hegel seminar notes for week 1 10-9-7 b

8/12/2019 Hegel Seminar Notes for Week 1 10-9-7 b

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6/10/2014

Hegel SeminarWeek 1 Notes

1.

Q: Why care about Hegel? A: Contemporary Anglophone situation.Sellars: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase.

Rorty on me: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its incipient Kantian to its eventual

Hegelian phase.

What would it mean to do this?

2. I say that I am offering asemanticreading of HegelsPhenomenology. Why? A: Because Isee thinking about concept useand conceptual contentas the center of his philosophical

interests. Further, I think he has a verysophisticated account of these central phenomena

one that we can learn a lot from today. Im going to motivate it two ways: from Kant, and

from Wittgenstein.

One of the reasons my reading makes so little contact with the huge secondary literature on

Hegel [Stekeler-WeithofersHegels Analytische Philosophieis an exception.] is that his

readersparticularly in Germanyby and large missed this central, axial concern. I think

there are causes for this, rather than reasons: he left no philosophically able students whose

principal concern was his logic and metaphysics. For understandable reasons, they all cared

about social, political, and broadly cultural parts of the system. It is fascinating to speculate

about how differently the history of philosophy would have developed if these motivating

problemswhich we only recovered via Wittgensteins lessonshad been appreciated by

philosophers after Hegels death in 1831.

3. Kants normative pragmatism:a) Kant on the framework: Kant discovered that the expressive role characteristic ofsome

concepts (alethic modal ones being the paradigm) is not to describe how things

empirically are, but to make explicit features of the framework of practices that makes

empirical description possible.

b) Kants normative turn. Judgment as minimal unit of responsibility. Subjective andobjective forms of judgment. Task responsibility is integrating into an SUA.

c) That view about pragmatics has consequences for conception of the contentofjudgments: they must stand in relations of material (concept-specific) incompatibility and

consequence. This is apragmatistorder of explanationexplanatory primacy not of the

practical over the theoretical (Fichte?) but offorce over content.

4. Three big questions are left over:a) Content 1: Two dimensions of intentionality. Need to synthesize OSUA gives that-

intentionality, what about of-intentionality? Kant has two ideas: i) inferential


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triangulation (as in Woodbridge Lecture I) ii) invocation of immediacyof representation,

in the form of intuitions.

b) Content 2: Determinateness. i) In what sense do conceptual contents need to bedeterminate? Kant has an answer to this: Kant-Frege determinateness. In this case, it

must be settled for every rule and every manifold of representations, whether that

manifold can be successfully synthesized by that rulei.e. integrated into the SUAor

whether another rule is needed, or some of the manifold must be rejected as spurious.

ii) Where do the determinate conceptual contents come from? Here Kant has only

some weak things to say: once things are off the ground, reflective judgments (3rd

Critique) can make new concepts from old ones. But where do anyempirical concepts

come from?

c) Normativity: What is the origin and nature of discursive normativity (Gltigkeit,Verbindlichkeit)? Here Kant does nothave a good answer. Transcendental activity

(instituting the discursive norms) must precede empirical activity (applying the discursive

norms in endorsing judgments and practical maxims).

5. Hegel will take over Kants normative pragmatism, but offer new answers to all thesequestions. Further his answers to the three questions will be integrated into one story. (I tell

part of this story in the Woodbridge lectures.)

6. Let me motivate two of these questions (the second and third) another way. For I think theseare two of the big questions that Wittgenstein asks. Further, I think thegeneralform of the

answers Hegel gives is the same as LWs. But there is a lotmore structure to Hs account

than to LWs. One of the big issues (partly a reflection of metaphilosophical and

methodological differences) between McDowell and me concerns whether this additionallevel of fine-structure is a good or a bad thing.

7. A threat to the intelligibility of the determinateness (of discursive norms): This is essentiallyKripkes Wittgensteins problemthough it need not be set up as SK does. The issue is how

to understand the nature and origin of determinateconceptual norms against the background

of apragmatistorder of semantic explanation.

a) We can start with Quines version of pragmatism (even though he is blind to thenormative dimension of concept-use). The slogan for my claim here is Hegel:Kant ::

Quine:Carnap. Kant and Carnap have two-phase theories: First, concepts, meanings, or

languages are instituted. Then, subsequently, judgments are made, beliefs formulated,

theories endorsed. Quine argues that while this is fine for artificial,formallanguages, it

is not and cannot be how things work for naturallanguages. In the former case, the

meanings arestipulatedin some expressively powerful metalanguage. But in the case

of natural languages, languages in use, it is onlythe useof the language that can confer

meanings on the expressions used. And the useconsists in making judgments, applying


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concepts, formulating and endorsing theories. So the challenge is to understand how the

one thing we do, use the language to make judgments, can count at onceas both

instituting the discursive norms andapplying them.

b) Kripkes Wittgensteins version of this issue. How can what we actually do, namelyapply concepts in actual circumstances, and exhibit dispositions to do so in others,

determine (make determinate) what we oughtto do in allfuture cases? A: If by

determinate one means Kant-Frege determinateness, rails laid out to infinity, one

cannot. So: what to do? Quine gives up on the idea of meaningand in a certain sense,

so does LW (as semantic nihilist). But in another sense, LWs response is to talk us out

of the feeling the need for determinateness in that (Kant-Frege)sense. What Hegel does

that LW does not do is give us a new modelof determinateness, according to the

metaconceptual structure of Vernunftrather than the Kantian Verstand.

8. The threat of genealogy: How to understand the rationalbindingness of conceptualnorms,once their radical contingency(on details of our embodiment, training, and historybothcommunal-traditional and individual-pedagogic) is appreciated.

Hegel: From rational derivabilitytogenealogy(historical: at once rational and causal). The issue here is

that the great discovery of modernity is the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. But what attitudes

individuals actually adopt is contingent on many things. How, then, can we see the norms that are

instituted thereby as rationallybinding on us? Those norms make us who we are (we are our

commitments and responsibilities). If those norms are not rational, how are we to identify with them?

This is alienation.

9.a) A genealogy offers an explanation of why(cf. Sellarss becausation) discursive norms

are as they are, or why applications of them are as they are, that does notappeal to

reasonswhy the norms are as they are, or the applications are as they are. It appeals to

causes instead: contingent features of embodiment, provenance, situation, history,

tradition, interests, and so on. LW often offers genealogies of our discursive practices, or

describes practices for which genealogical explanations are made available.

b) But for the great unmaskers (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud in the 19thcentury, Foucault andDerrida closer to our time), genealogy undercuts rationality, and undercuts even the idea

that it is becausethe norms are as they are that we do what we do. The most radical form

undercuts the very idea that the existence of a norm that can be explained (or details of

whose content can be explained) genealogically can provide a reasonfor applying a termone way rather than another.

c) Genealogies are in the first instance about the institutionof discursive norms. Theyinteract with the applicationof norms in two ways. First, one can explain why the

applications are as they are by appealing to a norm governing them, and then offer a

genealogy of the institution of the norm. Second, one can offer genealogical explanations


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of the application of a discursive norm, and then appeal to the Quine-LW claim that

applying the norm must also institute it.

