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Semantic Self-Consciousness: Brandom On Hegel(paper given at a conference: “Language and Modernity: Brandom’s Semantic

Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Freie Universität Berlin, 19-21 June

2014)

©Terry Pinkard 2014

Dra

Since the 1840’s, the dominant reading of Hegel’s philosophy has been more or less

Neo-Platonic. In short, it amounts to reading Hegel as a version of Schelling’s exuberant

metaphysics of spirit with some sort of logic attached to it. is was the version

propounded in H. M. Chalybäus’ influential book, Historische Entwicklung der

spekulativen Philosophie on Kant bis Hegel of 1839 – translated into English into 1853,

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 Anglo-American

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. In Tales of the Mighty

Dead, Brandom turned over the table 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 Fichte, with one line going from there all the way up to Derrida

and another to uine, the train now moved from Kant to Hegel to Frege to Heidegger

to Wittgenstein to Sellars and Rorty. (Current stop: Brandom’s own inferentialism.)

is was a much different Gestalt than had been the case. e 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.

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I myself am deeply sympathetic to Brandom’s approach. (My own book, Hegel’s

Phenomenology: e Sociality of Reason, belongs at least in the same family with

Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel.) He sheds light on many otherwise puzzling aspects

of the book and its structure, and many of his moves will almost certainly become staples

of the literature on Hegel.

His general summary of what Hegel is trying to achieve more particularly in the

Phenomenology is, I think, with one major hedge, correct. e “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 forgiveness.”1 at is, 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. (If I were to go into all the things

worthy of praise in Brandom’s manuscript – even just to list them and not explain them

– I would need more room than I can claim here.)

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’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: e 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 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,

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“transcendental conditions of the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes” at

all, there is going to be much of the book that is going to appear at least at first as

problematic. e entire chapter titled, “Spirit,” which seems to have some kind of

historical progression in it from Greece to Rome to modern Europe will seem odd. Is

Roman legality really a transcendental condition for “the intelligibility of determinately

contentful attitudes”? e Enlightenment’s struggle with religion and superstition? Even

chunks of the “Reason” chapter will seem strange. e “law of the heart” as a

transcendental condition for “the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes”?

And in “Religion”? e “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 one about the nature of

objectivity. It turns out that there 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 “hyper-objectivity”), or we can go to the opposite extreme and

take norms to be established by our attitudes (“hyper-subjectivity”).2 Very roughly, on

Brandom’s telling, hyper-objectivity characterizes the ancient world.3 All of the

Phenomenology is, in essence, an account of how we develop from hyper-objectivity to

hyper-subjectivity – 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-aer-the-modern). Now, on

the one hand, it would seem as if that were the case, then the history that the

Phenomenology traces out would be an odd one. It would be a history of engaging in

hyper-objectivity, failing over and over again to make it stick, then moving to hype-

subjectivity, failing over and over again to make it stick, and then finally getting it right.

is is reminiscent of the quote floating around on the (always reliable and veracious)

Internet to the effect that doing something over and over again and failing but expecting

nonetheless a different result, is the mark of insanity. (e quote is usually, erroneously,

attributed to Einstein.) If so, then the Phenomenology is really the history of, if not

insane, at least very thick-headed consciousness.

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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.”4 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 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.”5

In particular, we will comprehend why modern subjects have had such a hard time

making sense of themselves, which is that they took themselves wrongly: “e modern

self identifies immediately rather with its own subjective attitudes. is is alienation.”

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 hyper-objectivity and hyper-subjectivity

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 out

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. e valet takes all norms naturalistically (and therefore as not real, as merely the

shadows of normative attitudes). e valet is therefore is incapable of acknowledging any

true normativity on the part of the hero. Why? e valet is a philosophical naturalist.6

(Strangely, to my mind at least, Brandom attributes the lowly status of being a moral

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valet to Gilbert Harman, since they are both naturalists.7 One supposes that Nietzsche

and the utilitarians – even Mill? – also end up in the same boat.)

