, a few lines further down, defines the phenomenological path as “skepticism that comes to maturation” (dieser sich vollbringende Skeptizismus; GW 9, p. 56). Again, when he deals with what, according to Hegel, is the most sophisticated form of skepticism, which is the equipollence method of ancient skepticism, Brandom mainly underlines that the denial of normative commitment which the equipollence method makes explicit as the logical core of skepticism is a “pragmatic contradiction” (ST, p. 617), since the dialectical refutation of some candidate claims offered by skepticism always presupposes in actu exercitu the endorsement of other commitments (those whose endorsement precludes that candidate claim), which is denied in actu signatu by the methodical refusal to give assent to any such claim (ST, p. 359). Skepticism is implicitly bound by norms it does not explicitly identify itself with. Brandom imputes to equipollence skepticism a “defect” he assumes to be the same that Hegel diagnoses at the end of the Einleitung: skepticism “sees in every result pure nothingness and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is determinate, that is the nothingness of that from which it results” (PG/M, §79; see also §86). Assuming the general inadequacy of all conceptions, equipollence skepticism overgeneralizes negation. It frames the negative lesson of experience only in terms of abstract, formal negation, rather than in the more appropriate terms of determinate negation—the revelation of specific inadequacy of conceptions which is for Brandom the lesson of Hegel’s “dialectics” (ST, p. 358). Here it must be noted that, even though Hegel, in the Skeptizismus-Aufsatz and in the Freedom of Self-Consciousness, addresses such a contradiction and imputes to

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skepticism the shortcoming of seeing only the formal side of negation, this for him does not exhaust the whole meaning of skepticism. It is precisely with skepticism that, in Freedom of Self-Consciousness, the very notion of “Dialektik” and its movement throughout the phenomenological path is made explicit (PG/M, §§203f.). Skepticism is thus not only a category of the phenomenological path destined to be refuted, but has also a metacategorical meaning—it is integrated within true philosophy as the negative side of the Absolute—which is clearly expressed by the programmatic designation of the whole phenomenological path as “skepticism that comes to maturation.” Furthermore, the skeptical tropes—and in particular the five tropes of Agrippa, based on the trilemma between presupposition, infinite regress, and circularity—have a metanormative core, insofar as they make explicit, as Hegel argues in the Skeptizismus-Aufsatz and later in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, the structural relatedness of every determination, of every semantic content. Equipollence is thus an incompatibility method, whose logical meaning, as expressed in the tropes, is to make clear that determinations are reciprocally connected in a circular–holistic–confutative structure. As such, the tropes may be seen as metanormative forms of thought, insofar as they deploy in a non-normative vocabulary the logic of normative thought—since the perspective that affirms that every normative justification is fallible, and destined to be overcome, cannot be itself a normative justification to which other justifications may be opposed. As we will see, an understanding of skepticism as a self-contradictory pragmatic denial of normative commitment—as a consequence of the assumption of the semantic unintelligibility of determinate contents—is crucial for Brandom’s reconstruction of alienation. In fact, one may say that Brandom’s diagnosis of the defectiveness of skepticism imputes to it what I would call a form of “logical alienation”—an alienation from logical normativity, understood as a lack of identification with the pragmatic normative structure of thought, which is the model which he applies to the subsequent figures of alienated Spirit.

I.2 Alienation as defective metaphysical structure When he sets out to reconstruct the notion of “alienation” in the Geist chapter, Brandom begins with a definition of alienation as the absence or opposite of Sittlichkeit (ST, p. 472).1 The first significance of “alienation”—his word for “Entfremdung”—is that of “not sittlich.” Thus, in order to grasp what alienation means, one needs to understand Sittlichkeit, which Brandom understands as a matter of the bindingness of norms, that is, in his own vocabulary, as a matter of the kind of authority normative statuses have over normative attitudes. Brandom’s main concern here is to stress that Sittlichkeit and alienation are “metaphysical structures of normativity” (ST, p. 473), that either is “an ontological matter of the normative structure of social substance, and hence of self-consciousness” (ST, p. 503), “not primarily a psychological matter,” that is, not primarily a matter of subjective psychological attitudes. Let us consider such a socio-ontological understanding of Sittlichkeit as a way of being of social substance. It is a normative understanding, insofar as Sittlichkeit is

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defined as a certain relation to social norms. Sittlichkeit is, to use Hegel’s metaphor, to be at home with sittlich norms, that is, to identify with the norms one is bound by. Sittlichkeit is individuated as a social substance that instantiates such an identification with social norms. And the model for that is, in Brandom’s opinion, the strong identification found in the willingness to accept the risk of death within the struggle for recognition, which Brandom, in his reading of the metaphor, reconstructs as willingness, by the practitioners of Sittlichkeit, to risk and sacrifice their subjective attitudes and to identify with socially acknowledged normative statuses (ST, p. 475). It is along these lines that Brandom comes to define alienation as a “defective metaphysical structure” (ST, p. 504). Equating alienation with the absence of Sittlichkeit, he understands it as “an ontological matter of the normative structure of social substance” that is defective insofar as it lacks the central feature that defines the normative structure of Sittlichkeit, namely the relation of strong identification. Alienation is thus conceived in terms of being bound by norms one does not feel at home with, one does not identify with, and that bind one as something alien, external (ST, p. 475).

I.2.1 A matter of attitudes When identification is at issue, attitudes come back into play. The relation to social normativity addressed under the label of “being at home with” is a matter of having the proper attitudes towards objective norms. To be sure, Brandom’s affirmation that Sittlichkeit, as well as alienation, are ontological structures, and not “primarily a matter of psychological attitudes,” leaves room for the idea that attitudes, even psychological ones, are relevant, even though they do not exhaust the explanandum. Brandom says that “[a]ttitudes are not all of it, and the attitudes that matter are normative attitudes” (ST, p. 473). But once alienation is conceived solely in terms of a lack of identification, it is in danger of becoming primarily a matter of attitudes. Consider Brandom’s definition of the “core of alienation” (ST, p. 498): Alienation appears to be an opposition between normative attitudes and normative statuses. An alienated modern situation in which a subject does not identify with normative statuses is described as a situation in which a subject identifies immediately with its own subjective attitudes rather than with normative statuses. As Brandom puts it, “Only attitudes, not genuine norms, are visible in alienated Geist” (ST, p. 475). The point is not that, in alienation, there is no identification, but rather that alienation is a form of disturbed identification. Hence, when it comes to understanding the “defectiveness” that is proper to alienation, the attitudinal side seems to gain priority over the metaphysical structure. It seems that the intersubjective interplay of subjective attitudes of identifying with normative attitudes is what primarily constitutes alienation. Brandom may object that the relevant attitudes in this context are normative, not psychological, ones. But I am not sure that this is sufficient to secure the normative and metaphysical account of alienation, since the danger of a petitio principii arises. The subjects who identify immediately with normative statuses also demote norms to “adverbial modifications of the attitudes” (ST, p.

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475), denounce normative statuses as illusory, and reduce them to psychological subjective attitudes. They would not concede that the relevant attitudes are normative ones, and neither should we. While we might not embrace the realistic assumption according to which attitudes are genuinely normative only if they are directed towards already existing genuine norms, we should concede the less demanding one that attitudes are genuinely normative only if they are directed towards norms at all, be they already existing or constituted by those very attitudes. But in the most sophisticated alienated situation—which Hegel names “pure culture” (PG/M, §521)—not only do the subjects in question deny that there are genuine norms. They do not direct their attitudes towards norms at all.

I.2.2 Skepticism and alienation This takes us back to the subject matter of skepticism. As we have seen, Brandom understands skepticism as normative skepticism, that is, as a denial of normative commitment, a refusal to assent to epistemic, moral, aesthetic norms. Thinking not only of the practical doctrine of ancient skepticism, but also of Humean skepticism, reminds us that skepticism consists in the idea that we can live according to some customary rules without needing to give our assent, without needing to normatively identify with them. Hence, skepticism may well be taken to epitomize an absence of identification with normative statuses and, in its most radical form, a refusal of such an identification on the basis of the general assumption that norms as such are illusory. It is then again a matter of the prevalence of subjective attitudes over norms. One can now easily see that Brandom’s notion of alienated Spirit seems to be an instantiation of the structure of logical alienation detected in skepticism. Putting it the other way round, one can now better appreciate why Brandom’s discussion of alienated Spirit focuses on the specter of normative skepticism. In Brandom’s reconstruction of the section Der sich entfremdete Geist: Die Bildung, all this becomes much clearer. Here, “pure culture” (reine Bildung) figures as the most “explicit” (ST, p. 511) manifestation of “pure alienation” (ST, p. 513). And it is in “disruptive language” (zerrissene Sprache) that the pure structure of alienation is best exposed in its truth. This is the language of witty talk and of disruptive judgment (PG/M, §521), whose “universal inversion” undercuts the validity of every assessment—and whose hyperbolical radicalization is embodied by Rameau’s nephew (PG/M, §522). It is not surprising that alienation is exposed as radical normative skepticism, that is, as the position according to which, in Brandom’s words, “[t]he whole normative dimension of life is rejected as illusory” (ST, p. 512) and consequently no commitment to it is due. The epistemological skeptical doctrine that there is no real distinction between how things are in themselves and how things appear to us is rephrased by the compact formula: “Norms are an illusion. There are only attitudes” (ST, p. 512). Brandom reconstructs modern alienation as a kind of practical, implicit normative skepticism, basing his argument on the fact that when an alienated culture

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becomes aware of itself—of its disrupted structure—and demonstrates its selfawareness, as is the case with Rameau’s contradictory linguistic performance (PG/ M, §525), Hegel uses the same vocabulary he applies to describe skepticism in the last part of Freiheit des Selbstbewusstseins (PG/M, §205): both are described as selfaware restless confusion (Verwirrung) and as vanity (Eitelkeit) of all things and of itself which knows itself to be such. This might be why Brandom is led to apply to modern alienation the same argument he uses against the specter of skepticism: not to identify with the norms we are bound by is again understood as a “pragmatic contradiction” (ST, p. 617) that affects modern alienated consciousness.

I.3 Alienation as meta-attitude Brandom’s theory of alienation culminates in his peculiar reading of Niederträchtigkeit (translated by Miller as “base” or “ignoble” consciousness) as “the purest expression of the alienated character of modern normativity” (ST, p. 548). Understanding meta-attitudes as attitudes towards the relation between norms and attitudes of acknowledging such norms as binding, Brandom reconstructs the notion of Niederträchtigkeit, in play throughout the last three sections of the Geist chapter, as making explicit the meta-attitude proper to alienation. This very original interpretation may sound odd to a Hegel scholarship that, to my knowledge, has never conferred such a prominent position to the relation between Niederträchtigkeit and Edelmütigkeit. It sounds less strange if we recall the internal connection between Brandom’s concepts of alienation and skepticism. As a skeptical attitude towards the relation between normative attitudes and normative states, alienation is already understood as a meta-attitude: an attitude that assumes that the relation between attitudes and normative statuses is not a genuine one. In Brandom’s reconstruction of Niederträchtigkeit, the underlying skeptical attitude—the valet’s attitude expressed by Hegel with the formula “no man is a hero for his valet” (PG/M, §665)—is further specified as a form of naturalist practical attitude which follows the reductionist strategy to treat reasons as causes, to deny that normativity has a proper place in nature, and to end up with a sort of genealogical reconstruction which unmasks the contingent, natural, and animal basis of social life (ST, p. 561). That we are dealing with a naturalist variation of normative skepticism is confirmed by Brandom’s definition: the meta-attitude of Niederträchtigkeit, which is the “purest expression of modern alienation,” exhibits alienation as something that consists in “[d]enying the ultimate intelligibility of normative statuses” (ST, p. 581). Alienation is thus characterized as the purest expression of what, in his reading of the Einleitung, Brandom names “semantic skepticism” and what he now refers to as “nihilism about norms” (ST, p. 552). In contrast to Niederträchtigkeit’s skeptical naturalism, the noble consciousness (Edelmütigkeit), at least in the higher-order rational form it is taken to assume within Absolute Knowing, is understood as a non-alienated consciousness that consists in a non-skeptical attitude towards the relation between normative

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attitudes and norms—what Brandom calls the “recognitive attitude of trust” (ST, p. 635) and opposes to the sort of Rortyan “irony” (ST, p. 515) that characterizes pure culture. It is understood as a position that practically takes norms seriously and thus assumes that reasons are genuinely binding and cannot be traded in for causes, that norms have a place in nature, and that genealogical reconstruction does not exclude rational validity. Non-alienated consciousness, proper to postmodernity as the overcoming of modern alienation, appears then as normativism. Keep in mind that, according to Brandom, the meta-attitudes in play are not only epistemic, but also practical recognitive ones and imply the practical commitment (ST, p. 576) to make something exist by taking it to exist—what, in the socio-ontological lexicon of Searle (2010, p. 86), figures as the double direction of fit proper to performative declarations that make something be the case by representing it as being the case. Spirit exists as the product of our noble or ignoble attitudes, as something that is not independent of our meta-attitudes. Here, Brandom omits to specify that even noble attitudes should be taken to be only partly constitutive of what they are directed towards, otherwise, notwithstanding their nobleness, they would not be distinguishable from a “strategy of Mastery” (ST, p. 514), that is, an alienated strategy which, misconceiving freedom as asymmetric independence, assumes itself to be absolutely constitutive of what it is directed towards. Furthermore, according to Brandom, we should realize that base attitudes—skepticism—are parasitic upon noble attitudes—normativism—insofar as the latter are a necessary pragmatic presupposition that must be satisfied for Spirit to exist and also for base attitudes to have a determinate semantic content: base attitudes are exposed to suffer from a “pragmatic contradiction” between what they commit themselves to as practical commitments and what they explicitly acknowledge by putting normativity into question. It thus seems that, while normativism is a necessary pragmatic presupposition of Spirit, skepticism—alienation—is an optional, contingent choice. Such an analysis seems to confirm that, in Brandom’s understanding of alienation, the subjective attitudinal side is in the end prevalent: After all, it is Brandom himself who labels alienation as a form of “hypersubjectivity” (ST, p. 496). Even a base attitude is mainly a subjective attitude, proper to a form of consciousness. Of course, this form of consciousness might be intersubjective and socially shared but, even then, alienation is not understood as a structural, objective feature of a life form but as a pragmatic contradiction resulting from a subjective contingent option. Which also means that, in the end, alienation is understood as the product of optional base attitudes, as if those attitudes were responsible for what they denounce. In Brandom’s words: “What is wrong with Niederträchtigkeit is that such attitudes institute alienated recognitive structures” (ST, p. 585). Once again, alienation is in danger of being reduced to a product of self-contradictory subjective attitudes. To say that such a contradiction results from the contrast between the denial of normative commitment and the norms such a denial implicitly acknowledges as its own conditions of possibility is not to deny that such a contradiction is mainly located within the intersubjective play of subjective

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attitudes and not within the structure of an objective social world. Of course, Brandom mentions that, in the section of Der sich entfremdete Geist: Die Bildung, there are figures of institutional alienation such as State and Wealth (ST, p. 504). But I do not see how one could give an account of the alienated character of such objective structures just in terms of a pragmatic contradiction—and in fact the meta-attitude account of alienation does not provide such an account. Can an account in terms of meta-attitudes be sufficient to understand the alienated character of social institutions? Furthermore, critical attitudes as such—those very attitudes that unveil alienation—are in danger of being denounced as the cause of what they criticize. This does not seem to allow for the fact that, at least in some cases, critical attitudes (even base ones) may be required to denounce false forms of non-alienated Sittlichkeit, which, if we follow the strategy to treat alienation as a pragmatic contradiction, we may not be able to account for, since here critical attitudes figure as parasitic options, and it is not easy to see how they could be justified. In the end, skepticism—understood as an optional subjective or intersubjective attitude—would be the cause of alienation and normativism its cure: Are we sure that such a picture correctly identifies the kind of disease Hegel calls Entfremdung? Furthermore, the acknowledgement of normativism, as a necessary pragmatic presupposition always already implicitly undertaken, is assumed to be the step that breaks through the confines of alienated modernity into Absolute Knowing. Are we sure that the disease of modernity can be overcome through a transcendental argument? In the move from Rortyan irony to Brandomian trust, are we not in danger of getting rid of criticism as such?

II. Alienation reconsidered II.1 Entfremdung and Entäußerung As has often been noted in the literature, Hegel uses two words for “alienation”: “Entfremdung,” which corresponds to “entfremden,” “to make alien,” and “Entäußerung,” which corresponds to “entäußern,” “to make outer or external” (see Inwood 1992, p. 35). The lexical formation of the terms already reveals some kind of connection between them, related to a certain form of becoming other or alien to oneself, which would justify talking in general, as I shall do, of alienation as estrangement (Entfremdung) and as externalization (Entäußerung). When it comes to proposing different terms for the two German words, some translate “Entfremdung” with “estrangement” and “Entäußerung” with “alienation” or “externalization.” Another option, favored by Miller, is to translate “Entfremdung” with “alienation” and “Entäußerung” with “externalization.” That Hegel at times tends to use the two German terms as synonyms has led many interpreters, including Inwood, whose position seems to have gained prevalence in the recent Anglophone literature, to assume that no clear conceptual distinction can be traced between them.2 Others have put forward the idea—for

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which they have provided quite different reasons—that there is a conceptual distinction to be maintained and explicated.3 And I think that, if we look closely at the Phenomenology, this is consistent with Hegel’s use of the terms. Many passages can be found where the phenomenon referred to as “Entäußerung” is also referred to as “Entfremdung,” for example at the beginning of Der sich entfremdete Geist: Die Bildung. 4 But this does not mean that the two terms have the same meaning. Hegel gives us a clear clue on how to trace the distinction at the beginning of “Absolute Knowing.” There, Hegel clearly affirms that “Entäußerung” can assume both a “positive” and a “negative” meaning. Entäußerung is described as a process of externalization, which is constitutive of Spirit and has the structure of an objectification (PG/M, §788; GW 9, p. 422): the work through which Spirit “setzt sich als Gegenstand,” that is, posits itself as object. Entäußerung thus refers to the socio-ontological structure of objectification— which Hegel in his later writing refers to as Objektivierung—which, according to Hegel, is constitutive of social objects such as self-consciousness, and of institutional realities such as right, language, culture, market, and state—that is, of the whole structure of subjective and objective Spirit. The ontological mechanism of social objectification is a necessary constituent of Spirit—of the social world—and in itself is neither negative nor positive, but can assume one or the other value depending on the context. Entäußerung can assume a negative meaning once the social objectivity which is its result assumes a configuration perceived as something extraneous, alien to us, as something we can not identify with and recognize as our own work. Negative Entäußerung covers the use that Hegel elsewhere reserves for the term “Entfremdung.” We might then say that Entfremdung is a form Entäußerung can assume—when it takes the form of negative Entäußerung. Hence, Entfremdung can always be referred to as Entäußerung—because it is always related to processes of objectification—whereas Entäußerung cannot always be referred to as Entfremdung. Entäußerung can take a positive form, compatible with Absolute Knowing. This does not mean that its objectified form is cancelled, but rather that it becomes transparent (see Kain 2005, p. 220), as something in which Spirit recognizes itself in its otherness, with which it can identify as its own product and feel at home. Such a understanding of the relation between Entäußerung and Entfremdung is not only justified by the first paragraph of Absolute Knowing, but also allows us to make sense of many passages that can be found in the Bildung section of the Geist chapter, such as the following ones: Aber derjenige Geist, dessen Selbst das absolut Diskrete ist, hat seinen Inhalt sich als eine ebenso harte Wirklichkeit gegenüber, und die Welt hat hier die Bestimmung, ein Äußerliches, das Negative des Selbstbewußtseins zu sein. Aber diese Welt ist geistiges Wesen, sie ist an sich die Durchdringung des Seins und der Individualität; dies ihr Dasein ist das Werk des Selbstbewußtseins; aber ebenso eine unmittelbar vorhandne ihm fremde Wirklichkeit, welche eigentümliches Sein hat, und worin es sich nicht erkennt. (GW 9, p. 264)5

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Aber das Dasein dieser Welt sowie die Wirklichkeit des Selbstbewußtseins beruht auf der Bewegung, daß dieses seiner Persönlichkeit sich entäußert, hiedurch seine Welt hervorbringt, und sich gegen sie als eine Fremde so verhält, daß es sich ihrer nunmehr zu bemächtigen hat. (GW 9, p. 267)6 In a certain sense, Hegel is attacked by Marx in his Paris Manuscripts (1959) precisely for having traced such a distinction between normal and pathological Entäußerung, between Entäußerung and Entfremdung, a move that Marx criticizes as ideological and as masking the fact that institutional Entäußerung is always pathological, that it necessarily leads to Entfremdung and cannot be disentangled from it (see Haber 2007, p. 72). If the reconstruction I have proposed holds up, alienation as estrangement is not only a matter of subjective attitudes, since alienation (as well as freedom) also has objective conditions in certain forms of Entäußerung.