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

discursive norms.

i. The first questions how applying those norms can institute them, candetermine a genuine norm. How can actual applications settle what

oughtto be done in an indefinite number of novel future cases (i.e.

institute a KF-determinate norm)?

ii. The second questions how norms can rationalize or otherwise justifyone application rather than another, given the possibility of

genealogical explanations of the institution of the norm. How can the

norm explain, justify, or rationalize the applications, if it itself is

explicable genealogically?b) Hegels response (and I think it is in the samegeneraldirection as LWs) is i) to

acknowledge the facts on which the two threats are predicated, and ii) to claim that the

idea that they are threatsto the intelligibility of the norm-governed character of

discursive practice is based on a mistaken view of what that norm-governed character is;

and iii) to claim that bothare based on thesamemistaken presuppositions: a structure he

calls Verstand, iv) to offer a worked-out alternative structure: Vernunft.

c) The key to his response is that in some sense, by thinking about boththreats together,we see how they can neutralize each other. Each provides the key to responding to

the other. They are two sides of one coin.

d) Roughly, the response to the threat to the intelligibility of applications institutingdeterminate norms is to deny that the fact that more than one norm is compatible with

prior applications means that any norm instituted is completely indeterminate. Applying

the norm is determiningthe norm, making it moredeterminate, without making it wholly

determinate (in the K-F sense). [Note: later on, well see that this is theprospective

perspective on norm institution and application.] A new notion of determinateness is

required.

e) Roughly, the response to the threat of genealogy is that once we see that it is precisely thegenealogically explicable contingencies in the institution-by-application of the norm that

are the determining of it, the rendering of it more determinately contentful, and that that

is the only possiblesource of determinateness, we see that the idea that genealogy

undercuts the normative bindingness of what it explains is based on a fantasy about

norms and determinateness: the Kant-Frege-Carnap Verstand fantasy about KF-

determinate normsfirstinstituted (laying out rails to infinity) and thenapplied.

11. Story of Sketch of a Programfor a Critical Reading of Hegel


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Part I:

a) Distinction betweeni. Ordinary, ground-level, determinate empirical, practical, and theoretical concepts, andii. logical, philosophical, or speculative meta-concepts, whose distinctive expressive job it

is, on my reading, to let us make explicit the use, contents, and development of ordinary

determinate concepts. In both Kant and Hegel, I think the measure of our understanding of them is the

story we can tell about their views on (i), and secondarily, how their versions of

(ii) helps them do it. But the measure of their differences in (ii) is the very

different stories they tell about (i). Pursuing their work from this direction is

difficult, however, since both of themsaya lotmore about (ii), which they thinkof as the core of their philosophical contributions, than they do about (i).

b) H thinks that determinate and logical concepts ((i) and (ii) above) are differentwithrespect to their potential completenessandfinality:

i. logicalconcepts can be (and at least arguably are[though videthe incompleteness of Hsmagisterial tour de forcediscussion of the forms of inference in WL: inferences involving

iterated quantification are notable by their absence] and can be knownto be complete,correct, adequate, and final. Their metaconceptual role (as metavocabulary) can be fullyand finally carried out. [This interpretive claim about Hegel is notcontroversial.]

ii. determinateconcepts cannotbe (and hence, a fortiori,cannot be known to be) complete,

correct, adequate, and final. The march of empirical science has no end in principle. Herein

lies a very interesting story: Hegels version of Kants (and bothpre-Kantian empiricists and

rationalists agree) version of the conceptual inexhaustibility of the sensuouslies not(just) in

its always outrunning any finite set ofjudgments, but also in the (holistic) instabilityof the

concepts. [see SPCRH]

c) H thinks determinate and logical concepts are alikein that their contentcan in principlebespecifiedor conveyed onlygenealogically: by a rational reconstruction of a possiblehistory of their development. He does this for some general and abstract determinateconcepts in hisRealphilosophie. And both thePhdGand the WLdo iteach in its own

wayfor the logical, speculative metaconcepts.

d) My overall criticalphilosophicalclaim in the vicinity ((a), (b), and (c) are interpretiveclaims) is that Hegel is wrongabout both(b) and (c): bothin his claim about howdeterminate and logical concepts are different, andin his claim about how they are alike.

e) He is wrong about (b), because any set or system of logical concepts, too, must alwaysfail to make explicit everythingabout the use and content of ordinary determinateconcepts. The conceptual, no less than the sensuous, is (meta)conceptually inexhaustible.

Here I invoke the expressivism about logic(itself a Kantian-Hegelian, as well as Fregean,

claim) that is built on my inferentialismaboutsemantic content(an Hegelian theme).[Tell my story about a] distinguishing various sorts of oughts on the normative-pragmatic side: prudential, legal, moral; and b] the expressive roles of various

conditionals: classical, intuitionistic, modally strict, relevant.]

f) And H is wrong about I because although he is right about the necessity of genealogicalspecification of the contents of determinate concepts, the distinctive metaconceptual roleof logical, philosophical concepts makes another route available to convey them. We can

say directly, in other terms, what they help us say about the use and content of


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determinate concepts. That is what I aim to do for thePhdGand the WL: say what they

end up teaching us about determinate concepts, and how their vocabulary helps us do

that, but doing that in otherterms.

12. On the issue ofsystematicity

, and the potential viability of cafeteria Hegelianism

,

contra Rolf-Peter Horstmann. He claims that Hegels commitment tophilosophical

systematicitya kind of holism at the level of metasemanticsspecifically, explicitly, and

unavoidably forbids picking outsomeof his philosophical claims (a proper subset) for

endorsement, while rejecting others. My response is that the holism that mattersis for

ground-levelsemantics: the semantics of non-philosophical, non-speculative, non-logical

concepts. He is just wrongto think that it holds also of his metaconcepts. Various features

that he lumps together under the heading of Vernunft are actually separable, and separately

intelligible claims, which oughtto be assessed for their viability and plausibility individually

(retail, not wholesale assessment). That is, thefirstof Hegels claims that I deny is the

systematicity claim on which Horstmann relies.