How far can we go with this? Brandom’s way of seeing the valet as endorsing a

“base” (niederträchtig) naturalism ignores a key element of Hegel takes over and

transforms Kant’s so-called “incorporation thesis” (as Henry Allison has famously

dubbed it.) Kant claimed that “an incentive can determine the will to an action only so

far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim.”8 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 self-conscious 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. ere 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. e knight of virtue

thinks he is struggling to realize “the good” as opposed to the agent who embodies the

wicked way of the world. e knight of virtue makes reason his motive, whereas the

agent of “the way of the world” is moved by only natural self-interested desire. However,

as Hegel puts it, this amounts only to shadowboxing (Spiegelfechterei) since what is at

stake is what counts as a good or overriding reason for each of them. e 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

antiquated conceptions of virtue. Aer 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.9

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e moral valet is therefore not a naturalist. e 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 high-

minded principle but only by narrow personal interest. e hero takes a personal interest

in high-minded action. e moral valet thinks that the only reasons that move him are

those calculated to enhance his self-interest.

Brandom generalizes the remark about the moral valet into a principle for interpreting

the entire Phenomenology. is leads him to interpret Hegel’s conception of alienation as

the view that we are to identify ourselves with our subjective attitudes (which, as

Brandom argues, is untenable).10 On this view, the structure of Hegel’s philosophical

interpretations becomes clear. Ancient life (Greece in particular) was not alienated.

Modern life is. What will come aer Hegel, if only we read him carefully, will be a non-

alienated life but in a different key than Greek life. is dovetails nicely with Brandom’s

historical claim that Greeks were hyper-objective, moderns are hyper-subjective, and

(with Hegel’s help) we whatever-comes-aer-the-moderns will be something like

subjective-objective (that is, there will be an explicit linkage between sense-dependence

and reference-dependence, in Brandom’s helpful terms).

Now, this seems dubious as an account of the distinction between the ancients and the

moderns, so even if it Hegel’s view, it is going to be difficult to make 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.”11 In other words,

Sittlichkeit is hyper-objectivity.

However, for Hegel, Sittlichkeit involves not merely the normative authority of social

norms but the way in which those norms are linked to a certain type of psychology – we

could call it a “political” or “social” psychology – that comes with such norms. Hegel is

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certainly not the first to realize that political and ethical principles come, as it were, in a

package with different constellations of political and ethical psychology, but in his rather

unique form of ethical internalism, Hegel holds that the grip that norms can have on us

can only be there if there is something in our psyches that links up with those principles

– they must link up with what Bernard Williams called one’s subjective motivational

set.12 Principle and passion come as a package. Without the passions, the principles

cannot function as principles. What gets Hegel out of the rather standard objections to

such an internalism is his historical account of how one such “shape of

mindedness” (that is, a “Gestalt des Geistes”) can be said to be the rational successor to

what came before it. How does that account go?

Brandom understands each section of the Phenomenology as an individual allegory, as

it were, a story illustrating all the ways in which hyper-objectivity and hyper-subjectivity

(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.13 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.14 For Brandom, this is the principle behind the

infinite process that constitutes Hegelian thought (construed as “reason,” Vernun and

not “the understanding,” Verstand).

As an account of historical change itself, the model of common law judges has little to

recommend it. When Rome assumed control of Greece, it did not do so in terms of

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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:

Aer violently subjecting the Anglo-Saxon king and his subjects at Hastings, William

sent out judges to various parts of his new domain to establish a “common law.” ere

the object was not to rationally extend some old rulings but to displace the old rulings

root and branch and replace them with a new authority, one backed up by more than

semantic sanctions. ere was little to no “forgiveness” practiced there.

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.

Hegel, however, is concerned with how things have happened and why they take the

shape they do. Here it is best to draw a contrast and then look for the deeper reasons for

the contrast taking the shape it does. Brandom’s view of Sittlichkeit is that it consists,

ultimately, of hyper-objectivity. Another view of it sees as the “immediate” unity of the

universal and the particular, or, more colloquially, of the various norms and principles in

a way of life and the psychologies of the agents who live in it. It is “immediate” in the

sense that the goods that supposedly motivate the members of that form of life have a

grip on the psychologies of those who live by it and that they function as first principles

of reason, beyond any real questioning. It is not that people do not deliberate on those

principles.15 It was that the goods possessed a kind of authority that meshed with a

certain type of character, and, crucially, the goods are taken to have a coherence with

each other such that those who lived by them could expect their lives as individuals and

the life of the community as a whole to make sense to them. e watchword, as it were,

of Sittlichkeit is not that of hyper-objectivity but of harmony: If each individual carries

out the absolute requirements of his or her social office, the result will be a

spontaneously harmonious and therefore beautiful whole. e motivational force

behind the requirements of such Sittlichkeit comes from that of beauty and the attractive

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force beauty has for the self-conscious primates we are. Sittlichkeit is linked to the

passions and desires in a direct way.