II.2 Brandom’s deflationist understanding of alienation as Entfremdung If we now come back to Brandom’s use of the term “alienation,” we can see that he never distinguishes alienation as Entäußerung from alienation as Entfremdung. Right from the first occurrence of the term “alienation,” he refers to the German word “Entfremdung.” Thus, the focus of his analysis is only on alienation as estrangement and is clearly based on an interpretation of the section Der sich entfremdete Geist: Die Bildung. Furthermore, with “alienation,” he always refers to a negative phenomenon to be overcome—as for Marx, there is no place here for a distinction between normal and pathological alienation. As a consequence, in Brandom’s reconstruction, Hegel’s critique of modern alienation is as radical as Marx’s, even though on an idealistic normativist basis rather than a materialistic one. That there is no place here for a neutral, let alone a positive meaning of alienation may seem unsatisfactory to commentators, such as Joachim Ritter (1969, pp. 148–151), who have often underlined that, in the Hegelian understanding of modernity, Entzweiung expressed by Verstand, and linked to juridical person, private property, the system of State Power and Wealth, is a constitutive mechanism of objective Spirit and, furthermore, has the positive meaning of an emancipatory moment as an affirmation of necessary components of modern freedom. Not allowing for a positive meaning of alienation then implies the risk of attributing to Hegel a monodimensional criticism of modernity and also overlooks the fact that, due to the “finite” character of objective Spirit, there will always be a certain amount of estrangement not to be overcome at this level (see Kervégan 2007, p. 12; Pinkard 2012, pp. 173f.): even the meta-ethical and meta-objective step to Absolute Spirit—what Brandom understands as retrospective rational reconstruction—and the meta-philosophical reconciliation it is meant to assure, is a move to another level and does not simply annihilate the estranged forms (with their intrinsic opacity, contingency, and naturalness) that objective Spirit is not able to heal from within.

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To be sure, Brandom’s position is a sophisticated one and does not simply overlook the distinction between Entäußerung and Entfremdung or inadvertently conflate these terms. While he never mentions nor makes use of the notion of Entäußerung throughout the whole book, he does quote a passage of Miller’s translation in which the English translations of both “Entäußerung” (externalization) and “Entfremdung” (alienation) occur. Furthermore, Brandom’s understanding (ST, pp. 497f.) of Hegelian “actualization” (Verwirklichung) seems to be a transposition of the process which Hegel describes as Entäußerung. The processes through which norms are institutionalized, self-consciousness assumes a social existence through language, and State Power and Wealth embody recognitive relations are all described by Brandom as forms of Spirit’s “actualization,” or “manifestation,” or “expression”—terms he uses as synonyms (ST, p. 504). Such a use of the notion of actualization to cover the phenomenon of Entäußerung seems to be characteristic of an expressivist transposition of the subject– object model of Entäußerung into a paradigm of philosophy of language. In this sense, Brandom seems to be on the side of those—including Habermas—who think that the notions of Entäußerung and objectification should be either abandoned when related to the subject–object paradigm, or reformulated. Still, with his deflationist version of Entäußerung, Brandom implicitly offers us something which is in danger of getting lost. The deflationist version of Entäußerung may seem unsatisfactory not only to the commentators who follow Ritter’s interpretation and underline the constitutive and even positive meaning of Entäußerung, but also to those, such as Riedel, who assume that, even if Hegel acknowledges the ontological necessity of Entäußerung, and even the emancipatory meaning of some traits of modern Entzweiung, it remains a peculiar feature of Hegel’s analysis that he diagnoses also the negative side, the social pathologies of Entäußerung. The problem is that, once we use Brandom’s notion of “manifestation” or “expression” to translate the externalization process, we may lose sight of the “thinghood” side of Entäußerung. Hegel already links the manifestation of Spirit to the process of “sich zum Dinge machen” in his Jena writings. Here, the socioontological mechanism of objectification has a double side. On the one hand, the ontological constitution of theoretical and practical self-consciousness and intersubjectivity has some objective conditions in the objectified world (see also Quadflieg 2011, pp. 701–715). On the other hand, Spirit, objectifying itself, becomes a thing and starts having causal effects on us. Furthermore, insofar as habitualization is a necessary aspect of its becoming objective, according to Hegel’s motif that “habit is the universal form of Spirit” (GW 10, §410), Spirit takes the form of a “mechanism,” of a substance that implements social automatisms that, when reified, can lead to social estrangement. It is the objectification side of Entäußerung that constitutes the structural sliding door between positive and negative Entäußerung, since it is here that objective structures can be implemented whose causal effects on us may lead to different forms of estrangement. To put it another way, if we place alienation only on the subjective side of estrangement, we

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lose our grip on the fact that Hegelian Entfremdung is also linked to a certain effect of social reification connected with social institutions. Furthermore, if we equate, as Brandom does, externalization or Entäußerung and actualization or Verwirklichung, another problem arises. In Hegel’s writings, Verwirklichung—think of the Grundlinien (GW 14)—has a positive meaning: it indicates not every form of reality, but only those realities that make Reason actual and efficacious (wirklich). On the contrary, Entäußerung and Objektivierung are more wide-ranging concepts, as they cover both social forms that do and that do not actualize rational freedom. Thus, once we implicitly translate “Entäußerung or externalization” as “actualization or Verwirklichung,” we lose sight of the fact that the very same process of alienation as Entäußerung that manifests Spirit also produces alienation as estrangement. Once the structural objective nexus between Entäußerung and Entfremdung is abandoned, Entfremdung can no longer be captured as a certain form assumed by Entäußerung or objectification. Hence, alienation tends to be reduced to subjective estrangement, to a form of subjective alienation—an estrangement that is mainly connected with subjective (be it normative) attitudes of identification and their misguided deployment. And such a strategy loses sight of the objective side of alienation—an estrangement caused by objective structural features (such as those manifested in the reification analysis) and reflected in subjective forms of misled identification. The point here is not simply to invert the subjective understanding and reduce estrangement to objective alienation. What we need to understand is rather that the notion and the phenomenon of alienation is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective,7 since it has both objective conditions—a certain arrangement of the world—and subjective conditions—certain attitudes towards it. Now, Brandom is perfectly right to say that alienation, as Hegel understands it, is not mainly a psychological matter, but rather an ontological way of being that pertains to the whole structure of Spirit: “Alienation, like Sittlichkeit, is not a psychological attitude of individuals (though it can be reflected there)” (ST, p. 496, n. 9). But for this to be true, alienation needs to be rooted in the ambivalent process of Entäußerung. If truth be told, Brandom’s analysis of alienation has of course an objective side. First, his analysis of practical intentional action shows that individual attitudes in action always deploy the dialectics of Handlung and Tat, that is, are not just subjective occurrences, but events in the objective course of the world. Second, Brandom’s strategy is to give an account of the objectivity of Spirit in terms of the objectivity of norms. But the process of Entäußerung is broader than that and cannot be reduced to the normative actualization of norms. In the process of Entäußerung, the objectivity of norms, their actualization in the objectivity of Spirit, is itself conceived as something that tends to objectify itself, that is, that tends to assume the thinghood (Dinghaftigkeit) characteristic of structures that can start having causal effects on us. Of course, one of Hegel’s points is that such an objective side of reification is itself a product of the work of Spirit and thus partly dependent upon subjective attitudes. Hence, there is some room here to reformulate Brandom’s alienating attitudes as reifying ones. But the objective experience of alienation cannot be reduced to that,

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otherwise we would again fall into the trap of mastery and assume that spiritual attitudes are independent, that is, absolutely constitutive. As a consequence, an analysis in terms of meta-attitudes cannot exhaust the experience of alienation. My suggestion then is that, first, it is necessary to spell out that alienation has some objective conditions. Second, such objective conditions include, but cannot be reduced to occurrences of norms. Third, one needs to introduce into the ontology of the social world a notion of the causal retroaction of normativity, that is, of the causal entropy to which normative structures are subjected, which implies reconsidering the relation between nature and Spirit as a whole.

II.3 Domination and objective alienation If we now return to Hegel’s Phenomenology, we can see that, throughout the Geist chapter, there are a number of places where Hegel deals with social institutions that are a result of the Entäußerung of Spirit, of its objectification in social structures. Consider the system of right that objectifies recognition in the abstract form of personhood; consider the institution of the Roman Empire, and the system of modern State Power and Wealth. The constitution of each of these structures is described in terms of Entäußerung. But Hegel also deals with the pathologies that accompany such an objectification, with the negative occurrences of Entäußerung and the forms of Entfremdung they manifest. And such an estrangement, if we consider for instance Hegel’s analysis of the Roman Empire, is not only a lack of identification with social institutions, an inability to normatively recognize such social objectivities as our own product: Entfremdung is rather caused by, and is the manifestation of, the fact that such objectivities turn upon us and dominate and subjugate us, as happens with the dynamics where the emperor (PG/M, §481), as lord and master of the World (Herr der Welt), manifests himself as an absolute power (Macht) to which individual persons are subjected (§482) as to a destructive force of nature (zerstörende Gewalt). This world is, however, a spiritual entity, it is in-itself the interfusion of being and individuality; this, its existence, is the work of self-consciousness, but it is also an alien reality already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own and in which it does not recognize itself. This real world is the external essence and the free content of legal right. But this external world, which the lord of the world of legal right takes to himself, is not merely this elemental being confronting the self as something contingently given; on the contrary, it is his work, but not in a positive, rather in a negative sense. It obtains its existence through self-consciousness’s own externalization and separation of itself from its essence which, in the ruin and devastation which prevail in the world of legal right, seems to inflict on self-consciousness from without, the violence of the liberated element. (PG/M, §484)8

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Alienation as estrangement is here connected with social domination, the Herrschaft that man-made institutions exercise over us and that is reflected in subjective attitudes that express an inability to feel at home and normatively identify with institutions perceived as distant, alien, external to us. Hence, estrangement is not only normatively, but also causally connected with subjection to some alien power. It is due to the objective institutional structure of this world and may manifest itself in the estranged consciousness of the few (stoical and skeptical conceptions of internal freedom). One should not forget that even the Bildung of early modern French court culture described in the section on Der sich entfremdete Geist: Die Bildung is first conceived by Hegel as a reaction to the estranged effects of a previous Entäußerung. Culture reacts to a previous Entfremdung—it is an attempt to reappropriate the social world, to overcome estrangement—by generating new and more extended forms of Entäußerung—habits, social objects, institutions—, but the paradoxical effect it produces in its modern, Ancien Régime form, is that this brings about more radicalized forms of estrangement.9 Hence, even the notion of Entfremdung Hegel develops in this section is to be understood as linked to negative Entäußerung and should be analyzed in relation to the objective side of alienation. Now, it has been observed that, when it comes to accomplished modernity—at least for the final phase, described in the Grundlinien, where the institutional layers for a functioning family life, a civil society, and a constitutional state are basically at hand—, alienation as estrangement becomes for Hegel a matter of subjective alienation (see Hardimon 1994, p. 133). This modern world is basically rational, and hence estrangement should be conceived as primarily a problem of the attitudes of those who cannot come to identify with that world. Here, the therapeutic task of philosophy is to let us see that this world is a home, that the arrangements of this world, if appropriately seen, allow us to feel at home with it. But it should be noted that, if alienation as estrangement is here a matter of our attitudes, this is not due solely to our attitudes, since it also depends on the fact that some objective conditions are satisfied (that the world is a home). Furthermore, it seems to me that, at least for the majority of the Geist chapter, such objective conditions are not yet satisfied. And, of course, they are not satisfied in the Culture of the Ancien Régime, where, for instance, the constitutional State is not even imperfectly actualized. Thus, the estrangement described there cannot be primarily a matter of subjective attitudes. In that world, social critique is an estranged form of consciousness. But the attitude in which such an estranged form of critique consists is justified by the way the world is, even if it takes the form of a radical global skepticism—as with Rameau’s nephew—since the world’s arrangement is inadequate, which cannot be attributed solely to the attitudes of that form of consciousness.

II.4 The causal entropy of normative orders One of Brandom’s central insights is the idea that Hegel takes from Kant the notion of necessity as “conformity to a rule.” Kant sees “natural necessity” and “practical necessity” as species of one genus, but nonetheless understands them as

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very different modalities (ST, p. 692). According to Brandom, Hegel takes over from Kant the deontic translation of necessity into normative necessity, understood as normative force, but goes beyond him by understanding subjective and objective necessity as two sides of the same coin. According to this story, Hegel’s objective idealism implies that normative attitudes and normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent. Hegel’s conceptual and modal realism imply the asymmetrical reference-dependence of subjective activities on the existence of the objective world. Concerning the objectivity of the social world, we have a symmetrical reference-dependence between normative statuses and normative attitudes. As one can see, Brandom’s viewpoint leaves room for the idea that subjective practices are dependent on the existence of an objective world, while the objectivity of a social world is dependent on the actual force of these subjective practices. On this basis, modern alienation is understood as the position that (incoherently) practically affirms the asymmetrical sense- and reference-dependence of objective normative statuses on subjective normative attitudes. In other words, alienation arises out of an incapacity to reconcile the aspect according to which social norms are found (objective necessity: the social status of norms as social objects), and the aspect according to which norms are made by us (subjective necessity). Brandom attributes such an incapacity to the prevalence of some sort of base, ignoble skeptical meta-attitude. What I have been arguing so far is that this is not sufficient to correctly understand Hegel, since his alienation diagnosis seems to imply that such an incapacity is itself due to a certain way an objective world manifests itself, to certain objective structures that incapacitate us and prevent us from identifying ourselves with the social world. To put it in normative terms, this side of alienation seems to be linked to a specific non-normative experience in which norms are found: an experience in which the conceptual structure of an objective world acts in a non-conceptual way upon us. This is not simply due to, as Brandom admits, normative attitudes being part of the (first) natural causal order.10 It seems to be linked to a sui generis social causality of normative orders—what the young Hegel had named the causality of “destiny” and later made explicit as the causality of second nature. In my opinion, this helps us understand some occurrences of “necessity” (Notwendigkeit) in objective Spirit that are otherwise difficult to grasp. This happens already in Jena in his analyses of the tragedy of ethical life, of civil society, and of the process of social work, and more generally in his mature analysis of Sittlichkeit as social substance understood as a necessity that exerts an absolute power over individuals.11 Here, necessity is again conformity to a rule, but such conformity is not spontaneous at all: social rules act upon us in a mechanical, non-conceptual way. Even if we adopt a metaphysics that combines objective idealism and conceptual realism, this may still hold, since the fact that the ultimate structure of the world is conceptual does not exclude the possibility that concepts work in a non-conceptual way. Necessity is connected to social mechanisms, to social structures. And such a possibility of a sui generis causal instantiation of conceptual norms is rooted in the socio-ontological process of objectification, of the constitution of a social world that necessarily assumes a dinghaft character and can come to be reified. This is what I have

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previously called the question of the causal entropy of normativity or of its causal retroaction. It is related to the problem that, in the process of Spirit’s objectification, conceptual norms necessarily have to take a habitualized, mechanical form, and that, if reified, they can come to exert a form of social domination that subjugates human individuals and leads them into estrangement understood as a lack of identification or as misidentification. Hegel, in his later writings, uses the notion of “second nature [zweite Natur]” to refer to the fact that the result of the work of Spirit—the actualization of our normative practices—takes the form of objectifications that can manifest themselves as reified dead things that repeat traits of mechanical first naturalness and that may subjugate us: they act upon us with an authority and power analogous to or even stronger than that of causal natural necessity (GW 14, §146). Bildung, as discussed in the Einleitung, is a habit-formation process not only of subjective spiritual attitudes—of a subjective second nature—but also of objective, external social formations—of an objective second nature that results from the objectification of attitudes. Both sides are constituted through the ontological mechanism of Entäußerung and are thus subjected to its pathologies. We ought to keep in mind that Hegel, not only in his Jena writings, but also in the Grundlinien, describes such elements of social necessity—of alienation as Entäußerung—as components of Sittlichkeit and that he is also keen to describe some estranged manifestations of such objectifications—some forms of alienation as Entfremdung—as what, under certain structural historical conditions, cannot be overcome within objective Spirit. Think of some aspects of his analysis of civil society—for example, of the problem of the poor, and of the “rabble” (GW 14, §§241f.), who suffer both from subjective and objective alienation.12 If this is so, then the notion of Sittlichkeit does not simply mean the absence or the opposite of alienation, since it embodies, at least to some extent, both of its forms. Within A Spirit of Trust’s strategy, one could be tempted to give an account of the causal entropy of normative orders in terms of naturalizing attitudes, following Brandom’s analysis of Greek immediate Sittlichkeit, which he reconstructs in terms of naturalizing attitudes that reify norms as natural properties or accord normative significance to natural occurrences. The identification of naturalizing attitudes is an important component of every critical theory of society and therefore Brandom’s analysis of a base meta-attitude as a sort of naturalist reductionism is of great interest. One could say that, in this case, objective reification is explained in terms of subjective estranged attitudes, as the reifying effect of such attitudes. But an analysis in terms of naturalizing attitudes alone is not enough, since alienation is the experience that naturalized instances of norms are already there, have an effect of domination over us, and, up to a certain point, reproduce themselves partly independently of our attitudes. The problem of alienation is that there is a certain process of social objectivity that is partly independent of the subjective attitudinal processes, and is connected with Herrschaft. Objective alienation—reification—may be the historical result of estranged attitudes, but to modify our attitudes would not

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be enough to overcome it, since once established, reified patterns do not work anymore in intentional terms, but rather as causal structures. Finally, it is true that the “Master” strategy is a relevant aspect of Brandom’s analysis of alienation. Such an analysis offers us important conceptual tools to clarify the asymmetric logic of independence that structures power relations. Still, it is an analysis typically formulated from the active point of view of the master, and as such, if not combined with a socio-ontological analysis of Sittlichkeit through Entäußerung—which Hegel brilliantly develops when he combines the dialectics of Lord and Bondsman with an analysis of social labor as a constitutive form of objectification—does not seem sufficient to capture the experience of being dominated.

II.5 Alienation and work These last considerations offer us the opportunity to address another aspect of Brandom’s reconstruction of alienation, that the relation between alienation and social work does not seem to carry any weight. To be sure, Brandom’s reconstruction of the objectivity of norms as something that is both found and made by us puts a great emphasis on the Hegelian notion of Spirit as “universal Work” (das allgemeine Werk; GW 9, p. 239; PG/M, §439) and as “action of all and each” (das Tun Aller und Jeder). But the notion of work is used as a metaphor to mean human intentional activity in general, which is confirmed by the previous chapter of A Spirit of Trust, where Brandom develops a fascinating reconstruction of how both individuals and communities constitute themselves through practical intentional action. One can easily see that no specific attention is paid to poiesis, to work in the specific sense of man’s transformation of his natural environment and of social labor. We know that the Marxist tradition has often argued that Hegel is the bourgeois philosopher who discovered the central philosophical meaning of work and put it at the center of his metaphysics of Spirit: but this last move is also criticized as an ideological one, since it ends up idealizing work and concealing its material and unjust social articulation. If this were so, then Brandom would be a true Hegelian, and Marxists would not be satisfied with him. But I think the official Marxist picture of Hegel is not completely fitting here. First, if we look at the genesis of the phenomenological conception of Spirit as Werk, we can see that, at its roots in the Jena writings, there is a long confrontation with, on the one hand, work as an anthropogenetic productive activity through which human kind produces and reproduces itself and its natural environment and, on the other hand, work as political economy and the meaning of labor as socially divided productive activity. Work, both as an instrumental activity of the transformation of nature and as social interaction, is seen as one of the constitutive middles of Spirit, which is itself understood as a middle (Mitte) of work, language, and recognition, as Habermas has famously put it. In the Naturrecht-Aufsatz, as well as in the System der Sittlichkeit and in the Realphilosophie, work plays a central role in the genealogy of Spirit. And it is precisely in the analysis of the modern social division of labor that Hegel discovers in the Jena writings some pathological forms of estrangement linked

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to the sui generis natural causality of social processes. Even in the Phenomenology, where the material of such an analysis remains mostly in the background, the notion of the work of Spirit is not related only to action theory, in the Vernunft chapter, but also, in the Geist chapter, to the moment of Wealth, by which Hegel refers to the economic structure of civil society. And, last but not least, we all know that, in the Selbstbewusstsein chapter, the analysis of the relation between Lord and Bondsman implies a deep analysis of work as a productive activity of transformation of natural and social objects (including self-consciousness). If we assume that work is not only a metaphor, but also a central medium of the constitution of Spirit—what Hegel in the 1803–4 Jena lessons named the “ewig zum Werke werden”—then some consequences follow from this. First, as Manfred Riedel (1969) has very well argued, Spirit can no longer be conceived solely on the model of practical intentional action—something that is always internal to already established spiritual activity—but must be conceived as something that always involves a confrontation with nature and cannot be exhausted by ethical action. Second, Hegel’s notion of work is based on the socio-ontological mechanism of objectification, which he describes in the Realphilosophie II as a form of self-objectification (sich zum Dinge machen). In this sense, the notion of Entäußerung that Hegel uses in the analysis of Bildung is a reprise of the socioontological structure of work. Moreover, in the Selbstbewusstsein chapter, such a process of objectification is central to Hegel’s analysis of the work activity of the bondsman. And it is also clear here that the model of Entäußerung—described as “becoming an object” (sich zum Gegenstande machen; GW 9, p. 115; PG/M, §196)—is taken to be the structure of “formative activity” (Bilden) in general, that is, of Bildung. Hence, Bildung cannot be reduced to praxis, to intentional practical action, and is always merged with poiesis, with productive activity. Throughout its activity, the laboring consciousness gives social shape both to natural objects and to its own internal nature. It produces through objectification both a subjective and an objective second nature. Furthermore, such an activity of alienation as externalization takes also the form of alienation as estrangement. It produces some forms of estrangement—already in the Jena lessons, the analysis of mechanized labor and of the dulling labor of the factory furnished the model for an estranged experience of dependency on a “blind,” quasi-natural necessity (GW 8, pp. 243ff.). But labor can also be a means through which the alien object can be reappropriated and estrangement overcome. If this short analysis gets something right, the tendency, which Brandom shares with many other contemporary commentators, to equate spiritual activity with practical intentional action should be reconsidered. This would have consequences for our conception of both language and recognition, since their structural nexus with work as a medium of Spirit implies that they also, to a certain extent, presuppose work as an inescapable confrontation with nature. Furthermore, once we have ascertained the meaning of work for the socioontological constitution of Spirit, the notion of alienation cannot be separated from it, since work is linked both with positive and negative Entäußerung. Hence,

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Entfremdung must be understood not only as related to subjective practical and productive attitudes, but also as related to the causality of social mechanisms involved in the structure of social labor.