Part II:

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

Outline of Hegels Big Ideas:

1) HBI #1: Thesocialnature of the normative2) HBI #2: Reciprocal recognitionas the structure of thesocial3) HBI #3: A conception of the conceptual4) HBI # 4: Semantic/Conceptual Holism5) HBI # 5: Idealism: objective, conceptual, absolute6) HBI #6: Intentionality: expressive and representational, and the relations between them.What follows is some discussion of each of these points:

HBI #1) The socialnature of the normative:a) Kants master idea, I claimed, is his normative turn: his identification of us as creatures who live

and move and have our being in a normative space of acknowledging, attributing, and assessing

commitments, obligations, responsibilities, authorities. He reconstrues concepts as rules that

determine what we have committed ourselves to, and what would entitle us to those

commitments, by applying those concepts in judging and acting.

b) In taking this line, he sides with his rationalist predecessors, against the empiricists, with respectto their claim that in order to be awareof anything in a cognitiviely significant sense, in order to


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have any potentially cognitively significant experience, one must already have concepts. For

that awareness and experience consists in making judgments (the minimal unit of cognitive

responsibility or authority), which is applying concepts. If that is right, then one cannot

intelligibly envisage a situation in which one already has experiential awareness, but not yet

conceptswhich are to be understood as arising subsequently, by processes such as association

and abstraction.

c) The problem the rationalists notoriously faced is then to say where the concepts come from.How is it that a potential knower has access to concepts in advance of the experiential

awareness that, it is claimed, presupposes them?

d) This problem is no less pressing for Kant than for Leibniz. What is his response? Thepureconcepts, the categories, are a priorieffectively, innate. But what about ordinary empirical

and practical concepts? In the third Critiquewe hear a bit about judgments of reflection, by

which such concepts are said to be formed. Although we are not given much in the way of

details, such judgments arejudgments, and seem to presuppose that one can at least already

use concepts, if not, perhaps, the very ones being formed. So a question would seem to remain

about how the whole thing gets going. The general picture seems to be that empirical activity

(both theoretical and practical) consists in the application of norms (concepts) that are made

intelligible by some underlying noumenal activity, which does notconsist in endorsing empiricalclaims and practical maxims. From this point of view, Kant appears as having gotten a good grip

on the essentially normative character of cognition and action, but as having no very definite

story to tell about the nature and origins of normativity as such. Those questions can be seen as

having been punted into a noumenal realm beyond and behind our mundane empirical concept-

mongering activity. What, in the end, is Kants theory of normativity?

e) One of Hegels big ideas is that normativity is an essentially social phenomenon. Normativestatuses such as obligation, commitment, responsibility, and authority are socialstatuses. To be

able to undertake commitments and responsibilities, to acknowledge obligations and

authorities, is a social achievement. In particular, the notion of beingresponsible is

unintelligible apart from its connection to the possibility of being heldresponsible. Having

authority is unintelligible apart from its connection to the possibility of someonesacknowledgingthat authority. In general, normative statuses such as commitment and

obligation make sense only in the context of practices of taking or treating people ascommitted

and obliged.

f) A terminological point: Hegel seldom uses explicitly normative terms such as (the Germananalogues of) authority,responsibility, commitment and so on. (Though the Kantian Pflicht

does play a prominent role.) But I think his invocation of these concepts is ubiquitous. For as I

read him, Hegels way of talking about authority and responsibility is to use the terms

independence and dependence. I think these elastic termsalwaysappeal to this underlying

normative sense in his writings, and that looking for how this core sense is appealed to is an

important step in understanding the more general point of many of his allegories.

g) In taking this social line about the normative, Hegel brings Kant back down to earth. The originsof normativity in noumenal activity presupposed by empirical activity are now found in our

social surround. In a slogan coined (for another purpose) by John Haugeland, on this view all

transcendental constitution is social institution. Kants normative insight is in an important

sense naturalized(not a term often associated with Hegels project) by being socialized.

h) In this regard, Hegel belongs in a box with the later Wittgenstein. For the Wittgenstein of theInvestigationsis driven by the Kantian insight that intentionality is an essentially normative

phenomenonthat agency, for instance, is a matter of our authority over what happens and

our making ourselves responsible to what happens (for the success of our doing). And he fully


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appreciates and brilliantly presents the perspectives from which such distinctively normative

significances of our performances can come to seem mysterious and magical. His recipe for de-

mystification is always to exhibit them in the context of the social practices (customs, uses,

institutions) within which they acquire and display those significances.

HBI #2) Reciprocal recognitionas the structure of the social:

i) Hegels term for the normative realmfor the dimension of our activities that is articulated bynorms in the sense of being open to normative assessment, our commitments and entitlements,

responsibilities and authorities, everything that can be correct or incorrect, appropriate or

inappropriateis Geist, spirit. Hegel sees Geist as an essentially social phenomenon. For

someone to be a selfin the Kantian sense is to be a subject of normative statuses: commitment,

responsibility, authority, and so on. To say that Geist is an essentially social phenomenon is to

say that talk of selvesand talk of communitiesare two sides of one coin. [Not just in the sense

that the concepts self and community are reciprocally sense-dependent, but in the stronger

sense that they are reciprocally reference-dependent.] Talk of someone as having authority or

responsibility, as committed or entitled is always implicitly talk of that individual asa member of

a community. Normatively characterized individuals and their communities are brought into

being and sustained as aspects of oneprocess: the process Hegel calls recognition(Anerkennung). Geist is synthesized by reciprocal (gegenseitig) recognition. The structure of

that recognitive process is for Hegel the structure of the social as such.

j) Recognizing someone is taking that individual to be a selfin the Kantian sense: a subject ofnormative statuses. Recognizing someone is adopting a practical stance or attitude. It is taking

or treating someone in practice asa subject of normative statuses: as someone who can

undertake commitments and responsibilities and exercise authority. Holding someone

responsible and acknowledging them as authoritative in some regard are specific forms of

recognition. The basic idea develops a theme familiar from earlier Enlightenment approaches to

specifically political norms. It is that normative statuses such as responsibility and authority are

creatures of our practical attitudes towards each other. There were no statuses such as

commitment, responsibility, and authority before we started takingor treatingeach other ascommitted, responsible, and authoritative. Normative statusesare to be understood as

instituted by socially articulated normative attitudes.

k) The claim that the normative attitudes in question are sociallyarticulated expresses therequirement that in order to institute normative statuses, recognitive attitudes must be

reciprocal. To bea self is to be takento be (recognized as) a self by those one takes to be

(recognizes as) selves. Here are some representative passages:

Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another;

that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.The detailed exposition of the Notion of this

spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition. *PG 178].