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.”16 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 hyper-objectivists overlooks 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.17 Greek tragedy, however, concerns itself not just with the failure of some

cognitive power or status but 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 reconciliatory for us – reconciliatory in the sense that we comprehend that this

makes sense, this is the way it had to be.

However, what tragedy as art actually introduced into Greek life was an emerging idea

that the whole did not really make sense at all. e clashes in human life are in many

ways mirrors of the clashes of the gods among themselves, and those clashes are

unintelligible. Indeed, it seems that the gods themselves are subject to a necessity that

even they find unintelligible, that of “fate.” If Sittlichkeit is based on a core faith 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 faith itself starts to dissolve, and with the

dissolution of that faith, so does the social whole. What each experiences is not the calm

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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 and passions that held it together. e 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. e German

term for that in Hegel’s thought is Auebung.

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.18 For Brandom,

heroes are thus a consequence of “immediate Sittlichkeit.”19 is 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.20 Hegel, on the other hand, describes heroes as

mythical or at least mythically colored figures. ey occur in the periods prior to the

formation of states. Indeed, one of the things they do is to found states.21 Hegel makes it

clear that for us, there can be no such heroes: “Within the state, heroes are no longer

possible: they occur only in the absence of civilization.”22 Heroes are aesthetic exemplars

of freedom, not guides for real life.23 In heroes, we have a sensuous picture, as it were, of

what it mean for an agent to act without regard for principle and for the action

necessarily to come out right.24 e hero exemplifies what a full “being-at-one-with-

oneself ” (Beisichsein) would look like, which is a status only attainable in an aesthetic

(that is, mythical) form. ere can be no such heroes in modernity. (is requires an

important caveat: Brandom seems to think that in what he describes as the condition

following “modernity” there can well be heroes.)

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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. e 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.25 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.26 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. e 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.”27 Moreover, this endless cycle, as Brandom describes

it, of confession and forgiveness has 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, Brandom thinks he nonetheless assumed. (Brandom

justifies this interpretation by what he takes to be the extreme concision of the chapter

itself.28)

is 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

least contentious as an interpretation of the 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). e 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

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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.”29 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.30 However, for Hegel, radical evil involves a struggle of reason with itself. (is is

something brought out by Kant’s own idea of its inscrutability.31) It is in particular the

unavoidable human tendency to see one’s own reasons as somehow pushing out other

considerations – whether these reasons being those of self-interest or the perceived

interest of one’s group.

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. e confessing agent

in Hegel’s language confesses, “Ich bin’s” (“I am he”) – perhaps 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!”32 e confessing agent admits to

having cleaved only to his own way of judging. e 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.33 e hard heart fights back, denying, as Hegel says,

its “continuity” with the other – that is, it denies its own sociality, fanatically clinging

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 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.)34 As Hegel tells the story,

the hard heart at first simply responds with silence, refusing even to enter into talk with

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the other, since any action would sully the purity of his beautiful soul.35 Ultimately, the

hard heart breaks in light of the same necessity that prompts the confession in the first

place: e idea of a singular individual – “Ich bin's, und sonst keine!” – whose own

subjective life is unconnected to the life of the community around him ultimately makes

no sense. It is unintelligible, even to himself, and he becomes unintelligible, even to

himself. Its confession is thus not merely to fallibilism. It confesses to making no sense at

all. As in all such breakdowns in the Hegelian system, the protagonist finds himself

trying to make sense but really merely babbling. In the aspect of mutual forgiveness, it is

not morality per se that breaks down but a moralistic way of life – that of overly

individualistic beautiful souls – that breaks down. In its wake, each performs an

Auebung of itself, picks up the pieces, and fashions a new shape for both.36

Nature and natural desires are not the enemy. It is a conflict of reason with itself. is

leads to a different overall reading of the book than Brandom’s, but 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. at overall picture –

which Rorty stitched together, as we might put it, out of 2 parts Sellars, one part

Davidson – sees three things all working together. ere are language-entrance rules,

which are the causal inputs from the world on our sensory apparatus. ere 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 network, and we learn to respond these episodes by doing

or saying certain things. Brandom summarizes this in his nice “reliable differential

responsive dispositions” formula. 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.