II.6 Bootstrap from nature? Let me come to the last point of my analysis. If work, the way I have proposed to conceive it, is constitutive of Spirit, the relation between Spirit and nature should be reconsidered. Work, as we have seen, is conceived by Hegel as an activity that involves a confrontation with nature. The laboring individual—as well as the laboring community—transforms both external nature and its own internal nature, which is also meant to be an emancipation from first nature that is constitutive of the genesis of Spirit as the human social world. As Hegel writes about the bondsman, “through work he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it” (PG/M, §194). But just because such an emancipation is understood to involve work, it cannot be taken to be accomplished once and for all. Spirit, understood as a process of Bildung, is an ewig zum Werke werden: The confrontation with nature is reiterated, even though at different levels, at each stage of Spirit’s development, since each new individual and community has to reshape its own nature and appropriate the external first nature and the inherited social second nature that constitutes its environment. We may conceive such a work of emancipation from naturalness along the lines of the metaphor of bootstrapping that Brandom adopts in the Selbstbewusstsein chapter. But if we take the nexus between Spirit and work seriously, the bootstrapping process cannot be taken to be something that happens once and for all, as Brandom seems keen to think when he defines bootstrapping along the model of normative sacrifice and the risk of death and talks of an “initial bootstrapping transition from the merely natural” (ST, 239).13 If we were to think of the bootstrapping of Spirit from nature as something that happens once and for all and that makes us totally independent from nature, such a relation would be thought of again in terms of the Master strategy of absolute constitutive independence. But even the Master in the dialectics of Self-Consciousness has to learn, as Hegel puts it, “that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” (PG/M, §189), that is, that his effort to conceive of himself as totally independent from life’s naturalness is destined to fail. And this is a lesson that contemporary Hegelianism should learn from the master, too. The authority of Spirit’s self-conception cannot be absolute: if the idea of “essentially selfconscious creatures” (ST, pp. 235ff.) implies that they are partly self-constitutive, as Brandom puts it, this implies also that Spirit is partly not self-constituted, that is, partly dependent on (and responsible to) nature. Hence, the bootstrapping of desire that risks its own life—the bootstrapping from nature to normativity—is truly a never-ending story. This is implied by Brandom’s conception of such a bootstrapping as a normative sacrifice, that is, as a normative identification: The very possibility that alienation arises, that a lack of identification or a misidentification pathologically affects a form of life, implies at least that bootstrapping is never fully established. Even the fact that, as Brandom claims, we already always pragmatically presuppose a sort of noble

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commitment to normativity does not prevent us from falling back into estranged forms of life where that bootstrapping presupposition is compromised. One last point here deserves to be mentioned. As we have seen, in his analysis of the chapter on Geist, Brandom takes the notion of alienation as Entfremdung to always have a negative meaning, referring to something that must be healed. But in this very section, Hegel uses the notion of “Entfremdung” to refer to Spirit’s estrangement from Nature: It is therefore through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality. His true original nature and substance is the alienation of himself as Spirit from his natural being. This externalization is, therefore, both the purpose and the existence of the individual. (PG/M, §489)14 Brandom mentions this passage and describes it from the perspective of Spirit’s bootstrapping from nature, which has a positive meaning for him (ST, 497). But this seems to be inconsistent with the way he has so far reconstructed alienation as negative estrangement. Why not assume that Spirit’s Entfremdung from nature is also a phenomenon that has a negative side that must be healed? Indeed, Spirit’s effort to bootstrap itself from nature is not necessarily and completely emancipative. First, as we can see from the quotation, such a move also has the socio-ontological structure of Entäußerung, which can take an estranged form, as Hegel implies by using the word “Entfremdung.” Spirit’s effort to bootstrap itself is always a partial move of self-constitution, which implies also a partial remainder of dependence. This means not only that, after all, we are always also part of the causal natural order, that we have a first nature we cannot escape, but also that naturalness is repeated within Spirit and can manifest itself in its structure in an estranged way, in that normative structures start working as if they were natural ones, with a sort of sui generis causality, as estranged, reified second nature. If we look at the whole Geist chapter from this perspective, we can easily see that Hegel constantly focuses on the fact that naturalness is always repeated anew within Spirit. There is a Dialectics of Enlightenment which manifests a certain porosity of Spirit, its openness to the reactive return of naturalness within its own domain. It is another aspect of the fact that Spirit is only partly self-constitutive. I can here mention only some of the different forms of the repressed return of nature within Spirit: the natural character that acts according to the estranged dialectics of destiny within immediate Sittlichkeit; that, once personhood is abstractly recognized in its spiritual form in the Roman system of rights, the individual is consigned to the confusion of the multiplicity of natural internal and external forces and is exposed in its animal contingency; that the concept of a legal person is groundless, that is, dependent for its positive recognition on the brute fact of a social power that within the empire manifests itself as a natural force of devastation. Finally, I want to concentrate on how such a dialectics manifests itself within Culture, which will give us a clue as to how to read the passage quoted above. First, noble

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self-consciousness is the life form in which each agent, in order to be recognized as cultivated, as Pinkard (2012, p. 151) puts it, has to suppress his natural self and become a type, that is, has to conform to a social scheme of behavior that is taken to be distinguished. An internal contradiction immediately arises, since the noble form of life requires that the individual renounces his natural desires and conforms to the standards of honor, but in order to do so, he must profit from his natural individual talent, that is, just from that aspect of natural particularity he constitutively has to pretend to despise. Here, nature is repeated in an estranged form—which unconsciously acts on the individual—within the cultivated individual, and that is why Hegel understands Spirit’s effort to bootstrap itself from nature as Entfremdung. It is not by chance that Rameau’s nephew is the figure in which the truth of Culture’s failed, estranged bootstrapping is finally paradoxically manifested. Hegel depicts culture as Spirit’s effort to affirm itself as totally constitutive, as absolutely independent from nature, as it happens with the noble consciousness whose main social purpose is to be recognized as capable of abstracting completely from its naturalness. But such a negation of its naturalness is in the end an abstract one, and ends up as a form of Entfremdung. Whereas, for noble consciousness, natural individuality is the most ridiculous and despicable thing, it is ironically a figure of natural individuality that in the end reveals the dialectical truth of Culture. Rameau, to whom Diderot had already imputed a form of “aliénation d’esprit,” is designated by Diderot and Hegel himself as a figure of “natural individuality.” Rameau’s inverted and disrupted consciousness is read by Hegel as something that expresses a rebellion from within against the social kinds (Art) and codes of noble society he has himself mimetically adopted, and which Rameau’s estranged behavior denounces as “espèce” (species), as something ridiculous and despicable (PG/M, §489). In some sense, Rameau’s attitude of world-contempt and self-contempt is the estranged repetition of natural individuality within the social species. Rameau is the genial, original individual who manifests himself in a time of crisis and whose vertiginously incoherent behavior reveals the disruption of the social normativity of that period—a social form based on the abstract negation of natural individual particularity in the name of abstract universal social codes of nobleness—and denounces such a form of life as false, as merely apparent. As Hegel, refashioning in his own manner a passage from Diderot on Rameau’s natural individuality, puts it: It is the self-disruptive nature of all relationships and the conscious disruption of them; but only as self-consciousness in revolt is it aware of its own disrupted state, and in thus knowing it has immediately risen above it. (PG/M, §526)15 Rameau’s truth is also the truth of Entfremdung, because it is here that the purest structure of alienation as estrangement is manifested. But if we look at Rameau, we can see that his estrangement is not merely a matter of intentional meta-attitudes. His attitude in applying to everything, including himself, a skeptical attitude, is something he cannot control. He is clear about that, indeed, he may be the only

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one who is fully aware of his own alienation as something that has to do with the objective structure of his form of life. For this reason, the fact that he is subjectively self-conscious does not free him. For this reason, he cannot control the fact that his attitude of “contempt” (Verachtung) and “dejection” (Verwerfung) applies furiously to everything, including himself.16 He is somehow acted upon by such an attitude, as if he were somehow dominated by something alien, caused by some external force. In the end, culture’s estrangement from nature manifests itself in Rameau’s natural individuality as a reactive causality. That is where alienation fits in.

Notes 1 Here Brandom approaches the position of those commentators who reconstruct reconciliation as “the polar opposite of alienation” (Hardimon 1994, p. 95) and of those who stress that freedom as rational self-determination is a necessary condition for the overcoming of alienation (Neuhouser 2000, pp. 23f.) and attribute to Hegel a “non-alienation” theory of freedom (Pippin 2008, p. 37, n. 2). Brandom’s position is somehow more demanding, since it seems to require by definition (even if retrospectively) the overcoming of alienation already at the level of Sittlichkeit, which is a notion of finite objective Spirit, whereas “reconciliation” and “freedom” are notions that apply also, in the most perfected way, to Absolute Spirit (and for this reason a non-alienation theory of reconciliation or freedom could allow some local alienation in objective Spirit). 2 For such an assumption see, for instance, Hardimon 1994, Neuhouser 2000, Pippin 2008, and Pinkard 2012. See also Bedeschi and Cavalli 1991. 3 See for instance the reasons—criticized by Inwood—offered in Schacht 1971, pp. 37ff. For an interpretative line closer to the one offered in this chapter, see Cortella 2011, pp. 75ff. 4 See for example PG/M, §484: “But this activity and process whereby the substance becomes actual is the alienation of the personality, for the self that has an absolute significance in its immediate existence, i.e. without having alienated itself from itself, is without substance, and is the plaything of those raging elements. Its substance, therefore, is its externalization, and the externalization is the substance, i.e. the spiritual powers ordering themselves into a world and thereby preserving themselves.” (GW 9, pp. 264f.: “Dies Tun und Werden aber, wodurch die Substanz wirklich wird, ist die Entfremdung der Persönlichkeit, denn das unmittelbar, d.h. ohne Entfremdung an und für sich geltende Selbst ist ohne Substanz, und das Spiel jener tobenden Elemente; seine Substanz ist also seine Entäußerung selbst, und die Entäußerung ist die Substanz, oder die zu einer Welt sich ordnenden und sich dadurch erhaltenden geistigen Mächte.”) See also the discussion of Spirit’s estrangement from nature, below. 5 PG/M, § 484: “But the Spirit whose self is an absolutely discrete unit has its content confronting it as an equally hard unyielding reality, and here the world has the character of being something external, the negative of self-consciousness. This world is, however, a spiritual entity, it is in itself the interfusion of being and individuality; thus its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but it is also an alien reality already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own and in which it does not recognize itself.” 6 PG/M, § 488: “But the existence of this world, as also the actuality of self-consciousness, rests on the process in which the latter divests itself [entäußert] of its personality, thereby creating its world. This world it looks on as something alien, a world, therefore, of which it must now take possession.” 7 Rahel Jaeggi correctly observes that Entfremdung oscillates between a subjective and an objective pole as its co-originary dimensions: estrangement has constitutively to do with the possibility of a (distorted) relation to oneself, but is also mediated by a relation to the world of things and has some material premises in it. See Jaeggi 2016, p. 185. See also Hardimon 1994, pp. 95–96.

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8 GW 9, p. 264: “Aber diese Welt ist geistiges Wesen, sie ist an sich die Durchdringung des Seins und der Individualität; dies ihr Dasein ist das Werk des Selbstbewußtseins; aber ebenso eine unmittelbar vorhandne ihm fremde Wirklichkeit, welche eigentümliches Sein hat, und worin es sich nicht erkennt. Sie ist das äußerliche Wesen, und der freie Inhalt des Rechts; aber diese äußerliche Wirklichkeit, welche der Herr der Welt des Rechts in sich befaßt, ist nicht nur dieses zufällig für das Selbst vorhandne elementarische Wesen, sondern sie ist seine aber nicht positive Arbeit—vielmehr seine negative. Sie erhält ihr Dasein durch die eigne Entäußerung und Entwesung des Selbstbewußtseins, welche ihm in der Verwüstung, die in der Welt des Rechts herrscht, die äußerliche Gewalt der losgebundnen Elemente anzutun scheinet.” 9 One should not forget that Bildung is both a metacategory and a determinate figure of the development of Spirit. Bildung appears already in the Einleitung as a metacategory which embraces the whole process of formation of Spirit and regards both the formation of what Hegel will later call subjective Spirit—subjective second nature—and objective Spirit—objective second nature. It appears then as a figure of “Spirit,” where it is related to the modern world of French culture in the Ancien Régime and the specific forms of estrangement it produces. Still, in the analysis of the historical figure of Bildung, Hegel again makes reference also to its metacategorical structure, since even modern French culture is an instantiation of Bildung as the process of formation of Spirit. Here, Bildung is at first described both as the genealogical process of habit formation which leads from nature to spirit—which Hegel names estrangement of Spirit from nature and which is of course a metacategorical feature instantiated here in the specific historical figure of noble consciousness—and as a reaction to previous objectifications of Spirit formation. In some sense even this latter aspect may be seen as a metacategorical aspect of Bildung, since cultural formation is also always the result of previous culture and the attempt to appropriate not only first nature but also already existing cultural habits and institutions that exert over us not only a normative power, but also a sort of second nature causal effect. If we then assume that the self-estrangement of culture is the result of such a mechanism, Hegel’s analysis of modern French culture is a specific case of a more general paradoxicality he seems to impute to Bildung and which seems to be irresolvable on this terrain (see on this Menke’s argument in his 1996). But it may be, as Brandom himself assumes, that the sort of self-estrangement Hegel diagnoses in modern French culture is not due to that metacategorical structure of Bildung, but rather to some element that is specific to this historical form of life. If this is true, the paradoxicality of modern culture should not be overgeneralized. 10 Brandom 2008, p. 162: “Normative attitudes are part of the causal order. They are caused and can cause us to act (as the debunkers of both the nineteenth and twentieth century emphasize).” 11 See for instance TWA 7, p. 228, §146: “Für das Subjekt haben die sittliche Substanz, ihre Gesetzte und Gewalten […] eine absolute, unendlich festere Autorität und Macht als das Seyn der Natur.” (Hegel 1991, p. 190: “In relation to the subject, the ethical substance and its laws and powers are […] an absolute authority and power, infinitely more firmly based than the being of nature.”) 12 Hardimon argues that poverty is a matter of both subjective and objective alienation— the poor cannot identify with the modern world when they are objectively cut off from it—but that maybe Hegel failed to see this (1994, pp. 245f.) or else thought that, notwithstanding the poor, reconciliation could be basically attained, at the price of some alienation, which would mean that modern Sittlichkeit cannot be the absence or the opposite of alienation. 13 For the idea of “radically boot-strapping,” see Pippin 2008, p. 202. 14 GW 9, p. 267: “Wodurch also das Individuum hier Gelten und Wirklichkeit hat, ist die Bildung. Seine wahre ursprüngliche Natur und Substanz ist der Geist der Entfremdung des natürlichen Seins. Diese Entäußerung ist daher ebenso Zweck als Dasein desselben; sie ist zugleich das Mittel oder der Übergang sowohl der gedachten Substanz in die Wirklichkeit, als umgekehrt der bestimmten Individualität in die Wesentlichkeit.”

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15 GW 9, p. 286: “Es ist die sich selbst zerreißende Natur aller Verhältnisse und das bewußte Zerreißen derselben; nur als empörtes Selbstbewußtsein aber weiß es seine eigne Zerrissenheit, und in diesem Wissen derselben hat es sich unmittelbar darüber erhoben”. See Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau: “Ils m’arrêtent une fois l’an, quand je les rencontre, parce que leur caractère tranche avec celui des autres, et qu’ils rompent cette fastidieuse uniformité que notre éducation, nos conventions de société, nos bienséances d’usage ont introduite. S’il en paraît un dans une compagnie, c’est un grain de levain qui fermente et qui restitue à chacun une portion de son individualité naturelle” (Diderot 2006, p. 47). 16 This fact is underestimated by those who assume that Rameau is someone who fully accepts being alienated as a fact and a logical consequence of his life, someone who freely chooses it, and is “completely at one with himself in being at odds with himself” (see Pinkard 2012, p. 152). Rameau’s self-contempt is a clear sign of the fact that he fails to accept being alienated.

References Bedeschi, Giuseppe; Cavalli, Alessandro (1991) “Alienazione,” in Enciclopedia delle scienze sociali [online resource]. Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2008) “Georg Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Topoi 27, pp. 161–164. Cortella, Lucio (2011) L’Etica della democrazia: attualità della Filosofia del diritto di Hegel (Milano: Marietti). Diderot, Denis (2006) Le neveu de Rameau, edited by M. Delon (Paris: Gallimard). Haber, Stéphane (2007) L’Aliénation: vie sociale et expérience de la dépossession dans la théorie sociale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Hardimon, Michael (1994) Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (New York: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by A. W. Wood and translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1986) Werke in 20 Bänden mit Registerband (Theorie Werkausgabe), edited by E. Moldenbauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1968–) Gesammelte Werke, edited by the NordrheinWestfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste (Hamburg: Felix Meiner). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1956) Lessons on the History of Philosophy, translated by J. Sibree (New York: Dover). Inwood, Michael (1992) A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell). Jaeggi, Rahel (2016) Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems, with a new afterword (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Kain, Philip (2005) Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany, NY: SUNY). Kervégan, Jean-François (2007) L’Effectif et le rationnel: Hegel et l’esprit objectif (Paris: Vrin). Quadflieg, Dirk (2011) “Zur Dialektik von Verdinglichung und Freiheit,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59/5, pp. 1–15. Marx, Karl (1959) The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers). Menke, Christoph (1996) Die Tragödie im Sittlichen: Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).

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Neuhouser, Fredrick (2000) Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Pinkard, Terry (2012) Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (New York: Oxford University Press). Pippin, Robert (2008) Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (New York: Cambridge University Press). Riedel, Manfred (1969) Studien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Ritter, Joachim (1969) Metaphysik und Politik: Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Schacht, Richard (1971) Alienation (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor). Searle, John (2010) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press).

10 A PURE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE WITH AN EDIFYING INTENT Brandom’s reply to Rorty Gilles Bouché

Perhaps a new form of systematic philosophy will be found which has nothing whatever to do with epistemology but which nevertheless makes normal philosophical inquiry possible. Rorty 1979, p. 394 Brandom seems to me the most original and imaginative philosopher of our day. Rorty 2006, p. 58

I In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979, Rorty famously criticizes a certain conception of philosophy—the conception of philosophy as representationalist and foundationalist epistemology. By this, he means a theory of knowledge that understands its object in terms of representation and uses this understanding to provide an epistemological foundation for the rest of culture, on the basis of which knowledge claims made in other cultural areas (in science, art, religion) are to be adjudicated. While Rorty associates this conception mostly with the triad of Descartes, Locke, and Kant (roughly, by attributing a representationalist conception of knowledge to Descartes, an epistemologist conception of philosophy to Locke, and a foundationalist conception of epistemology to Kant), he takes it to be well and alive in analytic philosophy of language as well. Indeed, he takes philosophy as epistemology to have been immensely successful in turning itself into a professional discipline (a Fach, as he disparagingly says), but to have become culturally irrelevant in the process, as philosophy’s claim to epistemological authority tends to be safely ignored or roundly dismissed within the cultural areas whose knowledge claims philosophy wishes to adjudicate.1 To this conception of philosophy as epistemology, Rorty opposes the idea of an edifying philosophy. To prevent an easy misunderstanding, it should be noted straightaway

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that by “edification” Rorty means not “Erbauung,” not moral exaltation, but “Bildung,” an ongoing process by which one turns oneself into and maintains oneself as a cultured person—mainly, according to Rorty, and as he himself might have casually put it, by reading the Great Novels.2 Rorty’s understanding of Bildung can be approached via the notion of a worldview, which we might think of as something that, like a belief, is expressed, albeit not by making an individual assertion, but rather, in the paradigmatic case, by producing a narrative work of art that exhibits a certain wholeness, such as, precisely, a novel. As I understand Rorty, he holds that it is part of our modern condition that, as a simple matter of fact, we find ourselves time and again confronted with different worldviews and unable to rationally privilege one over the others or to rationally synthesize all of them into another, more comprehensive one.3 In such a situation, the only rational thing for us to do is to try to somehow hold on to all of those different worldviews at once, to somehow navigate between them, without arbitrarily privileging any one of them. If this experience of the incommensurability of worldviews is as common and obtrusive as Rorty thinks it is, then the difference that matters most is no longer that between holding a true worldview and holding a false one, between truth and falsehood, since, as a matter of fact, such a distinction often simply cannot be drawn, but rather that between narrowand broad-mindedness, between those who are confined to one worldview and those, the men and women of culture, who are able to navigate between many of them. According to Rorty, the two main qualities of the cultured person are a heightened imagination, as the ability to come up with new worldviews and new connections between existing ones, and irony, as the ability to keep a certain distance from each one of them.4 With its focus on the experience of the incommensurability of worldviews and on imagination and irony as the main qualities of the cultured person, Rorty’s understanding of Bildung is decidedly Romantic. Edifying philosophy, as opposed to, say, an edifying form of literary criticism, is then a philosophy that contributes to such a Romantically understood edification within philosophy, by coming up with new philosophical ways of speaking and by preventing any single one of them, notably the one characteristic of philosophy as epistemology, from keeping us in thrall. Rorty seems to grant the edifying philosopher a certain cultural relevance, though one that pales in comparison to that of the literary critic or, even more so, the novelist. Besides this edifying philosophy, there is however another kind of philosophy that Rorty finds perfectly legitimate, if not very interesting, which he calls “pure philosophy of language.”5 It is pure in the sense that it is not contaminated by any foundationalist epistemologist agenda. According to Rorty, such a pure philosophy of language is uninspiring in a twofold sense, not only because, like philosophy as epistemology, it is condemned to cultural irrelevance (a fact that the former, unlike the latter, openly assumes), but also because, by renouncing any foundationalist epistemologist ambitions, it disconnects itself from what Rorty calls “the textbook problems” or “the traditional concerns” of modern philosophy. We might say that pure philosophy of language is what remains of philosophy as epistemology once it has taken the linguistic turn and has been cut down to size. For Rorty, the paradigm of such a remainder is Davidson’s philosophy of language.