But according to the Notion of recognition this *that a self-consciousness certainty of itself

have truth] is possible only when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in

its own self through its own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure

abstraction of being-for-self. *PG 186].

l) Here is an example that may help in getting a sense of the idea. (Im not here talking at allabout the arguments thatjustify this way of thinking.)

i) Hegel introduces the idea of reciprocal recognition in connection with the normative meta-status of being a self, in the sense of being the subject of anynormative statuses. But I will


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argue (in discussion the Reasonsection of the Phenomenology) that he extends the notion

from this sort of generalrecognition to specificrecognitionwhich is attributing

determinate normative statuses such as being a good chess player or being committed to

achieve some goal.

ii) Consider the normative status of being a good chess player. I can recognize or acknowledgeothers as having that status (attribute it to them), and that is a practical attitude others can

adopt as well. I might desire to recognize myself as having that status. But what is it for me

not just to attributethat status to myself (adopt an attitude), but in fact to havethat status,

to bea good chess player? The thought is that it is for me to be recognizedasa good chess

player by those Irecognize as good chess players. For my self-recognition to betrue, it must

be seconded by the recognition of others. Which others? Not just anyone counts. The ones

who matter are the ones I recognize. (Compare: being a good philosopher.) In effect, I

constitute a community by recognizing some and not others in the respect in question. And

that community can then make me a member by takingme asa member: by recognizing me

in turn.

iii) A nice feature of this example of a particular normative status is that the standards for beinga good chess player are elastic. One might set the standards so low that any woodpusher

who can play a legal game counts. Or one might count only certified Masters as good chessplayers. I may aspire to be a good chess player in any sense along that long sliding scale.

But however high or low my ambition reaches, it is made concrete, definite, given a

determinate sense, by the others whom I recognize as having the status I aspire to. And by

exactly the same token, the standards I must meet to achievethat goal, to satisfythat

ambition, to deservethe self-recognition to which I aspire, are set by what it takes to earn

the recognition in that same sense by those I recognize in that sense. If I set my sights low,

then that reciprocal recognition will be easy to achieve, and with it the status in question. If

I set my sights higher, then the recognition of those I recognize in that demanding sense will

be much harder to earn, and the status of being a good chess player in that sense harder to

achieve. But if it isachieved, one then issomething more than one would be had one set

ones sights lower.m) I attributed to Kant the paradoxical-sounding conception of freedom as consisting in the

capacity to bind oneself by normsto undertake commitments and responsibilities, and so to

open oneself up to normative assessment as having fulfilled or failed to fulfill those

commitments and responsibilities. On this conception, selfhoodandfreedomare two

inseparable aspects of one normative phenomenon. On Hegels social, recognitive conception

of the normative, freedom as constraint by norms is not something one can achieve all on ones

own. It takes a villagein the sense of a community. (In fact, it takes a lot more institutional

structure than that. As we learn in the Philosophy of Right,it requires a state.) Being free, in

the sense of being the subject of normative statuses instituted by reciprocal recognition,

requires the recognition of the others one recognizes. Where recognition does not achieve full

reciprocity, where it remains asymmetric, only defective, not fully free selves are instituted. The

Phenomenologyis, inter alia, the story of the different forms of unfree selves we have instituted

throughout history, culminating cumulatively in the Absolute Knowing that is the realization that

all along we were always-already implicitlycommitted to reciprocal recognition and so to

constituting ourselves and others as fully free selves. It is, as Hegel says elsewhere, a history of

the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

n) I also attributed to Kant a criterion of demarcation distinguishing normative constraint frommerely naturalconstraint. What I called the Kant-Rousseau autonomy thesis is the claim that

genuinely normative constraint is always self-binding. One is normatively bound only by those


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authorities and responsibilities that one acknowledges asbinding. Ones status as bound

depends upon ones attitude of taking or treating something asbinding. (Only one aspect of this

thesis is expressed by saying that selves as such are bound not by rulesas in laws of nature

but by conceptionsof rules.) As I told the story, it is because his conception of the normative

includes this criterion of autonomythat normative self-hood can be equated withfreedom.

(Notice that in this sketch, no work needs to be done by the further claimcommon to Kant and

Hegel, but not, for instance to Dewey or the early Heidegger, or the later Wittgensteinthat all

norms are conceptualnorms, that is, norms articulating what is a reasonfor what.) In adding

the doctrine of the socialinstitution of normativity by reciprocal recognition, we have seen,

Hegel makes freedom and self-hood in the normative sense something one cannot achieve all

on ones own. One is dependenton the recognition of others. In giving up individual

independence, is Hegel also giving up the insights of the Kant-Rousseau autonomy thesis? I

think it is important to see that he is not. It is true that there is an apparent tension between

demarcating the normative by autonomy, on the one hand, and understanding it as having the

essentially social structure of recognition, on the other. And it is true that one of the

overarching lessons that Hegel seeks to teach us is to conceive ourselves (our selves, hence

normativity generally) under the category offreedomrather than of independence. (So, for

instance, Judith Sklars book on Hegels political thought is called From Independence toFreedom.) But in fact his understanding of freedom in terms of reciprocal recognition is a

sophisticated way of working out the Kant-Rousseau autonomy criterion of demarcation of the

normative. For it is true according to Hegel, too, that we are only bound by what we bind

ourselves by. (As for Kant, it will turn out that by explicitlybinding ourselves by conceptual

norms, we are implicitlyacknowledging various commitments that come with being in the space

of reasons. But that part of the story should come in at the end, not at the beginning.) But

Hegel wants to look more closely at what is required in practice in order for something we do to

be properly understood as having the significance of binding ourselves by a determinately

contentful norm, of undertaking a definite responsibility. And what is required, he thinks, is a

practice exhibiting the structure of authority and responsibility distinctive of reciprocal

recognition.o) Consider once again the toy example of the would-be good chess player. We may notice to

begin with that, at least in this case, the original commitment is up to the individual involved.

He commits himself to that goal. We saw that the goal becomes definite insofar as the player

recognizes some, and not others, as having the status he is committed to achieving. He

exercises his authority over the commitment he is undertaking by adopting those practical

recognitive attitudesthereby setting the standards for goodness of chess playing higher or

lower, accordingly as his practical recognitions are more or less restrictive. (In this example,

there is a pretty strict hierarchy of inclusiveness. Not every specific sort of commitment would

have this feature.) But in exercising that recognitive authority, the individual also thereby binds

himself, in the sense of making himself responsible tothose he recognizes. Forfulfillinghis

commitment, achieving his goal, now requires eliciting corresponding recognitive attitudes from

those he recognizes. And that lies beyond his authority. He is normatively independent

(authoritative) as regards his own recognitive attitudes towards others, but then is reciprocally

dependent (responsible) as regards their recognitive attitudes towards him. Beingresponsible

(having normatively bound oneselfa normative status) is intelligible only in a context in which

one can be heldresponsible (a normative attitude). That social context is what connects taking

oneself to be responsible (adopting an attitude) to makingoneself responsible (exhibiting a

status). It is making oneself responsible toothers (in that sense, recognizing them) that makes it

possible for one to bindoneself. (This is the same thought Wittgenstein expresses when he says


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If whatever seemsright to me isright, then there can be no question of right and wrong.)