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However, this saddles him with a view of reasons that is only contentiously Hegelian

and contentiously an account of reasons at all. For Hegel, reasons are the significance

that things have for us, given the possibilities we have as the creatures we are.37 Reasons

thus have to do matters about which “success” and “failure” are appropriate assessments,

and reasons are thus part of life, not for 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. e 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 pictorial showing.

at is something that only self-conscious primates possess. Only self-conscious primates

can stich “Gründe” (reasons) into “Vernun” (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.

On this kind of view of Hegel, one also has to reject a widespread and common

conception of what it means to be in possession of concept. On the commonplace view

nowadays, possession of a concept means that one can use a word in the appropriate way

– that is, a concept is something like a rule, and if one has mastered the rule and its

application, then one is in full possession of the concept. us, if one can use the word,

“moral,” or “red,” or “action” in comprehensible English (or whatever other language) in a

publically approvable way, one possesses the concept. On that view, there can be, of

course, expert users of concepts – only the lawyer can tell if you’ve really signed

something called a contract – but even in those cases, if one knows how to apply a given

concept-rule in the appropriate speech situations, one possesses the concept fully.

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Hegel holds, on the other hand, that at least for some concepts – those involving what

he calls speculative thought, that is, the basic concepts that make up the shadowy world

of the “unconditioned” – there can be publically validated uses of the concept that are

incomplete or not yet fully developed uses. In those cases, one can use the word but not

in the full sense which only emerges at points in the future where it is more developed.

e concepts that fill out the speculative realm can be refined by being developed in ways

that bring out implications and features that are not present in the original use,

implications that only show up as the concepts are developed in practice. (Such

“speculative concepts” behave more like Kant’s conception of beauty in the Critique of

Judgment.)

Paradigmatic for this kind of development is the way in which the key concepts

relating to the essence of agency itself are developed in history. e original use of a

concept for something having to do with the “unconditioned” is our conception of the

object “in itself.” As this conception of the object “in itself ” develops in history, its

internal tensions – even its contradictions – become more evident as the pressures such

tensions put on self-conscious individuals and communities becomes less tolerable. As

that happens, the concept itself comes up for grabs, and as it comes up for more

contested use and development – as it becomes “posited” in Hegel’s language – it comes

to have features not originally there in its original usage but which build on and modify

that usage. Brandom of course admits conceptual change, but these are in response to

empirical difficulties, not the way in which use of concepts can be perfected.

e existent public criteria for possessing a concept and mastering it therefore do not

exhaust its meaning. (In this way, Hegel departs from our contemporary orthodoxy.) As

these concepts develop historically, we sharpen and distill our grasp on the world they

purport to disclose. e refinement of a concept “in itself ” shows up as a refinement of

our grasp of the authoritative nature of things, and, in Hegel’s terms, therefore as a

developmental grasp of the “absolute.”38 Changes in the “speculative” concepts do not

make explicit what was already there. is is where Hegel’s metaphors about the

“organic” partially pay off: Failure, for example, to act on a reason has to be explained

16

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 its form

of life, which in this case is that of rational agency. If so, then many of the problems

with agency is not that external factors (as in disease) can thwart the appropriate

functioning of our powers of knowledge and action. 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. is is where dialectic arises, not when we

simply find ourselves holding incompatible empirical commitments.

Perhaps this is not so very far off from the view that Brandom explicitly endorses of a

non-psychological conception of reasons (which he also attributes to Hegel). ings, 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. ose contents can appear in subjective or objective form.

Nonetheless, these contents only show up to creatures whose nature is such that these

and not 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 self-

conscious creatures until they have extended thought all the way to science.

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, not, as Hegel did, 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.39 For Hegel, not

acknowledging it is the first step in a dialectic that leads to a different historical complex

17

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 search for the conditions of possibility of “determinately

contentful attitudes, of thinking, believing, meaning, or intending,” but there is no

dialectic. In Hegel, there is little to no transcendental search, but there is dialectic.

e 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. It is a thinning out that, so Hegel thought, promises to be refilled

in modern Sittlichkeit. e 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 situation 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.