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So much for Rorty’s diagnosis of the state of philosophy in the late seventies. The main idea that I want to explore in what follows is that Brandom’s philosophy as a whole can be read as a long and complex response to Rorty’s diagnosis. My conjecture is that Brandom responds to his Doktorvater—his “generous teacher, friend, best critic” (BSD, p. xx)—by taking up the challenge to produce a pure philosophy of language that renounces any foundationalist epistemologist ambitions, but that is far more interesting than Rorty imagines a pure philosophy of language could possibly be, in two respects— in that it remains connected to the traditional concerns of modern philosophy, which Brandom does not take to be epistemological ones, and in that it exhibits an edifying dimension that is to grant it a certain cultural relevance. It is part of my conjecture that Brandom can be seen to respond to Rorty also in the specific way in which he works out the details of his account of this connection and this edifying dimension. He shows his pure philosophy of language to remain faithful to the traditional concerns of modern philosophy in a way that grants a central role to the notion of representation, which Rorty rejects because he takes it to be inextricably tied to a foundationalist epistemologist agenda. For Brandom, that subjects by applying concepts represent the objective world as exhibiting facts is not only unproblematically true, it is also more than anything else what a pure philosophy of language is to give an account of. This obvious difference between Brandom and Rorty has been noted by many, including these two philosophers themselves.6 What has been noted much less, and what I want to focus on, is that Brandom not only rehabilitates a notion that Rorty rejects, but also rejects an attitude that Rorty accords a central role: He wants his pure philosophy of language to be edifying by helping us overcome an attitude of irony for an attitude of trust.

II While Brandom does not have any foundationalist epistemologist ambitions, he does not take his philosophy of language to be disconnected from the traditional concerns of modern philosophy, which he takes, like Rorty, to revolve around the notion of representation, but, unlike him, to be of a semantic rather than epistemological nature. The semantic question, of how we can represent the objective world, is not only in a straightforward sense more fundamental than the epistemological one, of how we can make sure that we represent the objective world correctly. It is also a “how can we” question of a very different kind: It is part of an attempt not to get better at what we do (distinguishing true representations from false ones), but to achieve an understanding of what it is that we do (representing)—a purely theoretical understanding that does not in any way affect or alter the doing of which it is an understanding, leaving it just as it is. For Brandom, the triad at the center of modern philosophy is not that of Descartes, Locke, and Kant, but that of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, in which Kant figures not as the synthesizer of rationalist and empiricist epistemologies, but as Hegel’s main precursor. Brandom notably credits Kant with the transition from Descartes’ epistemological to the more fundamental semantic question. For Hegel, as Brandom reads him, the semantic question becomes part of a larger account of

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the relation between subjects and the objective world—an account that I propose to call a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual. There are many conceivable, more or less broad or narrow, ways of defining this project. According to the rather broad definition that I want to propose, a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual can be understood as an account that meets at least three conditions. First, it is an account of subjects and the objective world as standing in a twofold relation, of subjects as standing to the objective world in a methodological relation in that they have access to it; in an ontological relation, in that they have being in it (Schelling’s distinction of Transzendental- and Naturphilosophie). The objective world gives rise to subjects, which then represent the objective world. Second, it takes not only the access of subjects to the objective world, but also the objective world itself to be conceptual (Fichte’s rejection of Kant’s Ding an sich). It not only takes subjects to represent the objective world by applying concepts, but also takes the objective world itself to exhibit a conceptual structure. It thus understands the methodological and ontological relations between subjects and the objective world as relations not between the conceptual and the non-conceptual, but between the subjective and objective dimensions of the conceptual. Third, it is an account not only of consciousness, but also of self-consciousness, in particular of the theoretical self-consciousness that consists in having a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual, which makes it expressively complete. Ideally, it is an account not only of how the objective world gives rise to subjects, which then represent the objective world, but also of how those conscious subjects rise into self-conscious subjects that represent themselves as representing the objective world—at the highest level of self-consciousness by developing a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual. Brandom himself wants to produce a philosophy of language that is a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual thus defined, which is thus a project that I take him both to attribute to Hegel and to endorse himself: He wants to account for the methodological relation by endorsing a rationalist understanding of representation according to which representing the objective world is something that one does by reasoning; for the ontological relation, by endorsing a non-reductive naturalism according to which there is both a sense in which conceptual norms are instituted by the activity of subjects and a sense in which a naturalistic description of that activity is complete. He endorses conceptual realism as the claim that the objective world itself exhibits a conceptual structure, which implies that there is also a sense in which conceptual norms are out there, independently of the activity of subjects. Brandom also acknowledges a commitment to expressive completeness, on the one hand by showing how consciousness can be elaborated into logical self-consciousness (a low-level form of self-consciousness, the ability to represent oneself as representing qua ability to make assertions about oneself as making assertions), on the other hand by insisting that theoretical self-consciousness (a high-level form of self-consciousness, the ability to represent oneself as representing qua ability to produce a theory of the conceptual, a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual) must in a certain sense be understood as a look on conceptual activity from within conceptual activity, not from sideways on. It is worth noting that there is a certain unacknowledged lacuna in Brandom’s account,

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however, in that he does not show how logical self-consciousness can be elaborated into theoretical self-consciousness. Indeed, he doesn’t properly distinguish these two forms of self-consciousness. Brandom’s philosophy is thus a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual as outlined above. It is also a pure philosophy of language. And Brandom seems to have a short and straightforward answer to the question why any hegelian philosophy of the conceptual should take the form of a pure philosophy of language: It should take the form of a philosophy of language in that, according to Brandom, conceptual activity must be linguistic activity because it must be a certain kind of social activity, an activity of intersubjective communication. It should take the form of a philosophy of language that is pure in that a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual, as outlined above, does not imply any foundationalist epistemologist project. It is crucial to note, however, that Brandom’s philosophy of language is pure also in another, quite different, and much more radical sense. His account of conceptual activity is an account of what we do that subtracts, from what we do, all that is not absolutely essential to conceptual activity. As Brandom himself insists, his subjects are concept-applying subjects, but need not at all be human beings.7 They need not have a specifically human nature, neither a first nor a second one. They need not move within a specifically human culture or, indeed, within anything resembling a culture at all. Brandom’s subjects have language, but need not have culture. His philosophy of language is pure in that it is purified from any philosophical engagement with culture. This raises two questions. First, does this purity not constitute a respect in which Brandom’s philosophy is fundamentally unlike Hegel’s? It is here indeed, more than anywhere else, that we might want to look for a fundamental difference between them. Even if we are ready to accept the main premise of Brandom’s reading of Hegel, that much of his pure philosophy of language can be read out of (or into) the Phenomenology, we might still want to insist that such a reading involves a very substantial effort—precisely the effort of extricating a pure philosophy of language from what Brandom can only understand as a rather unhelpfully allegorical presentation. (Which raises the question why Hegel, if what he provides is provided more perspicuously and without substantial loss as a pure philosophy of language, does not choose this form of presentation himself.) On the surface, it might seem that, rather than a pure philosophy of language, Hegel provides something of the order of a philosophy of language that is intimately intertwined with a philosophy of culture, maybe in at least two respects: He seems to assume that an account of language and an account of culture have to address similar problems, such as the threat of a subject–object dualism, which, as it is addressed by an account of language, takes the form of a threat to an understanding of how subjects can represent the objective world and leads to epistemological and semantic variants of skepticism. In an account of culture, it is addressed as manifesting itself notably in the threat of the “positivity” of social institutions (such as Christian religion), of the alienation of subjects from social institutions that are experienced as purely objective. On the other hand, Hegel seems to think that accounts of language and culture can address such problems by making use of the same theoretical concepts, such as the concepts of universality, particularity, and individuality, or the concepts of in-itself, for-itself, and in-and-

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for-itself. As Brandom himself points out (ST, p. 629), Hegel seems to develop the theoretical concepts that he brings to bear in his Logik always already with a view to applying them as well in his Realphilosophie, which contains a philosophy of culture, whereas Brandom, of course, is not in the business of offering any Realphilosophie at all. Second, we might ask if such a pure philosophy of language can possibly be adequate. Unlike many other commentators, I take it to be far from evident that the purity of Brandom’s philosophy makes it necessarily inadequate as a philosophy of language.8 It does however threaten to make it culturally irrelevant. I take it that Brandom himself wants to achieve more than just a pure philosophy of language9—not, however, by stepping outside of the confines of his philosophy of language and, say, engaging in a philosophy of culture, but by remaining on the safe ground of his philosophy of language and merely pointing beyond it, by showing that his philosophy of language, as it is, has an edifying dimension that makes it in a certain sense and to a certain extent culturally relevant. And I take it that Brandom wants to accomplish this feat by relating his philosophy of language to a theory of modernity, which he does in his reading of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, to which I will turn at present.

III Brandom brings his philosophy of language into contact with a theory of modernity in his reading of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, which he takes to have “the advent of modernity” as its main topic (ST, p. 469). It is crucial to note that the transition from premodernity to modernity must be understood as a shift within culture to which there does not correspond any shift within language, at least not in language as Brandom understands it. Brandom admits of shifts into language (large-scale phylogenetic and ontogenetic shifts from prelinguistic to linguistic beings) and within language (small-scale shifts from one set of beliefs or concepts to another one). But there is no room within his philosophy of language for something akin to a shift from a premodern to a modern language (a shift within language that would amount to a change of the very structure of linguistic activity rather than of the material dealt with within that structure). The transition from premodernity to modernity is outside the scope of his philosophy of language. I thus take Brandom, in his attempt to relate his philosophy of language to a theory of modernity, to undertake an implicit commitment to a language–culture distinction. Brandom understands the shift from a premodern to a modern culture as a shift from a state of Sittlichkeit without modern subjectivity to a state of modern subjectivity without Sittlichkeit, which he understands as a state of alienation (ST, pp. 471ff.). He takes the modern rise of subjectivity to be progressive, in that he takes it to contain a genuine and important insight, but to come at the cost of the loss of Sittlichkeit. More precisely, he takes it to contain two interrelated shifts, corresponding to conceptions of norms and of agency respectively (ST, pp. 490f.). It is very important to note that these two conceptions are not purely theoretical understandings of ways in which things are done that would be independent of

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these understandings. They are understandings that are embodied by ways in which things are done, by premodern and modern cultures. Brandom understands the first shift as one from a premodern to a modern conception of norms, from a conception of norms as objective and not instituted to a conception of norms as instituted and hence not objective. According to the modern conception, there are no objective norms and hence, in a sense, no norms at all, just normative attitudes of subjects mistakenly taking there to be norms. In a premodern culture, subjects identify with norms. The modern insight that norms are instituted comes at the cost of alienation, in that it comes at the cost of an inability to identify with norms (ST, pp. 646f.). The modern conception is cynical, in that it reduces norms to normative attitudes, and ironic, in that it requires subjects to take a cynical attitude toward their own normative attitudes. Brandom understands the second shift as one from a premodern to a modern conception of agency, from an expansive sittlich conception, according to which subjects are responsible for their actions together with all their consequences, to a contractive alienated one, according to which subjects are responsible only for the intended, foreseen, or at least foreseeable consequences of their actions. The shift to the modern conception again contains an insight, an insight into the injustice of a practice in which subjects are taken to be responsible for that over which they have no control, but again comes at the cost of alienation, which is manifest notably in that the modern conception leads to a fear of making oneself guilty by acting that makes it difficult for one to pass from deliberation to action (ST, pp. 729f.). Brandom takes Hegel to want to contribute to bringing about a further shift to a postmodern culture in which alienation is overcome and Sittlichkeit reachieved in a higher form that is compatible with modern subjectivity. As I read him, he claims that his pure philosophy of language, which he claims can be extracted from the Phenomenology, can make a certain contribution to bringing about this shift, and that it does so by having an edifying dimension. How are we to understand this contribution, this edifying dimension? We have seen that Brandom distinguishes two conceptions of norms, embodied by premodern and modern cultures. As I read him, he establishes a connection between his philosophy of language and a theory of modernity by taking these two conceptions of norms to correspond to two conceptions of linguistic norms that are developed within a philosophy of language: an objectivist conception according to which linguistic norms are objective and not instituted and a subjectivist conception according to which linguistic norms are instituted and not objective, so that there are no objective linguistic norms and hence, in a sense, no linguistic norms at all. What distinguishes the culture-embodied premodern and modern conceptions from the language-philosophical objectivist and subjectivist conceptions is that the latter, unlike the former, are purely theoretical understandings. Brandom takes all of these conceptions to be defective. But, while premodern and modern conceptions are defective, they have a certain reality in the premodern and modern cultures by which they are embodied. By contrast, the corresponding objectivist and subjectivist conceptions are purely theoretical conceptions of linguistic norms as they are independently of these

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conceptions. They are defective in the sense that they are simply incorrect, simply untrue. They have no reality whatsoever. They are not embodied by anything at all. To understand the sense in which Brandom’s pure philosophy of language is supposed to be edifying, we have to understand his own conception of linguistic norms. The next part of my chapter is thus purely reconstructive. Within his pure philosophy of language, Brandom takes objectivist and subjectivist conceptions to be equally incorrect, because equally one-sided. He proposes to replace them by an even-handed conception of linguistic norms as both instituted and objective—a conception that is obtained via a correct understanding of a process that Brandom understands as one in which norms are instituted by being applied, where each application of a norm makes that norm more determinate, by analogy to the process in which laws are instituted by being applied in a practice of common law. Brandom understands this process as one in which subjects make judgments and take up two distinct perspectives on them. All that is available to determine judgments are prior judgments. Looked at from a forward-looking, prospective perspective, no judgment is fully determined by prior judgments. Each judgment contains an element of contingency. Looked at from a backward-looking, retrospective perspective, a judgment can be shown to have been necessary, in that it can be shown to have been the application of a norm, which itself becomes visible only retrospectively. This is shown by producing a rational reconstruction that precisely shows the judgment to have been determined by prior judgments. As a process that essentially admits of these two perspectives, the process is one in which contingency is turned into necessity. Thus turning contingency into necessity by producing a rational reconstruction is what, according to Brandom, Hegel understands as “forgiving” (ST, p. 601). What Brandom proposes to understand as “trust,” a term that he takes over from Hegel’s discussion of Faith, is the trust that one will be forgiven, that one’s judgment will be retrospectively revealed as the application of a norm (ST, p. 621). According to Brandom’s even-handed conception of linguistic norms, this process can be understood as one in which norms are made because it can also be understood as one in which norms are found. The only way of understanding norms as something that is made is to understand them as something that is also found. There are other ways of understanding this process, however. According to an objectivist interpretation, the same process is not one in which subjects institute norms and make them ever more determinate, but one in which subjects come to an ever closer understanding of the norms as they are independently of that understanding. Subjects make progress in finding out what the norms are. According to a subjectivist interpretation, the process is indeed one in which norms are made rather than found, but talk of norms being made cannot be taken to be more than just a way of speaking. Properly speaking, norms simply cannot be made. All we have is a semblance of norms, a semblance of necessity that, by telling genealogical stories, is unmasked as mere contingency. All we have are contingent acts, and rational reconstructions waiting to be unmasked as mere rationalizations of those contingent acts.

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What makes Brandom’s even-handed interpretation preferable over the other ones? According to Brandom, his own interpretation is preferable over the objectivist one because it acknowledges that there is a sense in which norms are made, which Brandom simply takes to be true. But in what sense is it preferable over the subjectivist interpretation? The subjectivist might object that all that Brandom has shown so far is that subjects, by taking up retrospective perspectives, take there to be norms, hence that there are norms for subjects. To show that there are norms full stop, he would have to show in addition that subjects by taking there to be norms make there to be norms rather than, as the subjectivist would claim, mistakenly taking there to be norms. Brandom can be seen to respond to the subjectivist by saying, first, that whether there are norms is not a cognitive issue, about which subjects could be mistaken, that taking there to be norms is not a cognitive, but a performative attitude, and, second, that taking there to be norms is not optional. It is essential to engaging in linguistic activity. Taking up retrospective perspectives, producing rational reconstructions, which Brandom understands as forgiving, is inescapable—an inescapability that one implicitly acknowledges by engaging in linguistic activity. According to Brandom, the subjectivist interpretation thus leads to a pragmatic contradiction, between an explicit commitment to the subjectivist interpretation and a commitment to adopting the retrospective perspective implicitly undertaken by engaging in linguistic activity (ST, pp. 614ff.). At this point, I have reconstructed Brandom’s even-handed conception of linguistic norms, which he provides as part of his philosophy of language. Now, we can go back to our question of how we are to understand the edifying dimension of his philosophy of language. In what sense does it contribute to bringing about a postmodern culture? And what is a postmodern culture? In response to the last question, we might say that a postmodern culture, as Brandom understands it, is a culture that embodies a postmodern conception of norms and a postmodern conception of agency. We have now an answer to the question of how we are to understand a postmodern conception of norms: It is the culture-embodied conception of norms that corresponds to the language-philosophical conception of norms that is Brandom’s even-handed conception. It is the same conception, transposed from the context of language to the context of culture. But what is a postmodern conception of agency? As I understand Brandom, he believes that a postmodern conception of agency can be derived from the same even-handed conception of linguistic norms from which the postmodern conception of norms can be derived, namely by applying the structure of forgiveness and trust to actions. So far, we have seen that forgiving is producing a rational reconstruction that exhibits a judgment as the application of a norm, itself visible from the retrospective perspective from which the rational reconstruction is given. As I read Brandom, he transposes the idea of forgiveness from judgments to actions by understanding forgiving as applied to actions as turning actions into good actions by making them have good consequences. The consequences of an action are part of that action. Since they are never in once and

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for all, what that action is is never settled once and for all either. It is never too late to change an action in that it is never too late to change its consequences. Forgiving a judging subject is finding its judgment to be a rational one, retrospectively. Forgiving an acting subject is making its action be a good one, retroactively. What forgiveness as applied to judgments and forgiveness as applied to actions have in common is that, in both cases, forgiving is a way of assuming responsibility for the doings of someone else.10 In both cases, trust is the trust that others will try to forgive one, that others will try to discharge their responsibility for one’s doings. On the side of actions, it is the trust that others will do their best to prevent one from becoming guilty by acting, which allows one to overcome one’s fear of becoming guilty and hence to pass from deliberation to action (ST, pp. 734ff.). What does a postmodern culture, by which such postmodern conceptions of norms and agency are embodied, look like? We might say that, in general, a postmodern culture, as Brandom understands it, is one in which each subject takes responsibility for the judgments and actions of all subjects (ST, p. 734). But Brandom does not say anything about the social institutions that a postmodern culture might exhibit. Instead, he gives examples of instances of individual behavior that embody such postmodern conceptions. He doesn’t give examples of forgiveness on the side of action, though it would be very easy to come up with such examples. His main example is one of forgiveness on the side of cognition. It is his own, “magnanimous” reading of Hegel, which he wants to justify as an exercise in forgiveness, a reading that takes the form of a rational reconstruction, that wants to separate what is alive and what is dead in Hegel and maximize the former. The question is then: In what sense can a pure philosophy of language contribute to bringing about a postmodern culture, which Brandom hints at as a culture in which postmodern conceptions of norms and agency are embodied by individual behavior? In what sense can a pure philosophy of language be edifying? On a weak reading, the contribution of a pure philosophy of language consists merely in that it helps us to achieve postmodern conceptions of norms and agency, by making available a conception of linguistic norms from which those postmodern conceptions can be derived in the way that I have just retraced. What we do with those postmodern conceptions is then up to us, completely outside the scope of and unrelated to a philosophy of language. While this position is not entirely implausible, it does not seem to be Brandom’s position, which seems to be a stronger one. On a strong reading, a pure philosophy of language reveals that, just by engaging in linguistic activity, we undertake a commitment to embodying postmodern conceptions of norms and agency, to modifying our individual behavior so that it embodies such conceptions. I do not know whether such a strong reading captures Brandom’s position. There are passages in his reading of the Spirit chapter that suggest that it does.11 But I do find such a position extremely implausible. With regards to the postmodern conception of agency, even if a pure philosophy of language were to show that we are committed to take responsibility for the judgments of others, hence to embody a postmodern conception of norms, I do not see how it would follow that we are committed to take responsibility for the