[This point is expounded in greater detail in Chapter Two ofA Spirit of Trust: Some Pragmatist

Themes in Hegels Idealism.+

p) Conceiving norms under the category of independence is seeking to have authority withoutcorrelative responsibility. Conceiving norms under the categoryof freedom is seeing that

authority without responsibility cannot be determinately contentful. The reciprocal recognition

model of necessarily correlative authority and responsibility is not incompatible with Kant-

Rousseau autonomy insight, but is an attempt to work it out. Auto-nomy has two parts: the

nomos or law, and the fact that one subjects oneself to it, that becoming subject to it is ones

own doing. The model of independence focuses on the second, at the cost of making the first

unintelligible. The model of reciprocal recognition is invoked to make sense of both halves: that

one binds ones selfin the sense that it is ones self that is doing the bindingand that one is

bound. The first is the dimension of authority, and the second of responsibility. Hegel thinks

that only a social (recognitive) division of labor can both keep these from collapsing into each

other (If what seems right to me is right) or being driven too far apart (if what Im bound by

swings free of my attitudes).

q) Hegel saw that the best way to exploit Kants transformation of the concept concept fromsomething thought of as grasped by us to something thought of as gripping (binding,constraining, obliging) us is to stop thinking of concepts as in any sense in our heads. I said

above that a fundamental question Kant, like any rationalist who rejects the empiricist order of

explanation, must answer is: how do concepts become available to us to apply (use to commit

ourselves) in judgment and action? Hegels answer issocial: they are there in the language:

Language is the Dasein (existence) of Spirit *PG 652+. Spirit is the totality of norm-governed

(that is, since for Hegel all norms are concepts, conceptually articulated) activity. Each of us

comes into language as an always-already up-and-running enterprise. It makes concepts

available to us, and we avail ourselves of them. (Compare Sellarsunkantianly phrased

remark: Grasp of a concept is mastery of the use of a word.) The words that are available to

us to use already express concepts. Their normative significancewhat one would be

committing oneself to by applying them, and what would count as entitling one to thosecommitmentsis already settled by the practices (Sitte: customs, uses, institutions) in which

they play a role. That is why we can use them to make moves in the antecedent, on-going game

in which they have that significance. Normative significances are socially instituted. Hegels

ferocious language is devised so as to express the metaphysics of such normatively articulated

concepts.

r) One last remark about this structure of reciprocal recognition (at this point, necessarily at mostsuggestive): The expressive task distinctive of logicalorphilosophicalvocabulary for Hegel is, I

think, making explicitwhat is otherwise implicitin the use of ordinary empirical and practical

concepts. Hegel takes over from traditional logic the terms particular, universal, and

individual. But, of course, he uses them in his own distinctive, idiosyncratic way. I think that

the master idea that structures that use is the model of the synthesis of selves and communities

by reciprocal recognition. Individuals are particulars ascharacterized by universals. The model

is individual selves, which are particular natural organisms asmembers of recognitive

communitieswhich are a kind of universal they fall under. If we ask Where do the norms

come from? or How does Geist arise out of nature? Hegels answer is that the normative

realm of Geist comes into being when natural creatures start adopting recognitive attitudes

towards each other. [This story is told in more detail in Chapter Six ofA Spirit of Trust: The

Structure of Desire and Recognition.+


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s) Have we yet worried enough about the Hegelian claim that the modal logic of recognition is S5?That is, that recognition must be (on pain of the causality of fate, the metaphysical irony of

mastery) an equivalence relation: reflexive (self-consciousness) only if transitive and reflexive?

The alternative is to allow much more complex algebras, with respects of recognition, and

different algebraic features of them. (Cf. recognizing someone as an ambassador iff and only if

he/she is appropriately recognized as such by ones we recognize as heads of state, whose

recognitive status is quite differently constituted.) The worry is that good, liberal political

consequences come too quickly and easily if we accept this metaphysical-constitutive claim

about selves. (Cf. Habermas). Things may not be so easy.

HBI #3) A conception of the conceptual:

a) For Kant, all norms are conceptualnorms, which is to say that they articulatewhat is a reasonfor what. In that sense, all norms are rationalnormsnot in the sense that they can

be derived from the requirements of Reason, but in the sense that they are normsforreasoning.

Since being free is being able to bind oneself by norms and norms are conceptsnorms for

reasoningthe Kantian normative realm of freedom is also the realm of reason. Hegel takes all this

Kantian structure on board. But he combines it with a distinctive notion of the conceptual.

b) Conceptual norms concern what is a reason for what, which is to say that theyare inferentialnorms, norms of inference. Following up on Kants insight concerning the centrality,

ubiquity, and ineliminability of modality, Hegel identifies rationalrelations with necessaryrelations.

That is to say that concepts underwrite counterfactually robust inferencesthe ones that are

expressed explicitly in the form of laws. Recall Sellarss title Concepts as Involving Laws, and

Inconceivable without them. Sellarss own response to Quines challenge in Two Dogmas of

Empiricism to say whatpracticallydistinguishes concept-(content-, meaning-)constitutive inferential

relations from inferences underwritten by matters of fact is that it is all and only the counterfactual-

supporting inferences that are underwritten by the contents of concepts. (He was comfortable

accepting the non-traditional consequence of this view that because they depend on what the laws

really are, one cannot know the contents of ones conceptswhat one meansjust by introspecting,

but may need to go into the laboratory to determine them, because he held a kantian, rather than a12istincti concept of concepts.) This, I think, is (one important component of) the Hegelian position.

c) As we will see, Hegel is also a holistabout concepts. Individual concepts are tobe understood in terms of their function within an extended but unified process of conceptual

activity (experience) that includes applying whole batteries of concepts in disparate, concretely

situated judgings and actings. To be entitled to talk about adeterminate concept, rather than the

Concept (indeed, the Idea), one must be able to analyze the whole, breaking it down into co-

operating elements, so as to distinguish that determinate concept from others by its relations to

other concepts. The core of Hegels concept of the conceptual consists in his view of how we should

understand the relations that articulate the contents of determinate empirical and practical

concepts. I said above that those relations must at least include inferentialrelationsindeed,

modally robust, counterfactual-supporting ones. But Hegel sees something deeper. Behind

inference (and therefore, reason), as essential structure, he seesnegation.

d) The point is essentially logical, in his sense of logical: a matter of themetaconceptual apparatus we use to make explicit the implicit articulation of determinate

conceptual contents. When, in following out our holistic methodology, be carve up some

experiential process analytically, the results we achieve count as determinateconcepts only insofar

as they are distinguishablefrom one another. One of the paradoxical-sounding consequences of

Hegels holist-functionalist philosophical methodology is that the identityof functionally individuated

components of a larger whole consists in part in their differencesfrom one another. (That is one of


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the lessons of the comparative method of analysis establishing a 13istinction rationismentioned

above.) But, though this way of putting the point does loom large in Hegels writings, mere

difference is not enough for determinateness. Hegel takes as his guiding thread the Spinozist

principle omnis 13istinction13n est 13istinct. For an essential, defining property of negation is the

exclusiveness codified in the principle of noncontradiction:prules out not-p, they are incompatible.