1 All references are to the online version of Brandom’s manuscript. Since that can be

printed out in various ways, I have given no page number. ose who wish to find the

citations can just search for the text in Brandom’s online version (which is constantly

being updated). e version to which I am referring is that active on 19-21 June 2014.2 “So the claim is first that when the hyper-objectivity about norms characteristic of

immediate Sittlichkeit is shattered by a practical realization of the essential role played

by the normative attitudes of individual subjects in instituting norms, the result is a

complementary hyper-subjectivity: alienation.” 3 Brandom on the dispute between Antigone and Creon: “e other’s attitude shows up

rather as the expression of merely subjective, contingent particularity. e 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.”

4 Brandom, mss.5 Brandom, mss.6 Brandom, mss. “So the most general issue Hegel is addressing in his discussion of the

Kammerdiener is that of reductive naturalism about normativity. ” Also: “e

Kammerdiener stands for a niederträchtig, relentlessly naturalistic alternative to this

edelmütig, normative description of concept use… Reasons are traded for causes.”7 Brandom, mss. “ought 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.”

8 Kant, I. (1960). Religion within the limits of reason alone. New York,, Harper., “… 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, H. E. (1990). Kant's theory of freedom. Cambridge England ;

New York, Cambridge University Press.9 From Phil 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. 70 (82)10 Brandom, mss: “e modern self identifies immediately rather with its own subjective

attitudes. is is alienation.”; “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.”; “So the claim is first that when the hyper-

objectivity about norms characteristic of immediate Sittlichkeit is shattered by a practical

realization of the essential role played by the normative attitudes of individual subjects in

instituting norms, the result is a complementary hyper-subjectivity: alienation.”;

“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.”11 Brandom, mss.

12 Hegel: “Laws and principles have no immediate life or validity” – no Geltung, no

binding force – “in themselves. e activity which puts them to work and endows them

with real existence has its source in the needs, impulses, inclinations, and passions of

man. If I put something into practice and give it a real existence, it must be right for me,

I have to be “in” the act and hope to obtain satisfaction through its accomplishment.”

is alters H. B. Nisbet’s excellent translation very slightly. He renders Hegel’s “dazu

muß mir daran gelegen sein; ich muß dabei sein“ as “I must have an interest in doing so. I

must be personally involved in it.” Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Lectures on the philosophy of

world history : introduction, reason in history. Cambridge Eng. ; New York, Cambridge

University Press., p. 70; Hegel, G. W. F., J. Hoffmeister, et al. (1968). Vorlesungen über

die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Hamburg, F. Meiner. P. 82. [“Die Gesetze,

Prinzipien leben, gelten nicht unmittelbar durch sich selbst. Die Tätigkeit, welche sie ins

Werk und Dasein setzt, ist des Menschen Bedürfnis, Trieb, und weiter seine Neigung

und Leidenscha. Daß ich etwas zur Tat und zum Dasein bringe, dazu muß mir daran

gelegen sein; ich muß dabei sein, ich will durch die Vollführung befriedigt werden, – es

muß mein Interesse sein.]13 Brandom, mss. “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.”

14 Brandom, mss. “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… 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”; and “is 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.”15 Aristotle thought deliberation played a key role, although his exact views on that

matter are a matter of dispute.16 Or consider this passage from the Aesthetics: “Diese Kra der Individualität, dieser

Triumph der in sich konzentrierten konkreten Freiheit ist es, den wir besonders in

antiken Kunstwerken in der heiteren Ruhe ihrer Gestalten erkennen. Und dies ist nicht

etwa bei kampfloser Befriedigung allein der Fall, sondern dann selbst, wenn ein tiefer

Bruch das Subjekt in sich selbst wie dessen ganze Existenz zerrissen hat. Denn wenn die

tragischen Heroen z. B. auch so dargestellt sind, daß sie dem Schicksale unterliegen, so

zieht sich dennoch das Gemüt, indem es sagt: Es ist so!, in das einfache Beisichsein

zurück. Das Subjekt bleibt dann noch immer sich selber getreu; es gibt das auf, was ihm

geraubt wird, doch die Zwecke, welche es verfolgte, werden ihm nicht nur genommen,

sondern es läßt sie fallen und verliert damit sich selber nicht.” Hegel, G. W. F. (1969).

Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp., pp. 208-20917 Brandom, mss.: “e 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 aer the fact.”18 Brandom, mss: “e pre-modern 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.”

19 Brandom, mss: “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.”20 Brandom, mss: “e heroic aspect is that one takes responsibility for the whole deed,

the Tat. e tragic side is that one actually has authority only over what one intends and

can foresee, the Handlung.”21 Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right. Cambridge [England] ;

New York, Cambridge University Press. §93 addition: “Within the state, heroes are no

longer possible: they occur only in the absence of civilization. e end they pursue is

rightful, necessary, and political, and they put it into effect as a cause of their own. e

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.” (Knox translation) 22 Ibid. §93 addition.

23 Hegel, Hegel, G. W. F. (1988). Aesthetics : lectures on fine art. Oxford, Clarendon

Press. p. 185: “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./ (αa) is occurs in the so-

called 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, judgement, and

tribunal. us, 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

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.”24 Brandom runs together heroic self-consciousness with Oedipus’s specific heroic self-

consciousness. He twice cites a passage from Hegel: “e heroic self-consciousness (as in

ancient tragedies like that of Oedipus) has not yet progressed from its unalloyed

simplicity to reflect on the distinction between deed and action, between the external

event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances, or to analyze the

consequences minutely, but accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety.” Hegel, G.

W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right. Cambridge [England] ; New York,

Cambridge University Press., §118 Addition.

25 Brandom, mss: “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. e reductive stance acknowledges only attitudes.”26 Brandom, mss: “… 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 was suggested in

Chapter Two as helpful for understanding Hegel’s way of thinking about the

development of concepts, and has been appealed to at various points since.”

27 “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.” 28 Brandom, mss: “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.” “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.”

29 “Hence we can call this a natural propensity to evil, and as we must, aer 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).” Religion within the limits of Reason

alone.” 30 “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.” Religion within the limits of

Reason alone.” 31 “… 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).” Religion within

the limits of Reason alone.” 32Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). Phenomenology of Spirit translated by Terry Pinkard.: ¶667;

Isaiah 47:10 21st Century King James Version (KJ21): For thou hast trusted in thy

wickedness; thou hast said, ‘None seeth me.’ y wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath

perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, ‘I am, and none else besides me.’33 Martin Luther King Jr.: Pharaoh’s hard heart “tells us … that evil is recalcitrant and

determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of a persistent, almost

fanatical resistance.”

34Hegel, G. W. F. (2010). Phenomenology of Spirit translated by Terry Pinkard., ¶667.

“e judging consciousness repels this community from itself; it is the hard heart which

exists for itself and which rejects any continuity with the other… e one who confessed

sees himself repulsed and sees the other as in the wrong, that is, he sees the other as

somebody who refuses to let his own inwardness step forth 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 Gemeinscha von sich und ist das harte Herz, das für sich ist und

die Kontinuität mit dem Anderen verwir… 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.]35 For whatever it is worth, this interpretation of the hard heart diverges in some key

ways from that given by me in Hegel’s Phenomenology: e Sociality of Reason. 36 PhG, ¶671: “Each of the “I’s” for itself sublates itself in itself precisely by way of the

contradiction in its pure universality, a universality which at the same time strives against

its selfsameness with the other and separates itself from it.” [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.]37 is is a riff on an idea introduced by Charles Larmore in Larmore, C. E. (2012).

Vernun und Subjektivität : Frankfurter Vorlesungen. Berlin, Suhrkamp., although he

should not be charged with the use I make of it.38 is Hegelian point is also not the same thing as the contemporary discussions of

rule-skepticism in light of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following. It is not about the

way in which a finite set of behaviors cannot disclose an absolute understanding of what

the rule requires.

39 “e relation between free beings to each other is consequently the relation of a

reciprocal causation through intelligence and freedom. Neither can recognize the

other if both do not reciprocally recognize each other… I can ask of a determinate

rational creature that he recognize me as a free agent only to the extent that I treat

him as such a free agent.” J. G. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der

Wissenschaftslehre (1796), p. 44 (SW III)