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actions of others in what is after all a quite different sense. I do not see how the former commitment implies the latter. With regards to the postmodern conception of norms, I take it to be crucial to understand that Brandom’s philosophy of language is, on the one hand, indeed an account of linguistic activity as it is, as an activity that we actually engage in. On the other hand, however, it is an idealizing account. It is an idealization of what we actually do. To take Brandom’s philosophy of language to show that, by engaging in linguistic activity, we undertake a commitment to embodying a postmodern conception of norms is to take his account of an idealized linguistic activity to show that, by engaging in linguistic activity as it actually is, we undertake a commitment to change the way in which we engage in it so that the linguistic activity that we actually engage in becomes more similar to the idealized linguistic activity. An account of an idealized linguistic activity is taken to show that, by engaging in real linguistic activity, we undertake a commitment to realizing the idealization. I find such a claim highly implausible—just as implausible as the analogous claim, say, that an account of an idealized economic activity that understands us as economically rational, risk-calculating, satisfaction-maximizing homo economicus would show that, by engaging in economic activity, we undertake a commitment to realizing that idealization, to turning ourselves into homo economicus. It is clear enough why such a claim cannot go through: the idealization brackets the very complexity that provides us with reasons to act in ways that make our activity diverge from its idealization.12 The position captured by such a strong reading, of which, as I said, I am not entirely sure that it is one that Brandom endorses, can only be understood as an attempt to reduce the complexity of real life to the simplicity of an idealization—not only cognitively, which is in a sense what an idealization, as a heuristic device, is for, but also actively, transformatively. It can only be understood as the expression of a desire to make a complex activity conform to the simple model that, at the beginning, was introduced with the cognitive purpose of shedding light on the complex activity. There is a third reading, however, that provides in some sense a via media between the weak reading, in which the edifying dimension that Brandom wants his philosophy of language to have seems to go missing altogether, and the strong reading, which leaves him with an, in my view, untenable position. According to this third reading, a pure philosophy of language helps us to achieve postmodern conceptions of norms and agency, as per the weak reading, but can thereby have an edifying effect that is to be understood as an integral part of its contribution. The third reading takes seriously the idea of edification as inspiration, as something that consists not in the revelation of a commitment already undertaken, but in an effect that may or may not take place, and that we might hold all the dearer as it is precarious. According to this reading, Brandom’s philosophy of language is edifying not in the sense that it shows that we have already undertaken a commitment, which we can then only try to live up to, but in the sense that it can, though it does not have to, inspire us to undertake a commitment. We might look at a philosophy of language with an edifying intent thus understood with suspicion. Its edifying dimension might seem without philosophical value, and

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too theological, too sentimental, too priestly. It might remind us of Hegel’s famous warning, that “philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying” (PG/M, §9). Brandom himself, as I read him, takes Hegel’s warning to be directed not against edification in general, but against a specifically Romantic kind of edification, an edification that appeals to feeling, to which he takes Hegel to oppose a rationalist edification appealing to reason. Brandom emphasizes the rational, cognitive aspect of the edifying dimension of his philosophy of language, the fact that it is based on a correct conception of linguistic norms that his philosophy of language makes available. It seems difficult to deny, however, on the third reading, which understands edification as inspiration, that the actual edifying effect relies on more than reason, notably on an edificational rhetoric. Brandom’s own prose is certainly not free of pathos. I understand Hegel’s warning somewhat differently. I understand it as a warning against edification not as such, but as a substitute for philosophy, against taking edification to be able to replace a philosophical theory and to provide what one might have hoped a philosophical theory would offer. Where edification is not called on to replace philosophy, it might be perfectly acceptable. A concern that I have is then that Brandom’s attempt to show that his philosophy of language has a certain cultural relevance can be seen to involve an attempt to substitute edification for philosophy, namely for a philosophy of culture. My concern is that his pure philosophy of language involves a retreat from the project of producing a philosophy of culture, a retreat that creates a certain void, which Brandom then attempts to fill with edification. Brandom aims at a pure philosophy of language that is edifying in that it helps us overcome alienation. For him, the purest manifestation of alienation is irony, which he understands as the result of a cynical attitude toward oneself. He understands irony as a discrepancy between one’s self-consciousness and what one does, as “what Hegel thinks of as a failure of self-consciousness, in that what [one] is in [one]self, what [one] is actually doing, is not expressed in what [one] is for [one] self” (ST, p. 617). I agree that there is a kind of alienation that can be understood as a failure of self-consciousness, as a failure to achieve a self-consciousness that would allow one to live one’s life as self-consciously as one might want to live it. Unlike Brandom, I do not understand cynicism as the main cause of this kind of alienation, but complexity, the sheer complexity of our lives, and the society and culture in which we live. As something that we do not understand, culture becomes something alien, something that we cannot make our own by understanding it, while our subjective experience, as something that we cannot develop into a self-consciousness that would preserve our subjective experience and at the same time meet certain criteria of objectivity and have a certain substance, remains something merely subjective. Alienation of this kind cannot be overcome through edification, but only by achieving the kind of self-consciousness that only a philosophy of culture can provide.13 When we look at Brandom’s and Hegel’s philosophies, placed side by side, what we see might look as follows: On the one side, we have a philosophy that, seen through a certain anachronistic scheme, appears as a philosophy in which

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philosophy of language and philosophy of culture are intimately intertwined, maybe in the two ways that I have sketched above, which raises a number of questions: Why should we tie a philosophy of culture in such a way to a philosophy of language and thereby constrain the way in which we engage in the former? Why should we constrain our understanding of the phenomena that we want a philosophy of culture to address and our choice of the concepts that we want it to apply? Brandom himself stresses the experimental character of the way in which Hegel applies his theoretical concepts in his Realphilosophie. 14 But why should we think that the theoretical concepts developed in a philosophy of language are helpfully applied in a philosophy of culture at all? In tying a philosophy of culture to a philosophy of language, do we not remain captive to a philosophical dream that has become implausible, maybe the philosophical dream par excellence, of bringing together metaphysics and a diagnosis of the times, a timeless philosophy of language and a philosophy of culture that has its finger on the pulse of the times and grasps its time in thought? On the other side, we have a philosophy that seems to acknowledge the implausibility of this ambition, not, however, by producing a philosophy of culture that would be severed from a philosophy of language, but by retreating to a philosophy of language that is purified from any philosophical engagement with culture. To the extent that Brandom’s pure philosophy of language is adequate as such, it shows that philosophy of language can be severed from philosophy of culture, hence that the connection between them cannot be as intimate as Hegel’s philosophy seems to present it. At the same time, the philosophical dream seems to linger on in Brandom’s attempt to establish a mere point of contact between his pure philosophy of language and a theory of modernity, to fill a void that the retreat to a pure philosophy of language has left behind.

IV Toward the beginning of my chapter, I said that I want to explore the idea that Brandom’s whole philosophy can be understood as a long and complex response to Rorty. And I submitted that Brandom can be seen to respond to his mentor by taking up the challenge of producing a pure philosophy of language that is more interesting than Rorty thinks a pure philosophy of language could possibly be, in two respects: in that it remains connected to the traditional concerns of modern philosophy and in that it has a certain cultural relevance. I said that Brandom shows his philosophy of language to be interesting in the first respect in a way that involves rehabilitating the notion of representation, in the second respect by making plausible that his philosophy is edifying in that it helps us overcome an attitude of irony for an attitude of trust. We are at present in a better position to assess whether Brandom’s philosophy is indeed helpfully understood as a response to Rorty. With regard to the second respect, we might say that Brandom’s philosophy contains a response in letter, but not in spirit. “Edification” and “irony” do not quite mean for Brandom what they

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mean for Rorty. What Rorty means by “edification” is, as we have seen, not “Erbauung,” but “Bildung.” In Brandom’s philosophy, “edification” recovers its common moralistic meaning.15 Both Rorty and Brandom understand irony as the paradoxical attitude of distancing oneself from a position (a worldview, an understanding of what the norms are) that, insofar as it is one’s own position, is a position that in a sense one also endorses. They diverge however in their understanding of the problem to which irony is a response. For Brandom, irony is the result of a cynical attitude turned against oneself. For Rorty, it is a response to the experience of the incommensurability of worldviews, which is an experience not of there being no norms, but rather of there being too many of them. The problem of the incommensurability of worldviews is one that Brandom does not consider. There are at least two respects, however, in which Brandom in his philosophy acknowledges something that is at least akin to it. First, throughout his work, he acknowledges the relativity of the contents of beliefs to sets of background beliefs. But that relativity is not taken to lead to a serious problem. The sets of background beliefs do not amount to worldviews. They are just collections of individual beliefs, they do not amalgamate into worldviews. As a consequence, Brandom’s navigation between sets of background beliefs remains very different from Rorty’s navigation between worldviews. Second, Brandom tends to avow a certain pluralism when he discusses the status of his own philosophy, which he tends to present as just one of many possible stories.16 However, this pluralistic attitude seems not to affect what Brandom does in any way. His endorsement seems to remain a mere avowal. The task of telling “more such stories” (TMD, p. 16) is left to others, with a benevolent indifference that betrays this outsourcing as something other than the proposition of a division of labor. Using one of Rorty’s distinctions, we might say that Brandom, in those instances, talks like an ironist, but still acts like a metaphysician.17 That Brandom does not consider the problem of the incommensurability of worldviews has to do with his retreat to a pure philosophy of language. It is a retreat into an area of philosophy in which the experience of the incommensurability of worldviews is not obtrusive, in which one can be a metaphysician. Brandom’s retreat to a pure philosophy of language is thus also a retreat away from Rorty’s central problem. It is worth noting that the fact that Brandom does not consider this problem can also be seen to be at the origin of his disagreement with Rorty over the notion of representation. It is a respect in which Brandom does not address Rorty’s reasons for rejecting that notion. Indeed, Rorty does not completely reject an understanding according to which individual beliefs within worldviews can be said to represent. What he rejects is the idea that worldviews represent. He rejects a notion of representation that is not relativized to worldviews.18 There is something that Brandom and Rorty have in common. As I understand their philosophies, it is not only Brandom’s philosophy that contains a retreat. Rorty’s contains one as well, albeit a quite different one. Both retreat from the project of providing a philosophy of culture, a diagnosis of the times, from the hegelian project of grasping one’s time in thought. Brandom does so by retreating

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to a pure philosophy of language, Rorty by retreating to what we might call a feuilletonistic attitude. I do not think that Rorty’s ironism demands such a retreat, but it certainly encourages it. What it encourages is giving up the attempt to develop a substantial philosophy of culture, which an ironist might actually countenance as the project of developing a substantial worldview. It encourages retreating too quickly to the stultifying relativist claim that “one might look at things this way, but might just as well look at them another way,” before a single substantial “way of looking at things” has even been developed. That one might want to retreat from the project of producing a philosophy of culture is understandable. The difficulties that such a project faces are immense. They include what we might call the challenges of empiricity, polyhistory, and subjectivity—challenges that consist in having to keep up to date with the empirical sciences, amass more knowledge about what is going on in various cultural areas than any single person can possibly amass, and constantly face up to the worry that what one says remains too subjective to meet the standards of objectivity that one has to maintain if one wants one’s work to be of philosophical value. Given these difficulties, one might wonder whether the project of producing a philosophy of culture is not just as anachronistic as what I have referred to above as the philosophical dream. The question is whether the cost of a retreat from that project is not so high that one might prefer failure, and even foreseeable, necessary failure, to a retreat to the safer ground of a philosophy of language such as Brandom’s.19

Notes 1 See above all the introduction and Chapter 3 in Rorty 1979. 2 “Since ‘education’ sounds a bit too flat, and ‘Bildung’ a bit too foreign, I shall use ‘edification’ to stand for this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking. The attempt to edify (ourselves or others) may consist in the hermeneutic activity of making connections between our own culture and some exotic culture or historical period, or between our own discipline and another discipline which seems to pursue incommensurable aims in an incommensurable vocabulary. But it may instead consist in the ‘poetic’ activity of thinking up such new aims, new words, or new disciplines, followed by, so to speak, the inverse of hermeneutics: the attempt to reinterpret our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of our new inventions” (Rorty 1979, p. 360). On the marginalization of philosophy at the hands of literature, and in particular the novel, as the main medium of “edification,” see, for instance, Rorty 1989, p. xvi and the opening pages of Rorty 2007. 3 On the modern experience of being “impressed by other vocabularies,” see Rorty 1989, p. 73. 4 On irony, see notably Rorty 1979, p. 371 and 1989, pp. 73f. 5 On the difference between “pure” and “impure” philosophy of language, see Rorty 1979, pp. 257–262. 6 See, for instance, Brandom’s Vocabularies of Pragmatism and Rorty’s response, in Brandom 2006a, pp. 156–190, as well as Brandom 2013 and Rorty 1998. 7 This insistence constitutes the very starting point of Making It Explicit: “Arbitrary distinctions of biology, geography, culture, or preference can be and have been seized on to enforce and make intelligible the crucial distinction between us and them (or it). But philosophical thought is coeval with the impulse to understand ourselves according to a more principled, less parochial story—and so to be a more principled, less parochial sort of being./ The wider perspective enjoined by principle poses the question, Who are we?

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8 9

10

11

12 13

14 15

in the form: What would have to be true—not only of the quaint folk across the river, but of chimpanzees, dolphins, gaseous extraterrestrials, or digital computers (things in many ways quite different from the rest of us)—for them nonetheless to be correctly counted among us?” (MIE, pp. 3f.). Years later, looking back on Making It Explicit, Brandom clarifies: “For what I wanted to do is give the absolutely minimal conditions on being a discursive practice, to say what one needed to do in order to be able to claim that things are thus and so. This project has been described as ‘vandalizing Neurath’s boat.’ Otto Neurath famously said that our conceptual scheme, our language and beliefs, are not something that we can pull out in dry-dock and redo the foundations of—we are obliged to repair it at sea. And my question in Making it Explicit was how much of that structure we could throw overboard without sinking it—that is, without changing it from a discursive practice to a non-discursive practice. As a result, I abstracted away from everything about us as human beings that did not seem to be absolutely essential to the one enterprise of making claims about how things are” (Brandom 2008b, p. 378). And, in response to Charles Taylor’s criticism: “There remains the question of whether the idea of creatures who engage in discursive practices in my sense who do not engage in any other disclosive symbolic ones is in the end intelligible. […] In general, I think there could be creatures who are very much unlike us in important ways who could nonetheless be like us in that they can say or think that things are thus-and-so. […] [Charles Taylor] thinks the answer must be ‘No,’ and he might be right. But I suspect that he is assuming that the creatures in question must be like us in many more ways than just being concept-users. And it might be that at the level of abstraction at which I am prepared to consider the possibility of a positive answer, the question has been drained of any interest it might have for thinking about us humans” (Weiss and Wanderer 2010, pp. 303f.). A concern most perspicuously raised in Taylor 2010. “My ambition is to see what political consequences one might draw from the sort of understanding of discursive practice that I have been pursuing over the last 20 years. But that is a project that is still in its infancy” (Brandom 2008b: p. 381). Insofar as he wants to bring this project to fruition by addressing issues arising over the advent of modernity and by exploring the possibility of “a point of contact between these large, weighty cultural issues and the sort of detailed, painstaking work in the philosophy of language that has been pursued with single-minded precision by the analytic tradition” (Brandom 2015, p. 32), Brandom takes himself to follow in Habermas’ footsteps. Brandom’s postmodern subjects thus come to assume what Max Weber, in his 2010, pp. 56–64, opposes as an Ethics of Responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) to an Ethics of Moral Conviction (Gesinnungsethik)—a distinction clearly anticipated by Hegel and that, to my mind, remains eminently helpful in analyzing a number of ethical pathologies of our own day and age. Namely all the passages in which Brandom presents the transition to a postmodern culture as one in which we “explicitly acknowledge practical commitments concerning how we ought to treat one another that we will see as having been implicit in our discursive activity all along” (ST, p. 637). For an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum that draws out some of the consequences of Brandom’s postmodern conceptions of norms and agency alike, see Knappik’s contribution to this volume. In a somewhat similar vein, Pinkard, in this volume, pp. 000–000, likens alienation to a lack of understanding: “The breakdown of such a shape of life is accompanied by alienation, but not in Brandom’s sense of identifying immediately rather with one’s own subjective attitudes. It amounts to carrying on in terms of principles that no longer make sense. One is carrying on without understanding what one is doing or at least without understanding the point of it.” Testa, also in this volume, reminds us that alienation also has an objective side that calls for change, not interpretation. See CRH, p. 132, n. 2. “Hegel’s astonishing aspiration is for a morally edifying semantics” (ST, p. 637).

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16 “[…] the best philosophical response to such a narrative is not belief or endorsement but the telling of more such stories. It is the thinker who has only one such idiom in which to express and develop his self-understanding who is in thrall. So the sense in which such a story claims to be correct—the sense of endorsement for which it petitions—is not an exclusive one. It is not incompatible with there being other legitimate ways of telling the story, motivating other contemporary philosophical untertakings” (TMD, p. 16). Brandom likes to paraphrase Mao in this context (TMD, p. 104). 17 On the difference between “ironists” and “metaphysicians,” see Rorty 1989, pp. 73ff. 18 “Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of human beings—cannot. […] The conflation is facilitated by confining attention to single sentences as opposed to vocabularies. […] When the notion of ‘description of the world’ is moved from the level of criteriongoverned sentences within language games to language games as wholes, games which we do not choose between by reference to criteria, the idea that the world decides which descriptions are true can no longer be given a clear sense” (Rorty 1989, p. 5). 19 A particularly heroic (or, as some might say, quixotic) attempt at a comprehensive philosophy of culture has been mounted by Harry Redner, who summarizes his Weberian worldview in very approachable form in his 2013. Interestingly, his enterprise sets out precisely from a distinction of culture and language, which, to his mind, “is a distinction made by a number of linguists and the occasional anthropologist, but totally neglected by philosophers of all schools. By lumping both language and culture under some general rubric such as meaning or sign or symbolic form, depending on the school to which they adhere, philosophers confuse symbolic representations and linguistic representations and ascribe to the one what only pertains to the other. Thus language is made the locus of ideas, concepts, world-views and even metaphysics; and the symbolic systems of culture, such as developed discourses and modes of thought, are held to have grammars, logics, syntactical rules, ‘codes’ or ‘epistemes’” (1994, pp. 6f.). Redner lists structuralism, language-game theory, and hermeneutics/deconstructivism among the philosophical fashions at fault and polemically associates them with the figures of the idiot, the child, and the foreigner, who, each in their own way, struggle to comprehend the culture that surrounds them.

References Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brandom, Robert (2015) “Towards Reconciling to Heroes: Habermas and Hegel,” Argumenta 1/1, pp. 29–42. Brandom, Robert (2013) “An Arc of Thought: From Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to his Pragmatism,” in A. Gröschner, C. Koopman, and M. Sandbothe (eds.) Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 23–30. Brandom, Robert (2008a) Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Brandom, Robert (2008b) “Freedom Is a Matter of Responsibility and Authority: An Interview with Robert B. Brandom,” interview by T. Pritzlaff, European Journal of Political Theory 7, pp. 365–381. Brandom, Robert (2005) “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel: Comparing Empirical and Logical Concepts,” Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus 3, pp. 131–161. Brandom, Robert (2002) Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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Brandom, Robert (ed.) (2000a) Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell). Brandom, Robert (2000b) “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in Brandom 2000a, pp. 156–183. Brandom, Robert (1994) Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Redner, Harry (2013) Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture, and the Individual in the Age of Globalization (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers). Redner, Harry (1994) A New Science of Representation: Towards an Integrated Theory of Representation in Science, Politics and Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). Rorty, Richard (2007) “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 89–104. Rorty, Richard (2006) “An Interview with Richard Rorty,” interview by M. Wenning, A. Livingston, and D. Rondel, Gnosis 8/1, pp. 54–59. Rorty, Richard (1998) “Robert Brandom on Social Practices and Representations,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 122–137. Rorty, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rorty, Richard (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Taylor, Charles (2010) “Language Not Mysterious?” in Weiss and Wanderer 2010, pp. 32–47. Weber, Max (2010) Politik als Beruf (1919) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot). Weiss, Bernard; Wanderer, Jeremy (eds.) (2010) Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit (London: Routledge).

11 BRANDOM ON POSTMODERN ETHICAL LIFE Moral and political problems Franz Knappik

Robert Brandom’s semantic reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit culminates in an account of an ideal form of reciprocal recognition that we are always already committed to whenever we apply a concept, but that still awaits its concrete realization in an adequate recognitive practice replacing modernity. This future practice will be a “postmodern” form of ethical life that is based on a commitment to “forgiveness,” a willingness to offer rational reconstructions of past concept applications. On Brandom’s reading, Hegel describes the form of reciprocal recognition that is characteristic of postmodern ethical life in the account of forgiveness that concludes the Spirit chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I have various doubts about the textual adequacy of this reading, but in the following, my focus will be on the internal philosophical plausibility of this part of Brandom’s reading. I am going to explore practical consequences of Brandom’s account of postmodern ethical life (PEL): What does it mean more concretely to live in a community of PEL? What constraints does the recognitive structure of PEL impose on the ways in which we act and the ways in which we understand each other’s actions? On the one hand, I am going to argue that it is possible to derive moral norms from Brandom’s account of PEL. On the other hand, I attempt to show that this account has implications regarding the way we should understand each other’s actions that are morally not acceptable by PEL’s own lights. Among other things, PEL leaves no room for moral critique, and it makes us helpless against covert manipulation and oppression by powerful agents. I therefore will conclude that the normative structure of PEL is inconsistent.1

I. Brandom on postmodern ethical life I begin with a brief summary of those points from Brandom’s reading of the Spirit chapter in Part 3 of A Spirit of Trust that are essential background to my subsequent discussion.