For Hegel, it is this exclusiveness that is the essence of negation. He abstracts this feature from the

case of formal negation, and generalizes it to include the sort of material incompatibility that obtains

between the properties squareand triangular. (Formal negation can then reappear as the shadow of

material incompatibility: not-pis the minimalincompatible ofp. It is what is entailed by everything

materially incompatible withp.) That is, in thinking about the sort of difference implicit in the notion

of determinateness, it is important to distinguish between two different kinds of difference.

Properties (for instance) can be different, but compatible, as squareand redare. We might call this

mere difference. But properties can also be different in the stronger sense of material

incompatibilityof the impossibility of one and the same thing simultaneously exhibiting bothas

squareand triangular are. We might call this exclusive difference. In Sense CertaintyHegel argues

that the idea of a world exhibiting definiteness or determinateness asmere[gleichgltige, translated

by Miller as indifferent+ difference, without exclusive[auschlieende] difference, is incoherent.

This is why compatibly different properties always come as members of families of exclusivelydifferent ones. When Hegel talks about negation, it is exclusivedifference that he is invoking.

e) One of the more notorious theses attributed to Hegel is the denial of the law ofnoncontradiction. A meredenial would, of course be sillyin the sense that there could not in

principle be a reason for it. As Kripke says Why give up the principle of noncontradiction? Why not

just keep it too? But a reconstrualis something else. As I read him, Hegel takes noncontradiction, in

the sense of exclusion, to be the essence of negation. And thatprinciple is at the very center of his

logic, semantics, and metaphysics. Far from rejecting noncontradiction, he radicalizes and extends it.

f) Hegels term for exclusive difference is determinate negation *bestimmteNegation]. I take it to mean material incompatibility. The material incompatibility of red and green

is related to the formal incompatibility of redand not-redas Sellarss material inference from scarlet

to redis related to the formal inference from not-not-redto red. Determinate negation, materialincompatibility, is the basic structure of distinctively conceptualarticulation.

g) It is a modalrelation. Redis a (not the) determinate negation of green(ismaterially incompatible with it) insofar as it is not just not true that some monochromatic patch is

simultaneously both red and green, but insofar as it is impossiblethat it be both red and green.

h) The contentof a concept or property can be thought of as articulated by theconcepts or properties it modally excludes. One could represent the content by the set of contents

materially incompatible with it.

i) Contents so identified and individuated meet the conditions both of holism,since they are identified and individuated only by their relations of exclusive difference from other

elements of the Concept comprising them, and of determinateness, since they areso identified and

individuated. But why should content so articulated this be thought of as specifically conceptual?

The conceptual we said, for Hegel as for Kant, is what determines what is a reasonfor what, in the

sense of underwriting counterfactually robust modal inferences. One of the key observations on

which my reading of Hegel restsan observation that Hegel himself nowhere makesis that

relations of material incompatibility underwrite modally robust relations of material inference. To

say that the property being a dogentails the property being a mammal, in the modal sense that it is

impossiblefor something to be a dog and notbe a mammal, is just to say that everything materially

incompatible with being a mammal is materially incompatible with being a dog. Hegels term for

inferentialarticulation is mediation. The term derives from the role of the middle term in a


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specifically syllogistic inferencethe role of man in the syllogism in Barbara: All men are mortal,

Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. (The German word Schlu, inferenceformed from

schlieen, to conclude, the root of ausschlieen, to rule outis also the standard translation of

the Greek word syllogism.) Mediation is the structure of reason-giving, hence of the conceptual.

For Hegel, the conceptual is articulated by relations of mediation (modally robust material inference)

and determinate negation (modally robust material incompatibility), and, I claim, it is articulated by

relations of mediation becauseit is articulated by relations of determinate negation. Thus for Hegel,

negationis the essence of the conceptual.

j) According to this conception of the conceptual, the objective world isconceptually structured, quite independent of any activity by rational knowers or agents. For even if

there had never been thinkers, thefactthat A is wholly copper would rule out(be incompatible with)

its being wholly silver, and would entailthat it is less dense than a wholly silver object. To say that

there is some way the world is, that the objective world is determinate, is to say that some states of

affairs (ways the world could be) rule others out, and (so) entail still others. The laws of the objective

natural world make explicit its conceptual structure, in Hegels sense.

k) And thought, too, is conceptually structured. The claim,judgment, or thoughtthat A is wholly copper is incompatiblewith the claim, judgment, or thought that it is wholly silver. A

cognitive commitment to one of those contents rules outa commitment to the other, in the sensethat a reasonforone is a reason againstthe other.

l) Here, then, is a notion of conceptual contentthat can structure bothobjectivefacts and subjective thoughts or commitments. (Subjective not in the Cartesian sense, but in the

sense of being the thoughts ofa subjectthoughts a subject is responsiblefor, commitments ofand

bya subject.) In the favored case of genuine knowledge, it is thevery sameconceptual contentthat

shows up on the subjective side of certaintyin the form of a commitmentand on the objective side

of truth as afact.

m) Nonetheless, the two realms are not identical. For the sense of incompatible isdifferent in the two. One and the same object can not simultaneously exhibit incompatible

propertiesit is impossible. By contrast, one and the same subject merely oughtnot to undertake

incompatible commitmentsit is forbidden or inappropriate, but not impossible.n) It is possible to move from talk of the subjective perspective of certainty and theobjective perspective of truth (which are perspectives onconceptual contents) to talk of subjects and

objects. For they are each units of accountwith respect to their respective sorts of incompatibility

relation. An object is just what cannot simultaneously exhibit incompatible properties, and a subject

is just what is obliged not simultaneously to be responsible for incompatible commitments. In the

Perceptionchapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel says that objects repel incompatible properties.

That repulsion is natural. The sense in which subjects repel incompatible commitments is

normative. If and when one finds oneself with incompatible commitments, one is obliged, rationally,

to dosomething: to give up one or both, to amend ones collateral commitments, or the conceptions

that articulate them. That process of revision is experience. It is the determiningof the content of

our subjective conceptions, to try to bring them better in line with the relations of objective

incompatibility and consequence that conceptually articulate the objective world.