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On Brandom’s reading, Hegel holds that the conceptual content of language, thought, and action is constituted by normative attitudes, through which participants of a discursive practice assign each other authority and responsibility. Hegel, on this reading, analyses such normative attitudes as forms of reciprocal recognition. In addition, Hegel holds, on this view, that discursive practices involve normative meta-attitudes— attitudes that concern the relation between norms, on the one hand, and first-order normative attitudes, on the other hand. Brandom identifies these meta-attitudes with magnanimity (Edelmütigkeit) and pusillanimity (Niederträchtigkeit), two complementary viewpoints that Hegel introduces in the chapter on Culture, and that reappear in the final section of Spirit (explicitly in the case of pusillanimity, implicitly in the case of magnanimity). Brandom understands magnanimity as a view that holds that there are objectively valid norms that transcend our subjective normative attitudes, while pusillanimity, on his reading, denies such objective norms, reducing instead normativity to our subjective normative attitudes. Pusillanimity is, on Brandom’s account, the characteristic normative meta-attitude of modernity, which replaces the naive form of magnanimity that had characterized ancient ethical life: a form of magnanimity that simply assumed objective norms as given part of reality. Modernity, however, creates alienation, and it has to be overcome eventually by a restored, “postmodern” version of magnanimity that integrates the modern insight that norms depend on normative attitudes, by acknowledging a reciprocal dependence between norms and normative attitudes. The recognitive structure that corresponds to this form of magnanimity is that of PEL, the culminating stage in the history of discursive practices, which Brandom finds described in Hegel’s discussion of forgiveness at the end of the Spirit chapter. (In the following, I will reserve the terms “magnanimity” and “magnanimous” to refer to this specifically postmodern form of the meta-attitude, which is realized in PEL.) More specifically, consciousness learns in the dialectic of confession and forgiveness that whenever we attempt to follow norms—whenever we make doxastic claims, aim to act for reasons, etc.—we are always already implicitly committed to magnanimity, and hence also to PEL (ST, pp. 596f.). PEL is defined by a historical form of recognition: it is defined by diachronic relations of recognition that we create by offering rational reconstructions of each other’s utterances and actions—in general: of our concept applications (ST, pp. 600–610). When we apply a concept in thought, language, or action within a practice of PEL, we are like judges in case law in that we treat earlier concept applications as authoritative, and assume the responsibility to integrate them as far as possible into a narrative that presents a progress leading to our present concept application, while having ourselves authority about how exactly we tell this story. At the same time, we authorize and expect future concept-users to relate in exactly the same way to our own present concept application. Only by thus making our concept applications parts of larger traditions of concept use do we treat them as instances of norm-following at all, rather than as mere effects of causal circumstances. This is why any attempt to apply a concept in thought or action involves, for Brandom, a commitment to PEL—even though we so far have not yet

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lived up to this commitment, by establishing a practice that is actually articulated by the historical form of recognition that PEL requires.

II. The structure of rational reconstructions Let us now look more closely at the structure of rational reconstructions (ST, pp. 603–608). On Brandom’s account, when a person A gives a rational reconstruction for a concept application by a target person B, A needs to identify three elements: 1. 2. 3.

a referent R of the concept application; the conception that B has of R, and that is the sense through which R is given to B in the concept application; and the conception that A has of R, and that is the sense through which R is given to A in the context of her rational reconstruction of the concept application.

The first and the third items in this list are closely connected for A, since A uses her conception of R in order to single out R. By contrast, B’s conception of R is presented in the rational reconstruction as an earlier, imperfect conception of R. Consider, first, the case where the concept application is (part of) an utterance and A aims to rationally reconstruct the semantic content of that (part of an) utterance. In Brandom’s example, when a modern reader rationally reconstructs Aristotle’s applying the word cheir, she will see that word as referring, via a sense that is defined by his imperfect conception of a hand, to the same concept of a hand that she refers to via her own conception of a hand, a conception that she takes to capture that concept more adequately (ST, pp. 604f.). It is crucial to such a rational reconstruction that it identifies a shared concept that (according to this reconstruction) both the reconstructor and the target agent treat as authoritative. In Brandom’s words, rational reconstructions arrange “past conceptions” of concepts into an expressively progressive tradition of applications of a concept that is seen as having been all along already in play as the norm users of that concept were binding themselves by in making judgments and endorsing purposes […]. (ST, p. 606) In his discussion of Hegel’s notion of forgiveness, Brandom makes it clear that he understands rational reconstructions for actions in an exactly parallel way. “The magnanimous forgiving recollector,” writes Brandom, “must discern an implicit norm that governs the development of the deed” (ST, p. 744). Brandom identifies this implicit norm with the “intention” or “Absicht,” the agent’s plan for the action, which normally includes both a goal and means for realizing that goal and which governs the action as it unfolds over time. So, when A rationally reconstructs an action of B’s, she identifies  the intention that governs the action

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through a conception that is informed by what B actually has done and its consequences, and that improves upon B’s own conception of her intention.

Moreover, Brandom is explicit that in this case, too, the norm that is identified in the rational reconstruction needs to be shared by the person who offers the rational reconstruction. “The aim” of the rational reconstruction, Brandom writes, is to make the deed as rationally reconstructed one that those recollecting it can endorse now, on their own behalf. However unpromising it might have seemed at the outset, the process the agent initiated by acknowledging a practical commitment (Vorsatz) is to be seen as turning out to have been a good one, one there is reason [to] have promoted then and to endorse now. (ST, p. 737) And elsewhere: So the forgiving agent must endorse the norm being attributed as governing the deed—must acknowledge its authority. […] This is identifying with the agent, in the sense of risking and if need be sacrificing one’s own attitudes, by subjecting them to normative assessment according to the norm one both attributes and acknowledges, and being subjunctively sensitive to that norm in one’s own attitudes. (ST, p. 745) The intention I that is identified in the rational reconstruction is indexed to a particular agent and a particular situation—a situation that, from the vantage point of the rational reconstruction, belongs to the past. But the above quotes clearly imply that the person A who offers the rational reconstruction for an action of B adopts an attitude towards I that potentially has consequences also for her own future actions. While Brandom is not explicit on this, we may distinguish the following as four natural options for understanding the content of A’s resulting attitude (with “Φ” standing for the type of action specified by the relevant intention I): 1. 2. 3. 4.

Actions of type Φ are permissible for all agents who are circumstances as B, and have the same relevant preferences as Actions of type Φ are permissible for all agents who are circumstances as B, independently of their preferences. Actions of type Φ are obligatory for all agents who are circumstances as B, and have the same relevant preferences as Actions of type Φ are obligatory for all agents who are circumstances as B, independently of their preferences.

in relevantly similar B. in relevantly similar in relevantly similar B. in relevantly similar

Plausibly, rational reconstructions of actions within PEL may involve each of these attitudes.

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III. Moral implications of postmodern ethical life At one point of his discussion of PEL, Brandom describes magnanimity (and hence, PEL) as a “moral necessity” (ST, p. 578). In that context, he ascribes to Hegel a Kant-inspired strategy for deriving moral norms from the possibility of selfconsciousness: Self-recognition, recognizing oneself, treating oneself as a discursive being, as able to undertake determinately contentful commitments, exercise determinately contentful authority and so on, requires recognizing others: attributing that kind of responsibility and authority to them. Any practical or theoretical presupposition of that is a structural presupposition of one’s own self-consciousness. That is the source of moral requirements on how we treat others. (ST, p. 578) Brandom’s point here is that there is a generic moral obligation for us to adopt magnanimity and to establish a practice of PEL. But given the structure of rational reconstructions for actions that we analyzed in the last section, it is possible to show that the form of recognition required by PEL also has more concrete normative implications both for how we may act and for how we ought to interpret each other’s actions—and hence, that the moral obligatoriness of PEL entails more specific moral obligations. We saw in the last section that PEL requires us to interpret other persons’ actions in terms of intentions that we can ourselves endorse. This endorsement amounted to acknowledging a norm that deems actions corresponding to that intention permissible or even obligatory (in terms of one of the four attitudes we distinguished at the end of the last section). But as I shall presently attempt to show, there is a principled limit on the types of actions for which a magnanimous agent A can endorse intentions, and which can be deemed permissible or obligatory by the norms A acknowledges. The types of actions that are excluded by this limit are not available as specifications of the intentions that A can ascribe to others in rational reconstructions of their actions. At the same time, given that A cannot acknowledge these types of actions as permissible, they are not available as permissible contents for her own intentions either. So, the limit in question imposes constraints both on the ways in which magnanimous agents ought to interpret the actions of other agents, and on the ways in which they are allowed to act themselves.2 Take courses of actions that involve killing someone. Such actions destroy, if successful, the victim’s ability to develop rational reconstructions, and hence they diminish the ability of the whole community of PEL to engage in such magnanimous agency. By rationally reconstructing someone else’s action in terms of an intention to kill somebody, or by herself killing somebody, a magnanimous agent A would therefore act directly against the interests of PEL. In addition, the action type “killing somebody” has possible instances where A is herself the victim of the deed, and where A’s own ability to develop rational reconstructions would be

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destroyed if the action were carried out. In endorsing an intention of this kind in the context of a rational reconstruction, or in acting herself in this way (in suicide), A would therefore contradict her own status as magnanimous agent, as creator of rational reconstructions. Or take actions that include the systematic deception of others. Crucial to PEL is the joint enterprise of developing more and more adequate conceptions of concepts, of coming closer and closer to the truth about these concepts. In this sense, PEL aims at truth. This shared aim is undercut by deceptive actions. A magnanimous agent therefore must not ascribe to others intentions to act in such a way in rational reconstructions of their actions, or act herself this way. Finally, consider actions that involve compulsion, oppression, or deprivation of liberty. Such actions create asymmetrical recognitive relations as analyzed by Hegel in the master/slave dialectic, and such relations are incompatible with the symmetrical recognition that PEL calls for. A magnanimous agent must not ascribe an intention to act, and must not act herself, in such ways either, for this would again mean counteracting PEL—supporting or carrying out forms of agency that destroy magnanimous recognitive relations and replace them with defective modes of recognition. There is a general principle behind these examples that we can now formulate. In doing so, we can drop the qualification that such-and-such is not permissible for magnanimous agents. For the prohibitions in question are normative implications of PEL which is itself morally obligatory, on Brandom’s account: hence, these prohibitions have moral force, too, and are thus valid for all beings who are subject to moral demands. Keeping this in mind, we get the following principle (with “Φ” standing for a type of action, and “ϕ” for an instance of this type):3 (Limit of Forgiveness) If actions of type Φ impair the (ability for) magnanimous agency of (potential or actual)4 members of a practice of PEL, it is not permissible to  acknowledge a norm that deems permissible or even obligatory actions of type Φ and hence neither to  ϕ oneself, nor to  rationally reconstruct someone else’s action in terms of an intention to ϕ. In the following, I will use the terms “magnanimity-incompatible” and “magnanimitycompatible” to distinguish those actions, intentions, and interpretations which are ruled out by Limit of Forgiveness, from those which are not. As the above examples show, Limit of Forgiveness puts substantive moral constraints on our actions. This principle can thus be used to complement Brandom’s neo-Hegelian theory of normativity with a derivation of moral norms (a possibility that Brandom himself alludes to in the passage that I quoted at the beginning of this section). I will not attempt to discuss here what exact moral norms can be established in that way. Instead, I will simply build on the above examples in my following discussion.

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At the same time, Limit of Forgiveness substantively restricts the hermeneutic options that are available to magnanimous interpreters. Take, for example, a situation in which A has a significant amount of evidence suggesting that agent B has killed another person C in order to steal C’s money. The intention “kill C and steal his money” is magnanimity-incompatible, and hence is not an intention that A can endorse. Given Brandom’s account of rational reconstructions of actions, this means that A cannot offer a rational reconstruction of B’s action in terms of the intention “kill C and steal his money.” Instead, if there is another possible interpretation that is magnanimity-compatible, this interpretation must be preferred. Hence, interpreters in PEL must try as far as possible to make sense of other persons’ actions in terms of magnanimity-compatible intentions. Such interpreters constantly work on the presumption that their fellow participants in the practice of magnanimity choose magnanimity-compatible actions—in other words, on the presumption that they respect everyone’s role as a participant in that practice (as someone who is able to and supposed to develop rational reconstructions for everyone else). This presumption is naturally characterized as a form of trust. Brandom himself uses the term “trust” both in order to refer to the entire, complex recognitive structure which PEL gives rise to (hence the title A Spirit of Trust) (e.g. ST, pp. 576), and to pick out one particular element of this structure, namely, our petitioning for future judges to rationally reconstruct our present concept applications (ST, pp. 621). But as it turns out now, PEL in Brandom’s sense also requires trust in a more ordinary sense, namely that of an attitude of assuming that others will respect other persons’ roles as (actual or potential) participants in PEL (and hence not act in ways that impair their ability to offer rational reconstructions). I will in the following call this latter attitude “magnanimous trust.”5

IV. Moral problems with magnanimous trust In this section, I am going to argue that magnanimous trust has deeply troublesome consequences. These consequences provide moral reasons that speak against any attempt to establish PEL in real practice. Consider, first, the following question: can truly magnanimous interpreters recognize magnanimity-incompatible actions as such? Imagine a magnanimous interpreter A who witnesses a scene that looks as if B killed C and ran away with his money. Initially, the following picture might be tempting: A sees that B kills C and steals his money, and there is no reason to think that B does not do this intentionally. So, A has to ascribe to B the intention “kill C and steal his money.” Since this intention is magnanimity-incompatible, A cannot share it, and hence cannot develop a rational reconstruction for B’s action. This picture is mistaken, however. It restricts the role of magnanimous trust to a stage at which A has already decided what B intentionally did and what his intention in doing so was. Magnanimous interpretation adds then merely the agent’s own endorsement of that intention (and possibly helps to decide among rival accounts of the agent’s intention in cases that are less clear than our example case). But this

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restriction is unwarranted. For descriptions under which observers take actions to be intentional, and corresponding ascriptions of intentions to the agent, are not something that is unshakably given. Rather, they are themselves the result of (conscious or unconscious) interpretive decisions under conditions of uncertainty—i.e. decisions that are based on evidence which does not deductively entail a particular account of what has happened. An interpreter who lives up to the demands of PEL must bring to bear her magnanimous trust also to this earlier stage of interpretation. To spell out in more detail what this means, it will be useful to draw on Bayesian theories of hypothesis testing, which are generally seen as providing normatively valid models of data interpretation under conditions of uncertainty (e.g. Jaynes 2003). Bayes’s rule holds that (Bayes’s rule) p(H|E) = p(E|H)  p(H)/p(E) where “p” stands for a (subjective) probability, “H” for a given hypothesis—in the case of interpretative tasks, a candidate interpretation—and “E” for a given piece of evidence. Let us quickly go through the various factors in Bayes’s rule: 







p(H|E), the probability of the hypothesis in question given the evidence, is known as “posterior probability.” On Bayesian accounts of interpretation, agents compare the posterior probabilities of all relevant candidate interpretations (hypotheses) for the given evidence and select the hypothesis with highest posterior probability as their preferred interpretation. p(E|H), the probability that the given evidence occurs if the hypothesis in question is true, is called “likelihood.” In Bayesian accounts of interpretive tasks, this factor is used to model the fit between an interpretive hypothesis and the given evidence: if a given interpretive hypothesis has high likelihood, this means that it matches the evidence well. (For example, if the task is to interpret the fact that there is smoke on the horizon, the hypothesis that there is a forest fire in that direction fits the evidence of there being smoke well: if that hypothesis were true, it would be very likely that there would be smoke in that direction.) p(H), the unconditional probability of the hypothesis, is called the “prior probability” of the hypothesis. This factor is used to model the internal plausibility of a given interpretation. (For example, a hypothesis on which the smoke on the horizon is caused by a UFO that has just landed, has much lower prior probability than the forest-fire hypothesis.) p(E), the unconditional probability of the evidence, is needed as normalizing factor, to yield posterior probabilities between 0 and 1.

In these Bayesian terms, magnanimous trust—the presumption that others will always act in magnanimity-compatible ways—is equivalent to a particular assessment of prior probabilities for magnanimity-incompatible interpretations, namely, an assessment on which such interpretations have a prior probability of 0. For setting the prior probability for magnanimity-incompatible interpretations to 0 means

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to set them to the lowest possible value, and we need to do this in order to live up to PEL with its demand that we do what we can in order to provide rational reconstructions.6 Given Bayes’s rule, such priors have the result that the posterior probability of magnanimity-incompatible interpretive hypotheses will automatically be 0, too. So, it is never rational for magnanimous agents to select magnanimity-incompatible interpretations as their winning hypothesis. In situations where an action would have clearly seemed to be governed by a magnanimity-incompatible intention—and hence would have seemed to be “unforgivable”—this probabilistic effect of magnanimous trust can have either of two consequences. First, there may be another, magnanimity-compatible interpretation available that otherwise would have lost to the magnanimity-incompatible interpretation because of lower likelihood, prior probability or both, but that now—due to the effect of magnanimous trust—has the highest posterior probability and is adopted as winning hypothesis. Take again the above example, where the magnanimous interpreter A has witnessed a scene that looked as if B killed C and ran away with his money. Due to A’s magnanimous trust, the interpretation that would have otherwise won—B as acting on the intention of killing C and stealing his money—will have posterior probability 0. By contrast, an interpretation on which the scene that A witnessed was, say, a skilfully staged artistic performance would otherwise have lost because of its relatively low prior probability, but it now may be adopted as best interpretation of B’s action. Second, there can be cases in which no winning hypothesis emerges. It is always possible to think of magnanimity-compatible “revisionist” interpretations,7 but there may be a threshold of posterior probability that hypotheses need to reach in order to be selected as winning interpretation. In a given case, all available revisionist accounts may fail to reach this threshold, such that no interpretation is adopted at all. The result in this case is that the interpreter suspends judgment about how to interpret the evidence. As a consequence, wherever magnanimous interpreters are confronted with actions that really are magnanimity-incompatible, magnanimous trust will prevent them from understanding these actions, and produce instead more or less bizarre false interpretations, and/or persisting ignorance. This implication is troublesome for several reasons. First, false beliefs and ignorance about other persons’ actions are damaging for magnanimous agents. Not only do they conflict with the epistemic aims of such agents, they also make it impossible for them to choose appropriate actions in order to protect themselves and the whole practice of PEL against the magnanimity-incompatible actions of others—by trying to intervene in ongoing magnanimity-incompatible actions, or to prevent them in the future. Second, if nobody is able to detect a magnanimity-incompatible action, it also follows that nobody can be made responsible and criticized for such an action. Without room for moral critique, moral improvement is hard to achieve. Moreover, authors of magnanimity-incompatible actions like murder or enslavement would never have to face any consequences such as reproach or punishment for

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their actions, which would be unjust. Finally, one can argue that moral norms whose infringements are impossible to detect—at least for agents who comply with the demands of PEL that are the very source of these norms—are “private” norms, like those described by Wittgenstein in the private language argument. One should therefore doubt whether they can be considered norms at all, even more so in the context of a Hegelian view of normativity that puts so much weight on the social character of normativity. So, there are several deeply worrisome consequences of magnanimous trust, and hence several reasons why we ought not to adopt such trust. Moreover, these reasons are moral reasons. Magnanimous trust makes us unable to protect PEL against magnanimity-incompatible actions that endanger this practice. So, it fulfills itself the criteria for magnanimity-incompatibility, and resistance to such trust is morally demanded as a consequence of the principle Limit of Forgiveness. And since magnanimous trust leaves no room for moral responsibility and critique, the moral norms that follow from Limit of Forgiveness require themselves that we do not adopt magnanimous trust—for absence of magnanimous trust is a condition of possibility of practically implementing these norms. PEL thus turns out to create a normative contradiction: on the one hand, it implies that magnanimous trust is morally demanded; on the other hand, it implies that magnanimous trust is morally wrong. Notice, moreover, that this is not a case of a moral dilemma, where various moral demands happen to conflict with each other in particular cases. Rather, the contradiction in question is a systematic one, which follows from the very nature of PEL. To all this, the following two objections can be made. First, the assaults against which, according to the foregoing argument, it must be possible to protect PEL consist in magnanimity-incompatible behavior. Should we not expect that such behavior is overcome in the transition to PEL, so that there is nothing left against which the practice and its participants have to be protected? It may be true that the transition to PEL requires all magnanimity-incompatible behavior to stop (although Brandom nowhere gets explicit about these aspects of the transition to PEL). But even if this is so, one cannot simply assume that PEL, once it is established, will forever be immune to such phenomena. In order to be able to persist in its existence, a practice of PEL needs to be able to protect itself against any regression into them, and my point is that magnanimous trust undermines this ability. Second, it might be argued that PEL need not necessarily take a form where all agents set the prior probability for magnanimity-incompatible actions to 0. Brandom himself explicitly allows for magnanimity-incompatible actions that are recognized as such, and therefore are not amenable to rational reconstructions: It seems that the metanormative criteria of adequacy for successful forgiveness, both reparative and recollective, are in many cases impossible to satisfy. Some things people have done strike us, even upon due reflection, as simply unforgivable. In these cases, though we might try to mitigate the consequences of

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evil doings, we have no idea at all how to go about discerning the emergence of a governing norm we could ourselves endorse. (ST, pp. 746f.) Does this not mean that PEL need not have the dramatic consequences I described above? To this, I respond that there are two senses in which an action can be “unforgivable”: a normative sense, according to which a rational agent must not forgive (rationally reconstruct) the doing; and a psychological sense, according to which a given interpreter lacks sufficient psychological resources, and does not manage to forge a rational reconstruction (e.g. because she lacks sufficient imagination, or because she does not manage to actually treat the prior probability of magnanimity-incompatible actions always as 0).8 I do not deny that actions may be unforgivable within PEL in the second sense, and in such cases, magnanimityincompatible actions can actually be detected as such by magnanimous interpreters. But this also means that these interpreters fail to live up to the demands of PEL. By contrast, an interpreter who does comply with these demands will never recognize a magnanimity-incompatible action as such, and so there are no unforgivable actions in the first sense. This seems to be Brandom’s view, too. For after the passage I quoted above, he goes on to explain (ST, pp. 747f.) that in cases in which magnanimous interpreters find themselves unable to rationally reconstruct a given action, they have to admit that this is partly their own fault, and that they fail to live up to the ideal of forgiveness they are committed to. But in any case, the fact that there can be practices of PEL in which magnanimity-incompatible actions are recognized as such because interpreters fail to fully realize magnanimous trust does not assuage the above worries: the inconsistency that we had identified was located at the level of the normative implications of PEL, and considerations about psychological failures to live up to these demands cannot resolve that inconsistency.