HBI #4: Holism:

a) Hegel is the first philosopher to whose thought is thoroughly holistic.(Holism is not his term. It was not introduced until the late nineteenth century.) Hegel explicitly

and systematically pursues holism both generally in his methodology and more specifically in his

semantics. One of the principal reasons he finds it necessary so radically to recast the philosophical

terminology he inherited is because of his holist convictions. He sees previous philosophers as


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crippled by their semantic atomism: the view that one can make sense of the contents of concepts

(whether ordinary, determinate, empirical and practical concepts, or the metaconcepts in terms of

which one understands their functioning) one by one, each independently of the others. One of

Hegels master ideas is that to see things aright we must shift from atomistic to holistic conceptions

of concepts. His way of talking about this is to say that what he has to teach us is how to move

beyond the standpoint of Verstandto the standpoint of Vernunft. (His appropriation and

transformation of the use of these Kantian terms is a paradigm of the sort of thing Hegel does with

the conceptual raw materials he inherits from his predecessors.)

b) In Hegels story, Kant is the avatar of Verstand: its final, most sophisticatedexponent. But Hegels holism is the result of generalizing and radicalizing what he properly sees as

one of Kants fundamental philosophical moves. Kant criticized the empiricists and rationalists alike

for postulating a single continuous dimension that had sensations at the bottom and concepts at the

top. One of his insights is that sensations and concepts are substantially and essentially different

kindsof things. One must distinguish more sharply between sensibility and understanding. On the

other hand, one thing he agreed with these traditions about is that one cannot understand empirical

knowledge by construing sensibility and understanding as wholly independent faculties, and then

somehow bolting them together to get judgments. His solution is a (locally) holistone. Startwith a

conception of judgment (the unit of cognitive responsibility), and understand sensibility andunderstanding solely in terms of the contributions they make, the roles they play, in judgment.

Neither of the two faculties can be understood independently: in isolation, or antecedently to

considering their role in judgment. We come to the conception of the two faculties only byanalyzing

an antecedent unity. (And that unity, too, is ultimately to be understood in terms of the role of

judgments in a higher unity: the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.) Here one thinks of the

medieval distinction between two kinds of distinction. Two items exhibit a15istinction realis(a real

distinction) if they can actually be separatedas, say, dogs and cats can be put in different rooms.

Two items exhibit a 15istinction rationis(a distinction of reason) if they can be separated only by

comparison. Thus the shapeand the substanceof a wooden sphere cannot actually be separated.

But they can be distinguished if we lay the wooden sphere alongside a wooden cube and a stone

sphere. Just so, we can grasp the distinctively different contributions made to judgment bysensibility and understanding if we consider differentconceptualizations of the samesensory

situation (say, construing what we see now as a dog, now as a fox, or a statue), and applying the

sameconcepts to differentsensory situations (say, calling both thisand thatfoxes).

c) This move is indeed one of the most important and distinctive of Kantsphilosophical contributions. But Hegel thinks it epitomizes a methodology that should be applied

muchmore widely than Kant did.

d) For instance, Hegel thinks that Kant should have seen that this holisticapproach to the relations of what Kant understands as conceptualformand sensible contentin

cognition requires a corresponding holism about the relation of form to content and particular to

universal in logic. Yet Kant takes over the traditional logic in most respects, making only the very

smallest conceptual adjustments to it in the light of his insight about the primacy of the

propositional. Hegel will insist that we start with the notion of an individualintuitively or

presystematically, a particular ascharacterized by a universaland work our way to notions of

particular and universal by analyzingindividuals. In fact his model of the relations between these

logical categories is of an individual selfas constituted by reciprocal recognition. The recognitive

community in which there are such selves is the paradigm of a universal, and the creatures whose

recognitive relations constitute both selves and communities are the paradigm of mere particulars.

e) Even in thinking about the relations between sensibility and understanding,Hegel takes it that Kant was insufficiently radical in following through on his holist insight. Hegels


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account of the relation between immediacyand mediationwill be thoroughly holistic. The lesson of

the opening Sense Certaintysection of the Phenomenologyis the Sellarsian one that the immediacy

of the deliverances of non-inferentially arrived at sensory impressions is unintelligible apart from

consideration of its mediation, in the sense of its inferential articulation and relation to other

possible judgments.

f) One of the clearest applications of Hegels holist methodology concerns hisnew understanding of the relations betweenjudgmentsand concepts. Kant, like all his predecessors,

had thought of concepts as having their contents independently of and indifferently to what

judgments articulated by those concepts subjects actually endorse. Hegel is a holist on this point in

the same sense that Quine is. Altering the judgments one makes alters the contents of the concepts

involved. (Because making judgments using determinate concepts willalwayslead one to

commitments that are mutually incompatible by ones own lightseven if one applies the

conceptual norms correctly. And that experience of error is what obliges one to change, not just

ones judgments, but eventually also ones concepts. See below.) From Hegels point of view, Kant

should have seen that his insight about the primacy of judgment over intuition and concept requires

giving up the semantic atomism about the relations between concepts and judgments that had been

a hallmark of Enlightenment epistemology.

g) Along another dimension, Hegel thinks that Kant should have adopted thesame holistic strategy toward the distinction between theoreticalandpracticalactivity that he did

toward the distinction between sensibilityand understanding. Accordingly, in the Reasonsection of

the Phenomenology, which discusses practical agency (we are told that reason is purposive activity

at PG 22), the topic is addressed first in terms of the cycle of actionthe unity of the world as given

and the world it has made (PG 308). This is a cycle of perception (of what is in that sense

immediately given), thought, action, and perception of the result of that action (a new given that is

also what was made). Empirical cognition and intentional action are to be understood only as

aspectsof this developingprocess. The official name for this process is experience(Erfahrung), and

the point of Hegels philosophical enterprise is an expressive one: to give us (meta-)conceptual tools

to understand that process. (That is why the original title of the Phenomenology of Spiritwas The

Science of the Experience of Consciousness.) It is to take the form of afunctional decompositionofthat process, analyzingit into components distinguishable by the different roles they play in that

process.

h) The resulting account is a conceptual holismbecause it is the result of amethodologicalfunctionalism. But the functional system in question is to be as large as possible: all

of it, everythinghumans, their activities, and their environment.

i) The later figure who most closely follows Hegel in this holistic thought is JohnDewey. His most important theoretical work is Experience and Nature, whose relentless pursuit of

Hegels holist, anti-reductionist, methodology led Rorty to characterize it as using the term

experience as an incantatory device to blur every conceivable distinction. In this regard, at least,

Deweythough vastly less powerful and systematic a thinkeris true to the thought of his first

master, Hegel, whom he saw himself as naturalizing and de-intellectualizing. (His other important

theoretical work is his Logic, which again in good Hegelian fashion, aims to be an organon developing

conceptual tools to express the interaction of various aspects of experiential processes.)