V. Political problems with magnanimous trust Yet could there not be a normative compromise that does in some sense resolve the inconsistency? Given the problems we pointed out in the last section, one might propose that all that PEL can reasonably demand from us is to realize magnanimous trust to some (imperfect) degree, such that there remain possibilities for moral critique, protection, etc. In such a compromise solution, magnanimous trust might have only a very weak impact on prior probabilities, or even merely consist in a policy of preferring magnanimity-compatible over magnanimity-incompatible interpretations when both have equal posterior probability. This would enable magnanimous interpreters to detect and criticize at least most of the magnanimousincompatible actions that are visible to a non-magnanimous interpreter, and this would probably be enough to protect PEL against existential threats.

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Insofar as this solution would require a systematic and far-reaching failure of compliance with what PEL really demands, it is questionable whether such a compromise would be in the spirit of PEL. In addition, even if it is granted that this compromise would resolve the problems that we rehearsed above, it still would have very problematic consequences. In particular, there are forms of political agency that create a problem for this proposal. I want to suggest that there is an important category of harmful political actions that share the following features: a b c d

they pursue manipulative, oppressive, or other magnanimity-incompatible intentions; their agents have particular power; they are covert, in that they involve strategies that make them difficult to detect and/or criticize; and they are particularly efficient and harmful because of (b) and (c).

A first example is propaganda, which deliberately manipulates people’s beliefs and emotions through lies, distortions, and misleading rhetoric. Propaganda is magnanimity-incompatible as it runs counter to the truth-aimedness of PEL. At the same time, propaganda is covert since it presents itself as truthful discourse, and its authors often explain the fact that their claims contradict those of other voices (e.g. of serious journalistic media) by providing conspiracy theories aimed at denigrating those voices. Finally, propaganda is typically efficient in manipulating people because its manipulative agenda is hidden behind the “official” facade of truthfulness; and it is efficient in manipulating at a large scale when its authors have power positions that enable them to reach a large audience, impose their agenda on state media, etc. Further examples include:   

colonialism with its legitimizing narrative of a “civilizing mission” (Rist 2008, pp. 47–58); warfare for pretended humanitarian reasons; political communication that is deliberately ambiguous between a highly harmful (e.g. racist, sexist, fascist …) and an innocuous message.

(In this last case—a favorite ploy in recent right-wing populist and extremist politics9—the offensive message does its harm, while the agent can point to the harmless message in order to defend his behavior against critique, and to denigrate his critics as persons who are exaggerating or making things up.) Why do phenomena like these present a problem for the restricted version of PEL that we are considering? Given the covert nature of these phenomena, “friendly” interpretations (such as interpretations of propaganda as truthful, or of ambiguous political communication as harmless) will normally have, at a first assessment by average interpreters, at least the same posterior probability as critical interpretations (which uncover the true character of the actions in question). But this means that a magnanimous interpreter will believe the friendly version, even

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when magnanimous trust is restricted in the proposed way. This, in its turn, allows the action to fully unfold its deleterious effects, and makes it very hard if not impossible for the interpreter to defend herself and/or others against these effects. Given the particularly efficient nature of the actions in question, these effects can cause harm to others (and to their magnanimous agency) at a large scale, and therefore pose a substantive threat to PEL. Any resistance against such forms of political agency requires in the first place insight into their existence and working. But it takes a more critical attitude than magnanimous trust (even in its restricted form) to gain such insight: an attitude that takes any sign for manipulation, oppression, and the like, very seriously, and treats it at least as sufficient reason for further investigation.10 I therefore conclude that the proposed compromise with its restricted version of magnanimous trust is not a satisfactory solution either. Together with the argument in the last section, this shows that PEL is a practice with contradictory normative implications; and it is not plausible that there is a moral requirement or necessary implicit commitment to create a practice of this kind.11

Notes 1 I discuss further problems with Brandom’s reading of the Spirit chapter in Knappik 2013, esp. pp. 125–134 and pp. 452–461. 2 The following discussion is indebted to Korsgaard’s discussion of Kant’s Categorical Imperative and her “practical contradiction” interpretation of the Formula of Universal Law in Korsgaard 1985. Drawing on Kantian moral theory in this Hegelian context is justified by the fact that Brandom himself characterizes the strategy by which Hegel (on his reading) establishes the moral obligatoriness of PEL, as Kantian (ST, pp. 559f.). 3 While my account of the various attitudes through which an agent can endorse an intention in Section II was indexed to circumstances and—in cases (1) and (3)—preferences of the agent, I drop these qualifications here: as the above examples suggest, types of actions that impair magnanimous agency normally do so independently of particular circumstances and preferences. 4 An action like murder destroys the victim’s ability for magnanimous action even when the victim does not live in a practice of PEL. 5 One problem with Brandom’s account that I shall bracket in the following is that there is an influential view (see, for instance, Baier 1986) on which trust cannot be adopted at will for practical (as opposed to epistemic) reasons, where the “moral necessity” of PEL would be such a practical reason. 6 Assuming that we can adopt a particular probabilistic assessment for practical reasons. If this is not possible, it is implausible that there is a moral requirement to adopt a particular interpretive stance in the first place (see also note 5). 7 Even when she has collected a lot of relevant evidence—e.g., in the above example, verified that C is dead—it is always possible that the interpreter is only dreaming, or that some similar skeptical hypothesis is true. 8 Brandom makes a similar distinction at ST, p. 747. 9 To give just one example: in July 2017, the later Italian Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini, made a public visit to a beach resort whose tenant had put on display signposts with quotes by Mussolini and other references to fascism and Nazism, and was under legal investigation for this reason. Salvini had pictures taken of himself embracing the tenant and pointing smilingly to the signposts and declared on this occasion: “This is not

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a political visit, but one of support for a professional activity that employs dozens and dozens of persons” (Stefanoni 2017, my translation). 10 This attitude can still be one of trust (and in many cases, it should be: see Warren 2018 on trust in institutions as precondition for democracy). But it needs to be a critical form of trust where the truster is open to evidence suggesting that the trust is, or has become, unwarranted, and ready to eventually revoke his trust—as opposed to a form of trust where the truster is overly biased in favor of the trustee, and hence blind to signs that the trustee may not be trustworthy (see Jones 1996, pp. 11–13, who gives the example of trust in a “particularly charming and particularly irresponsible” friend). 11 For very useful discussion, I am indebted to Gilles Bouché, Erasmus Mayr, Filipe Campello, and the audience at the 2014 Berlin conference on A Spirit of Trust.

References Baier, Annette (1986) “Trust and Antitrust,” Ethics 96/2, pp. 231–260. Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Jaynes, Edwin Thomas (2003) Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, edited by G. L. Bretthorst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Jones, Karen (1996) “Trust as an Affective Attitude,” Ethics 107/1, pp. 4–25. Knappik, Franz (2013) Im Reich der Freiheit: Hegels Theorie autonomer Vernunft (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter). Korsgaard, Christine (1985) “Kant’s Formula of Universal Law,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66, pp. 24–47. Rist, Gilbert (2008) The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, translated by P. Camiller, 3rd ed. (London/New York: Zed Books). Stefanoni, Franco (2017) “Salvini con gestore della ‘spiaggia fascista’: ‘Non processiamo le idee’,” Corriere della Sera, July 18 [available online]. Warren, Mark (2018) “Trust and Democracy,” in E. Uslane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 75–94.

12 BRANDOM’S HEGEL Charles Taylor

Robert Brandom’s book on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a very impressive achievement, full of interesting ideas which will start new and fruitful chains of enquiry. I am grateful for the chance to read it and comment on it. Understandably a book of this kind opens two avenues of enquiries: (A) Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, is it a faithful rendition of Hegel’s work, and/or intentions? and (B) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the theory which the book lays out, whether or not these are also those of Hegel? I would like to spend more time on (B) (and even there, I can only take up a fraction of the interesting ideas the book offers). But first, I would like to say a few words on (A).

I I should start by saying that I am not completely sure what Brandom himself believes on this question, because his self-given task is to give an interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which Hegel saw as a kind of prolegomenon to his more systematic theory, a way of leading us from more conventional standpoints to the one from which Hegel’s mature outlook becomes visible. But from what I glean from the text as it stands, I think I disagree fundamentally with Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel’s mature theory. I saw and still see this theory as emerging from the thinking of the founding generation of German Romanticism, that of the 1790s, with whom he was associated. (He in fact went to school with some of its leading figures.) The outlook of this generation was formed, among other things, by the fact that the traditional Western understandings of cosmic order (for instance, the Great Chain of Being, the numerological Kabbalah, the relations of sympathy between heavenly and earthly beings, the “signatures” of Paracelsus, and the like) were more and more subject to question, and even rejection, in the Age of Enlightenment. The basic

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idea underlying these pictures of order is that of a self-realizing plan, modeled on the thinking of Plato and Aristotle. I say “self-realizing,” because these orders not only defined the good, but also exercised a powerful influence over the changing and unstable sublunary realm to bring it into conformity with this good. As Aristotle put it in the Nicomachean Ethics (1094a2), the good is that to which all things tend, the plan they “strive towards” (“tagathon, hou pant’ ephietai”). The Romantic generation saw their times as losing contact with these orders, and strove to recover this, but this didn’t mean they wanted just to restore the status quo ante. On the contrary, they made important modifications. The first was in their understanding of the order and our place in it, which I can lay out tersely in seven points: (1) The order was understood through a concept of Nature and, inspired by Goethe, this was understood in terms of a Spinoza-derived pantheism. Literal readers of Spinoza might be horrified, because this vision completely separated the seventeenth-century thinker from his Cartesian roots. Nature was not to be understood mechanistically. It was more like a living organism. In other words, the Romantics were rebelling against a dead mechanical view of Nature. And they were also rebelling against mind–body dualism, and against a purely instrumental approach to nature. They longed for a unification of self, unity with our emotions, with nature in us, and with nature as a whole. In this regard, one of their primary sources of inspiration was Goethe (who was nevertheless uncomfortable with their more rebellious stances). Then (2) our soul communicates with this whole, with Nature. Nature resonates in us, and we intensify this through expression, art. But (3) our whole idea of Nature has undergone a modern shift. It isn’t just a static set, or ordered cosmos, of beautiful forms; rather, it is striving, developing; Nature is producing higher and higher forms. Spinoza’s natura naturans is seen as in motion, unfolding, seeking its adequate form. Moreover (4), this is what we also are doing. We are striving to discover our true form through creative expression, moving stage by stage. This type of development might be called “expressive-historical”: at each stage we try to realize, that is, give expression to our potential; and this realization makes manifest how we fall short, and what further changes are necessary. Indeed, it is this new anthropology of serial self-discovery which lies behind the new view of nature as development (and perhaps vice versa). (5) The two lines of expressive-historical development, of the cosmos and humans, respectively, are interlinked. Nature or cosmos can’t reach its final form without our realizing ours. That is because the successive stages of the cosmos need continually advancing consciousness, of which humans are the locus. This notion of expression connects up to a new ideal of (6) freedom, as full selfrealization; this goes beyond the notion of negative freedom, freedom from, which is one of the prominent modern understandings of the concept. It also includes while going beyond the new understanding of freedom as autonomy, which was both an ethical and political ideal. Kant is the great articulator of this ideal,

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followed by Fichte. But within the new anthropology of humans as self-developing, autonomy has to include full self-realization. (3) and (4), together with (5) and (6), suggest (7) the ideal of the perfect reconciling of freedom and unity with nature, within and without. The progress to this is then envisaged through a narrative of history, the so-called “spiral path” (ekzentrische Bahn), whereby we leave an initial state of harmonious unity between humans and nature, pass through a period of their opposition, as we develop our reason and increase our autonomy, to return to a higher unity. (This goal was often tersely defined as combining Fichte and Spinoza.) Hölderlin makes this point in his Hyperion Fragment as does Schiller in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. But is the end attainable? Perhaps not. This gives a place to (8) Irony: the road to (7) may never be completed; we may always strive, suffer distance. Ironic expression, however, manifests the gap, shows what we strive for (see Richards 2002; Beiser 2004). So, we develop as Nature develops, and indeed, our proper development matches that of nature, brings it to consciousness, and unites it with freedom. In fact, as we saw, we partake in the development of nature, which requires conscious expression to realize its end. We are the locus where Nature becomes aware of itself. Many of the writers of the 1790s shared the view, later articulated by Schelling (and in a more rationalist form in Hegel) that the full realization of Nature requires the conscious expression which only Spirit can give it. Art (or philosophy) and Nature come into unison, because they come to fulfillment together. We find our own goals in Nature, which must thus be correctly read. But since our spiral path has taken us away from the immediate unity with nature, we can no longer read it easily. What Romantic art, Poetry, strives to do is recover an adequate reading, and this would of necessity mean the creation of a mode of symbolic access. But before I explain this term, let us look at the other source of ideas which circulated among these thinkers. The second big change which seemed to go along with this was epistemic. As humanity proceeds along the spiral path, it cannot claim the full, unambiguous grasp of the nature of cosmic order that Renaissance thinkers propounded. This sense of necessary distance found expression, for instance, in Hamann’s idea that, while Nature was a language through which God communicates with us, we can never fully grasp it, but can only aspire to an approximate “translation.” Indeed, human speech is the result of this: “Reden ist übersetzen.” The result, thirdly, was that we couldn’t achieve and shouldn’t aspire to the full clarity of rigorous philosophical language. On the contrary, our medium should be the languages of art, or mythology, of fable (Novalis). Hegel emerges from this milieu. He helped develop its thinking. He sides with Schelling against Fichte. But then in the 1800s he breaks with it decisively on the third point. Nothing debars us from a full, rigorous, philosophical-conceptual account of the whole process of development. The mainline Romantics have sold reason short. Building such a system is what Hegel now embarks on.

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Of course, he agrees that this system was not attainable earlier, at less-advanced points on humanity’s “spiral path.” The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. But such a system is possible now, and Hegel proceeds to build it through a number of works and lecture series, culminating in his period in Berlin. What that system retains was the core Platonic-Aristotelian idea of a self-realizing plan. The place of contingency is limited, contained within limits which can be deduced from the Concept, ranging over both static hierarchies (as in the Naturphilosophie), and developmental accounts (philosophy of history, aesthetics, religion). I don’t think that a “naturalistic,” or “unmysterious” account of the mature Hegel is possible.

II Let me leave question (A) there, because I would like to be able to address important questions in (B). And here there are so many in this rich and wide-ranging book that I have to be selective. First, I would like to say how much I agree with the starting point of Brandom’s argument, which sees Kant playing a crucial role in the breakout from the dead end of Cartesian epistemology, with its notion of inner representations as our path to outer reality. Descartes declares himself “certain that I can have no knowledge of what is outside me except by means of the ideas I have within me” (assuré que je ne puis avoir aucune connaissance de ce qui est hors de moi que par l’entremise des idées que j’ai eues en moi; 1991, p. 201). This starting point guarantees that sceptical issues will recur again and again. There was no way out as long as my experience of perceiving a flower, say, was assimilated to a bare mental event, such as a headache, or a ringing in my ears. It has rather to be taken as what inclines me to make a claim, that there is a flower here before me. Hegel tackles the dead-end nature of the Cartesian approach in the introduction to the Phenomenology, where he shows up the inadequacy of theories of knowledge as instrument or medium. As Brandom argues, he places himself firmly as a successor of Kant, whose starting point is the judgment, the conceptual characterization of the objects of experience. From that point on, the way in which experience can force conceptual change becomes understandable, and Brandom works this out with great clarity and brio. The experience of error (for example, where we take seriously the experience of a straight stick which looks bent in water) forces a change in our initial descriptions, often requiring a change of concepts. I have a first problem with this account if taken as a general account of the experience of error. For errors about the natural world, it is unproblematic, but it doesn’t always work for errors in self-understanding. Here what can and does often happen is that a transition to another self-understanding is interpreted as the resolution of a confusion, or the overcoming of self-delusion. It is not that I discover an incompatibility between current beliefs and have to cast about to see which one (s) must be abandoned. In a realm where the languages of self-understanding help constitute different self-experiences, the passage from one to another can carry in itself the meaning of being a gain in self-clarity (see Taylor 1997).

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But I would like to concentrate on a highly important and relevant set of ideas from the Phenomenology, which continue to preoccupy us today: Hegel’s contribution to our understanding of Western modernity. First of all, we have to acknowledge that his real object was precisely Western modernity. His understanding of other world civilizations was very imperfect. This has become very evident now that we are forced to recognize other paths to what turn out to be alternative democracies. But it is unfair to hammer this point. No one was in a position to recognize this multiplicity at the time (though Hegel’s contemporary, Friedrich Schlegel, another member of the Romantic generation, arguably got farther in his understanding of Indian culture). And even in critiquing his account of Western modernity, we have to cut Hegel some slack, even while we note the limitations. One of the key points of his analysis turns on the famous dialectic of the Master and Slave (or Lord and Servant, in German Herr und Knecht), which turns on the notions of recognition and non-recognition. These are still issues that we are dealing with today (see Honneth 1992). But how to understand their relevance? Just by itself, this dialectic can’t account for the massive change from Ancient Régime societies of ranks and orders to modern mass democracies, which profess equality and non-discrimination (however violated in practice). Mutual recognition always existed, even in a society of orders, but always in restricted domains. Among nobles, or at least certain ranks of nobility, among burghers, among peasants in their villages, and on big estates; as indeed, it existed among citizens in ancient Athens, but fell far short of universal application, even at the height of Athenian democracy. But even so, these citizens had something like a “we” that was an “I.” But as Brandom points out, the dialectic doesn’t lose its point even so. The Master is a type, one who sees himself as owed service, but doesn’t recognize a corresponding obligation to the Servant. (Of course, the theory, and even at times and partially, the practice of feudalism talked of mutual obligations, but it always tended to degenerate.) And one message of the dialectic was that the unfavored party, thrown onto his own resources, has to deal with, gain control over the world; and it is this transforming power which ensures that the servants, as peasants, and then later, even more as bourgeois, will inherit the world; and it is they who can institute societies where recognition becomes as a rule reciprocal. But I think that Brandom overestimates the usefulness of the Master–Servant dialectic when he reads the rise of moral subjectivism as implicit in the Master’s stance—in Brandom’s terms what I’m calling subjectivism is the situation in which the attitude-dependence of normative statuses is not balanced by a sense of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. Orders, if not whole societies, have usually been bound together by some common ethic, even if its interpretation is hotly contested. Subjectivism is a theoretical view, which is certainly encouraged by reductive accounts of human motivation encouraged by “scientific naturalism” (see ST, pp. 663ff.). But it is, to use more contemporary terms, a “meta-ethical” position, not a substantive ethical stance.1 Societies and orders have always been held together (i.e. not torn apart by civil strife) by an agreed substantive code. And

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this is true of societies ruled by crudely dominant minorities, as well as of more egalitarian ones. (But I’m not sure that I’m not also criticizing Hegel here.) I think also that Brandom is expanding too far the relevance of this imbalance between attitudes and statuses when he aligns it with Hegel’s notion of “alienation.” I believe this term needs to be understood in terms of the “spiral path” which Hegel draws from the Romantics. There was an original, unreflective unity between humans and nature, and within human society among the ancient Greeks. Deep internal contradictions led ineluctably to the break-up of this unity; and this allowed for and encouraged more radical conceptions of freedom and reason. The spiral closes when these developments allow for a renewed sense of unity with nature and within society incorporating this higher understanding of rational freedom. The opposite of alienation in both ancient polis and emerging modern society is a condition in which the power holding society together is felt to emanate from the citizens, to be theirs, as against the rule by alien power which succeeds the heyday of the polis and its subsumption in the Roman Empire, and the long period of irresponsible power which has prevailed since then. Of course, the difference between the two phases lies in the fact that the moderns who overcome alienation are self-consciously rational and free subjects, where the ancient Greeks were still subject to an inscrutable fate. The intervening period is that of “der sich entfremdete Geist” of Chapter VI B of the Phenomenology. We can see Marx’s debt to Hegel in his version of this concept.

III What Hegel is struggling with in the Phenomenology and beyond is how to move from the persisting remains of a society of orders, where mutual recognition is contained within limited orders, to a society where all are free, and thus mutual recognition is universal. That this is a real problem for him, we can see in his discussion of the French revolution, Phenomenology Chapter VI B III: “Absolute Freedom and the Terror.” This reflects the dilemma of the whole generation of the 1790s, who enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution, erected liberty trees to the horror of their elders, and then were repelled and horrified themselves, as the revolution descended into violence and terror, and seemed to resolve itself into a renewed (Napoleonic) monarchy. (There is, of course, a twentieth-century analogy in the—eventually abandoned—love affair of part of the Western Left with the Bolshevik Revolution.) In the Phenomenology, Hegel saw the problem as residing in a unified negative will of the Revolutionary government to destroy all the institutions of the Ancien Régime. This was the drive to “absolute,” that is, unlimited freedom, a power which in effect destroyed freedom. And in fact, one can argue that the great weakness of the French Revolution, in comparison to the American, was that there were no extant political forms which could legitimately claim to canalize popular will. In the American case, the potential void was filled by the institutions of representative government, which only needed to be given greater powers, and base themselves on a wider franchise, to take over the burden of legitimacy.2 But the French Ancien Régime offered only the

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discredited Estates General, which enshrined the worst of a society of orders. To be fair to the revolutionaries of 1789, Burke’s advice to build in continuity with their historic constitution was very hard to follow, after many centuries dedicated to erecting an “absolute” monarchy. At the stage where he was writing this work, there is some evidence that Hegel would have settled for a Napoleonic solution, integrating some of the Reforms of the Revolution, such as equality before the law, and careers open to talents, and balancing them by a strong executive to keep order. But later, when he was more integrated into post-war German society, he saw the solution in maintaining some feature of the society of orders. In the Philosophy of Right, he sees the modern state as articulated into estates (Stände): peasantry, landowners, burghers and business people, and the professionals and functionaries who administer the state. How this was to be reconciled with the free choice of careers, open to talents, was unresolved. Hegel is often accused of giving his blessing to the Prussian state, but the contemporary Prussia which employed him in the University of Berlin was very far from adopting his formula. The lesson that Tocqueville drew at roughly the same period, inspired by his experience in the US, was that modern democracies needed another kind of articulation, into levels of government, as well as a lively culture of voluntary organizations. Both thinkers shied away from the model of a single unitary government enjoying all powers, which the French Revolution had thrown up in its first manifestation. But Tocqueville has turned out the more perspicacious. Modern democratic society has turned out to have great difficulties maintaining universal mutual recognition, but this is not because of the legacy of a society of orders; rather the ideal of equal citizenship has been periodically poisoned by divisive definitions which brand certain people as not really fit to be equal citizens: because of the wrong ethnicity, or religion, or culture; or because they came later, or are not industrious and self-reliant as true citizens ought to be. Today’s wave of what is often called “populism” illustrates this all too well. Can Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition help us to see how to combat this? I doubt it. But there is one Hegelian idea, as interpreted by Brandom, which is very relevant to a connected problem: that of the bitter division which often arises from populism. This is where democracy comes to be redefined as rule of the majority over the rejected minority. The sense of common citizenship of all the members of society threatens to fray to the breaking point. Brandom’s very profound reading of Hegel’s notion of “forgiveness,” leading to “trust” points to an important antidote. In a truly functioning democracy, the significance of each person’s or group’s action doesn’t depend on that person or group alone. Others can contribute to its ultimate significance. They can do this partly by interpreting it charitably in the light of a common tradition, drawing a lesson from it which fits with the thrust of that tradition. Brandom’s example is the chain of verdicts by judges in a common-law tradition. But perhaps even more significant, others can inflect the meaning of a past action by intervening to change the chain of consequences which flow from it. A striking example of this is Mandela and Tutu’s initiative of the South African Truth

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and Reconciliation Commission. Some of the terrible injustices of the apartheid regime seemed about to spawn an almost endless series of acts of retribution; these would be entirely understandable in the light of what many had suffered, but they would have driven ever deeper divisions in the society. In an act of great wisdom and courage Mandela, backed by Tutu, intervened to inflect this potential chain in another direction. Of course, one can never be sure of the consequences of this kind of attempt. But it can only be motivated by a desire to reconcile and bring together a society threatened by the deep division arising from historic injustices. I don’t know to what extent Brandom captures Hegel’s intention in these passages, but whoever first thought of it has made a profound contribution to our understanding of what it takes to create viable democratic societies.

IV It may be worthwhile to explore this further. Democratic republics require a very definite sense of identity: Americans, Canadians, Québécois, German, French, and so on. Why? Well, because the very nature of democracy, for several reasons, requires this strong commitment: it requires participation in voting, participation in paying taxes, participation in going to war, if there is conscription. If there is to be redistribution, there has to be a very profound solidarity to motivate these transfers from more to less fortunate. Democracy therefore requires a strong common identity. Finally, and very importantly, if we are in a deliberative community—we are talking together, deciding among ourselves, voting, and making decisions—we have to trust that the other members of the group are really concerned with our common good. You see a situation arising where independentist movements start very easily—and I happen to know a case like that, coming from Quebec—in which the minority says, “Well when they’re talking about the good of our society, they’re not talking about us; they’re talking just about them. We’re not part of their horizon.” When that kind of trust breaks down, democracy is in very big trouble. It can even end up splitting into two. So we need a powerful common identity (see Calhoun 2007). But these powerful identities can slip very easily in a negative and exclusionary direction. A very good book by the Yale sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere, makes this point (see also Mann 2005): the common properties that make up this identity are very strongly morally charged; they’re good. As a matter of fact, in most contemporary democratic societies, there are two sides to this identity. One facet defines certain principles: that we believe in representative democracy, human rights, equality; but they also have a particular side: as a citizen, I am engaged in a particular historical project aimed at realizing these principles. Canadians, Americans, French, Germans, we each believe in our national project which is meant to embody these values. This is what Habermas is referring to with the term “constitutional patriotism.” The question is, how do democratic republics maintain a real sense of unity around their political identity? It’s clear that this requires a kind of trust, as the reference above to independence movements was meant to show. Unless party or group A is confident

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about this in relation to B, the democratic polity is in danger. If A and B represent different regions, they may be on the verge of a break-up. But where they are not geographically distributed in this way, something worse can happen. They are liable to enter into a kind of undeclared civil war, in which each is willing to use any means short of violence (because then it would really be a civil war) to win their point. It is easy for deep differences of outlook between parties to end up producing this kind of split. When this comes about, then each party ceases to be for the other an interlocutor in a common debate to find together the best solution, but rather an enemy to be vanquished and sidelined. If a society is to avoid this, each side must have what Brandom calls the “spirit of trust.” Of course, parties (say, of Left and Right) will take a dim view of the motivations of their rivals. They will see all too clearly the self-interest involved in their programmes. But they can avoid the slide towards virtual civil war, as long as they can also read the opponents as animated by a desire to realize the common principles or uphold the common identity. But this is not just a question of dispassionate judgment. As Brandom argues, to sustain our democracies each side must exercise charity in interpreting the other’s positions as motivated by the common ends. This is analogous to Brandom’s cardinal example of judges interpreting over time a common body of law. They must make an effort to interpret the precedents set by previous judgments as (at least in part) good faith attempts to interpret and refine the common tradition. The same kind of effort is required to keep rival parties from losing all trust in each other. Of course, there are situations where the partisan thrust is so blatant that it cannot be so interpreted, and this is where breakdown becomes close to unavoidable. This is the current situation in the United States under Trump Republicans. Somehow US Republicans after Reagan engaged in a path of politics without compromise. They recognized no longer opponents but enemies. In the last decades, this has escalated. Unless something intervenes to stop this kind of hardball politics, the result will be that Democrats respond in kind, and the polity will be riven by division, and incapable of functioning normally. Whether this will happen or not is very hard to predict. But we can see from this example how much of what Brandom calls a “spirit of trust” is essential to the functioning of a modern democratic polity.

Notes 1 The same can be said of the more recent flurry of “postmodern” positions, such as Derrida’s. 2 I have argued this in Taylor 2004.

References Alexander, Jeffrey (2006) The Civil Sphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Aristotle (1926) Nicomachean Ethics, translated by H. Rackham (London: Loeb Classical Library). Beiser, Fred (2004) The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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Brandom, Robert (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Calhoun, Craig (2007) Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London: Routledge). Descartes, René (1991) “Letter to Gibieuf of 19 January 1642,” The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 3, translated by J. Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Honneth, Axel (1992) Kampf um Anerkennung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Mann, Michael (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Richards, Robert (2002) The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Taylor, Charles (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press). Taylor, Charles (1997) “Explanation and Practical Reason,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 34–60.

INDEX

Abelard, Peter 5 absolute knowledge 21, 41, 50, 85, 99, 100, 102, 124–126, 135, 136, 138, 146, 148, 149 absolute spirit 140, 150, 162 active reason 101, 128, 129 agency 14, 87–91, 93, 95, 97–103, 111, 114, 116–120, 132, 171, 172, 174–176, 181, 188, 189, 195, 196 alethic modalities 12, 13, 24, 29, 69, 70 Alexander, Jeffrey 205 alienation 4, 7, 83, 85, 110, 113, 118, 120, 123, 125–134, 136–138, 140, 141, 143–163, 170–172, 177, 181, 185, 203 allegory 7, 72, 109–111, 170 Allison, Henry 109, 118 ancient civilisations 108, 110, 111, 120, 141, 142, 145, 185, 202, 203; see also Greeks, Romans Anderssein 15, 17 Anerkennung 59 Antigone (play by Sophocles) 7, 78, 82, 83, 118, 130, 132 apperception 14, 22, 24, 26, 42–44 Aristotle 19, 20, 62–65, 73, 97, 186, 199, 201 aufgehoben 57, 60, 68, 71 Bayes, Thomas 191, 192 Begriff 29 Bernstein, J.M. 7, 123–138 Bertram, Georg 6, 75–86 Bolshevik revolution 203

Bowman, Brady 26 Burke, Edmund 204 categorical imperative (Kant) 128, 196 Chalybäus, Heinrich Moritz 107 charity 5, 206 Christianity 126, 131, 136, 170 common law 75, 76, 78, 97, 111–113, 119, 120, 126, 135, 173, 204 conceptual dynamism 31–33, 35 conceptual idealism 7, 14, 22, 24, 87–93, 95–103 conceptuality 133 conceptual realism 6, 7, 24, 29, 58, 69, 71, 87, 88, 91–93, 96, 155, 169 conceptual truth 31, 38, 133 confession 79–83, 85, 100, 107, 113–115, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 131–136, 138, 185 consciousness 4–7, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20–22, 24, 41, 42, 45, 47–65, 67, 68, 72, 78–80, 82, 83, 87, 88, 90, 93, 95, 99–102, 109, 113, 114, 118, 120, 121, 123–126, 128–133, 135–138, 141, 142, 146, 147, 154, 158, 161, 163, 169, 185, 191, 199, 200 cynicism 7, 172, 177, 179 Davidson, Donald 29, 89, 95, 116, 167 deontic modalities 69 deontic norms 13–15, 24, 29 Derrida, Jacques 107, 206 Descartes, René 59, 61, 115, 166, 168, 199, 201

Index 209

determinate negation 12, 15, 16, 19, 25, 48, 53, 62, 137, 142 Dewey, John 94, 96 dialectic 11, 24, 25, 30, 36–39, 49, 62, 113, 115, 117, 142, 143, 152, 157, 159, 160, 161, 185, 189, 202 dialetheism 6, 38, 39 Diderot, Denis 161, 164 Dove, Kenley 45, 54 Edelmütigkeit 79, 133, 135, 146, 185 edification 167, 176–180 Einleitung 141, 142, 146, 156, 163 empiricism 6, 12, 14–23, 32–34, 36, 41, 44, 66, 69, 117, 124, 138, 168, 180 Enlightenment 97, 100–103, 108, 127, 160, 198 Entäußerung 7, 117, 140, 141, 148–154, 156–158, 160, 162, 163 entfremden 148 Entfremdung 7, 140, 141, 143, 148–154, 156, 159–163 Erfahrung 6, 21, 49, 50, 57, 68 Erlebnis 6, 57, 58, 68, 72 essence 15, 16, 18, 25–27, 29, 64, 71, 100, 108, 129, 138, 153 evil 17, 113, 114, 120, 121, 126, 131–133, 194 Ficara, Elena 5, 6, 28–39 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 7, 23, 107, 117, 121, 127, 133, 169, 200 Foot, Philippa 112 forgiveness 4, 5, 8, 75, 76, 78–81, 85, 100, 108, 111, 113–116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 131, 133–138, 173–175, 184–187, 189, 190, 193, 194, 204 Franks, Paul 25 Frege, Gottlob 13, 16, 24, 67, 90, 91, 107 French Revolution 103, 127, 132, 137, 138, 203, 204 Geach, Peter 54 Gegensatz 17, 19, 121 Gegenstand 51, 149 Geist 58, 69, 95, 125–129, 131, 132, 135, 140, 143–146, 148–150, 153, 154, 158, 160 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 199 Greece (ancient) 85, 108–113, 117, 119, 120, 125, 130, 156, 203 Habermas, Jürgen 151, 157, 181, 205 Hamilton, Sir William 107 Hardimon, Michael 154, 162, 163 Harman, Gilbert 109, 118 Hastings, Battle of 111

Heidegger, Martin 78, 107, 108 Henrich, Dieter 26, 27 Hobbes, Thomas 136, 138 hyperobjectivity 7, 8, 108–112, 115, 118 hypersubjectivity 7, 8, 108–111, 115, 118, 147 idealism 3, 7, 13, 14, 22, 24, 42, 58, 69, 87–103, 155, 176 Iliad (poem by Homer) 112 incompatibility 28–39 individuality 79, 86, 89, 99, 119, 130–134, 136–138, 153, 161, 162, 170 intentional agency 14, 87–103 Inwood, Michael 148, 162 irony 135, 147, 148, 167, 168, 172, 177–180, 182, 200 Jaeggi, Rahel 162 Jena 11, 39, 151, 155–158 judgment 7, 12, 19, 23, 24, 26, 29–32, 34–36, 38, 42–44, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 62, 64–73, 76, 78–80, 90, 91, 97, 98, 101, 102, 119, 120, 123, 127, 131–135, 137, 145, 173–175, 186, 192, 201, 206 Kant, Immanuel 5, 6, 7, 13, 15, 19, 23–26, 29, 33, 42–47, 49, 50, 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 64, 67, 69, 72, 83, 85, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100, 107–110, 114, 115, 120, 121, 124, 127–129, 131–134, 136, 138, 154, 155, 166, 168, 188, 196, 199, 201 Knappik, Franz 4, 8, 184–197 Korsgaard, Christine 196 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 19, 64, 65, 73 liar paradox 38 Locke 166, 168 logic 5, 6, 11–27, 30, 31, 33, 37–39, 41, 42–44, 51, 56, 61, 63–70, 72, 73, 85, 107, 109, 115, 117, 123, 138, 141–143, 145, 164, 169, 170, 182 MacIntyre, Alasdair 97, 98, 103 magnanimity 4–6, 8, 79, 84, 120, 175, 185, 186, 188–196 Mandela, Nelson 204, 205 Mandeville, Bernard 110 Marx, Karl 150, 157, 203 master/slave dialectic 58, 59, 157, 159, 189, 202 McDowell, John 6, 41–55

210 Index

mediation 4, 12, 21, 39, 59, 60, 71, 87, 115, 125, 138, 162 meta-attitudes 140, 146–148, 153, 155, 156, 161, 185 metaconcepts 5, 15, 18, 21, 23, 33, 41, 42, 44, 45, 54 metaphysics of spirit 107, 157 Mill, John Stuart 109 Miller, A.V. 54, 85, 146, 148, 151 modal realism 12, 13, 16, 19, 155 Moore, A.W. 108 Moyar, Dean 7, 87–103, 138 Napoleon 203, 204 naturalism 7, 95–97, 109, 110, 118, 132, 146, 156, 169, 202 nature 2, 7, 59, 100, 141, 146, 147, 153, 157–163, 166, 199, 200, 203 negation 5, 6, 11–27, 37, 38, 48, 53, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 133, 137, 142, 143, 161 negative magnitude 17, 19, 24 negativity 11, 12, 17, 26, 27, 133 Neurath, Otto 3, 181 Newton, Isaac 19, 24, 114 Nietzsche 109 Non-Contradiction, Law of 30 normativity 12–15, 23, 24, 29, 38, 42, 54, 58, 70, 79, 81–83, 91, 93, 102, 109, 111, 113, 116, 118, 123–127, 130, 131, 132–138, 140–148, 150, 152–156, 159–161, 163, 172, 184, 185, 187–189, 191, 193, 194, 196, 202 norms 2, 7, 8, 19, 24, 42, 54, 69, 77–79, 81–83, 85, 90, 94, 108, 109, 111, 112, 118–120, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138, 141–147, 151–153, 155–157, 169, 171–177, 179, 181, 184, 185, 188, 189, 193 Nuzzo, Angelica 39 observing reason 18, 99–101, 128 Oedipus Rex (play by Sophocles) 112 Peirce, Charles Saunders 103 perception 6, 18, 51, 58, 62–64, 66–68, 72, 96, 99, 117, 201 phenomenology 1, 3–5, 11, 13–18, 20, 22–24, 34, 36–38, 41, 45–47, 51, 56–58, 60, 67–69, 72, 75, 87–90, 95, 96, 98–101, 107–112, 115, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 135–137, 138, 140–143, 149, 153, 157, 158, 170–172, 184, 198, 201–203 philosophy of language 2, 3, 151, 166–181

phrenology 100, 101 Pietism 114 Pinkard, Terry 7, 38, 72, 84, 85, 107–121, 161, 181 Pippin, Robert 5–7, 11–27, 84, 94, 103, 117, 123–125, 162 Plato 25, 72, 103, 199, 201 Ploucquet, Gottfried 64, 65, 72, 73 poiesis 7, 157, 158 positivism 7, 24, 94, 123–138 postmodern ethical life (PEL) 184–197 postmodernism 3, 4, 140, 147, 172, 174–176, 181, 184, 185, 187–189, 191, 193, 195, 206 pragmatism 2, 7, 12, 22, 57, 58, 72, 91, 94–96, 98, 102, 123–126, 138, 142, 143, 146–148, 174 praxis 7, 158 Prussia 204 Quine, Willard Van Orman 72, 107 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 145, 146, 154, 161, 162, 164 rationalism 2, 3, 5, 18, 22, 42, 44, 54, 55, 59, 85, 92, 98, 99, 102, 103, 111, 113, 116, 119, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127, 133, 134, 140, 146, 147, 150, 152, 154, 162, 167, 168, 169, 173–177, 184–190, 192–194, 200, 203 rationalization 173 reason 2–5, 7, 17, 18, 25, 29, 46, 47, 87, 89, 98–101, 103, 108, 110, 111, 114, 116, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 136, 137, 152, 162, 177, 203 reciprocal recognition 2, 3, 6, 8, 184, 185 recognition 2, 3, 6–8, 17, 58, 59, 75–85, 87, 92, 100, 103, 107, 117, 124–131, 133–138, 144, 147, 151, 153, 157, 158, 160, 184–186, 188–190, 202–204 Redding, Paul 6, 26, 56–73 Redner, Harry 182 Republican Party (USA) 206 Ritter, Joachim 150, 151 robust recognition 75–78, 84 Romans 61, 108, 109, 111, 153, 160, 203 Romanticism 8, 167, 177, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203 Rorty, Richard 7, 57, 59, 69, 72, 95–97, 107, 116, 147, 148, 166–168, 178–180, 182 Rose, Gillian 129 Russell, Bertrand 56, 61 Salvini, Matteo 196 Satz 65, 67, 72

Index 211

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 61, 107, 114, 169, 200 Schematism 44 Schlegel, Friedrich 202 self-consciousness 4–6, 17, 20, 21, 33, 51, 53, 57–59, 72, 75, 76, 84, 85, 87, 88, 99, 100, 107–110, 116–118, 120, 123, 125–130, 135–138, 140, 142, 143, 149, 151, 153, 158, 159, 161, 162, 169, 170, 177, 188, 203 Sellars, Wilfrid 12, 20, 23, 38, 57–60, 72, 107, 116 semantic descent 5, 6, 33, 41, 42 sense certainty 6, 51, 55, 57, 58, 60–64, 66–69, 72, 99 Sittlichkeit 77, 111–113, 118, 119, 127, 128, 130, 132, 140, 143, 144, 148, 152, 155–157, 160, 162, 163, 171, 172 skepticism 23, 45, 140–143, 145–148, 154, 155, 161, 170 Smith, Kemp 42, 43 sophistry 25 Spinoza, Baruch 31, 199, 200 Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin 38 Stern, Robert 85 subjective logic 64, 65, 68 Taylor, Charles 8, 181, 198–206 Testa, Italo 7, 140–164, 181

Tocqueville, Alexis de 204 tragedy 112, 113, 119 transcendental deduction 42, 44 transcendentalism 7, 25, 44, 72, 107–109, 117, 123–125, 148 Trump, Donald 206 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) 205 Tübingen 64, 65 Tübinger Stift 64 Tutu, Desmond 204–205 valet story 109, 110, 118, 131, 132, 146 Vernunft 23, 29, 54, 111, 116, 158 Verstand 14, 23, 25, 54, 111, 120, 150 virtue 15–17, 19, 24, 30, 33, 53, 59, 67, 97, 110, 112, 116, 119, 120, 130; virtue signalling 4 Wahrheit 38, 39 Wahrnehmung 62 Weber, Max 181 Wesenslogik 16, 18, 24 Whig history 92, 96, 113, 129 William the Conqueror 111 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 29, 57, 58, 59, 69, 93, 107, 193 Wolff, Michael 15, 17, 19, 24 Woodbridge Lectures 42