j) Perhaps most centrally and importantly (this is the thought with which heopens the Introduction to the Phenomenology), Hegel thinks that one will never get an intelligible

account of the relations between conceptual activity and the world that is known about and acted in

if one attempts to start with independently intelligible accounts of subjectand object, and then

attempts to bolt them together afterwards. Thus, rather than talk about subjects and objects, Hegel

wants us to start with a notion of content, as something that can be commonto its subjective form in


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thought and its objective form in fact. (Compare one of McDowells favorite quotes from

Wittgenstein (PI 95: When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, weand our

meaningdo not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this-is-so.) When all goes well, the

content of my thoughtthat I have two hands isthefactthat I have two hands. Hegelian contents are

Fregean thoughts. (Frege: A fact is a thought that is true.) Hegels terms for a content in its

objective manifestation is truth, and in its subjective manifestation, certainty. The insoluble problem

of understanding how two kinds of things, subject and object, characterized independently of one

another (perhaps as Cartesian mind and Newtonian world) can be related in knowledge is replaced

by the problem of understanding the possible relations between the truth-aspect and the certainty-

aspect of oneunified kind of conceptual content. Of course, actually entitling oneself to talk this way

requires a lot of work. Hegels distinctive philosophical vocabulary is crafted with an eye to doing

that.

k) Hegels term for holism about the relation of subjective and objective (whichhe develops in the context of his holism about the theoretical and the practical, the immediate and

the mediated, recognizing and being recognized) is idealism. (The Idea in the Science of Logicis

the unity of Thought and Being, as well as of the theoretical and the practical.)

HBI #5: Idealism:a) I said above that Hegels idealism is a kind of holism about the subjective andthe objective. The whole that must be analyzed is the whole constellation of objectiverelationsof

material incompatibility, on the side of truth, and subjectiveprocessesof experience driven by

subjective incompatibilities, on the side of certainty.

b) The basic claim of Hegels idealism is that the objective relations ofincompatibility that articulate the conceptual structure in virtue of which the world is determinate

and law-governed are unintelligible apart from their relation to the subjective processes of

acknowledging and repairing incompatible commitments. It is not that there could not bea

determinate objective world without such processes. It is just that we cannot explain what we mean

by saying that there is one without invoking also the experiential processes that are our

acknowledgment of constraintby objective incompatibilities and entailments. In the jargon Iintroduce in Chapter Five ofA Spirit of Trust (and in Chapter Six of Tales of the Mighty Dead), the

objective and subjective notions of incompatibility are reciprocally sense dependent, but not

reference dependent.

c) Here are three more specific idealist theses that Hegel argues for (though notquite in these modernized terms) that I think one can respectably and responsibly maintain today.

Each involves the reciprocal sense dependence of a fundamental category we use to express our

understanding of the objective articulation of the world and a corresponding feature of our use of

language:

The concepts object and singular term are reciprocally sense dependent. Onecould not count as grasping the concept object unless one could use singular terms.

The concepts fact and declarative sentence are reciprocally sense dependent.Nothing could count as mastery of the concept fact except what is implicit in the use of declarative

sentences to make assertions.

The concepts law and necessity, on the one hand, and counterfactualinference on the other, are reciprocally sense dependent.

HBI #6: Intentionality:


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a) The fine structure of Hegels idealism is worked out in his account ofintentionalityand representation. For it is here that we see how the process of resolving

incompatible commitments in experience, on the side of subjects, is to be understood as normatively

governed by the over-arching goal of correctly representing how things objectively are. I have

already indicated that the direction of explanation of his account of intentionality, like Kants, will be

from conceptual contentsomething that can be grasped in the sense that it articulates

commitments subjects can undertaketo aboutnessor semantic directedness on objects. Ive said

something about how he thinks about conceptual content in terms of (subjective and objective)

incompatibility. One of Hegels key moves is the route he lays out to explain what it is to make

ourselves responsible toobjectsforthe correctness of conceptually contentful commitmentsthat

is, the way he explicates a normative sense of aboutness, and so the representational dimension of

thoughtin terms of what it is to be responsibleforcommitments whose conceptual content is

(holistically) articulated by relations of incompatibility.

b) Conceptual contents articulate both ways things could be (objective states ofaffairs, among which are facts) and ways things could be takento be (states of subjects, normative

statuses, the contents of commitments). They are the contents both of how things are inthemselves

(objectively) and how they areforconsciousness (subjectively). Another way of talking about how

things areforsome consciousness is asphenomena: appearances. Another way of talking about howthings are inthemselves is as noumena: realities. As appearances, the phenomena present

purportedrealities. They are representings, and the noumena are representeds.

c) What is it about conceptual contents, articulated by relations of modallyrobust material incompatibility (determinate negation) and (so) modally robust material inference

(mediation), in virtue of which they so much aspurportto represent (foror toconsciousness) how

things are in themselves, i.e. to be(for consciousness) representingsof representeds? This is a kind of

question Descartes, for instance, never asked. (And the point goes through as well for successors

such as Locke and Hume. The rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz, I claim, didhave this as an explicit

question, and offered worked-out theoretical answers. See Chapters 4 and 5 ofTales of the Mighty

Dead.) That is, Descartes never asked what it was in virtue of which my rabbit-idea was arabbit

ideaas opposed to one representing lemurs, or robots, or nothing. He took the representationalpurportof ideas, their semanticcontent, for granted (dividing the world metaphysically into those

things that are by nature representings, and those things that by nature can only be represented),

and asked only an epistemologicalquestion arising downstream from that one: what is it for that

representational purport to be successful, for things in fact to be as my idea represents them as

being. We owe the deeper, antecedent, semantic question to Kant. That is Hegels question, too.

He saw in Kant this advance from epistemological to semantic questions, as perhaps no-one did again

until Wittgenstein. Hegel offers a much more systematic, explicit, and worked-out answer to that

question than Kant does. (Which is not to say that it is all that easy to recover from his texts. But

then, where in the first Critique would one say that Kant is clearest and most explicit about his

answer?)

d) The book we are reading is aphenomenologyin no small part because Hegel iscommitted to explaining the conceptof noumena solely in terms of phenomena. (Well see below

why it is a phenomenology of Spirit. But I claim that thepoint of this large-scale metanarrative is to

make explicit how ordinary conceptual contents develop, and in what their semantic properties

consist. Thatstory, too, I claim, deserves to be called a phenomenology.) He wantsto say what it is

about how things appearto us, the conceptual contents that articulate our commitments, in virtue of

which it is correct to understand them, and they can appear to us as, subjective commitments

regarding how things objectively are, how theypurport to representthings as they are inthemselves,

and so are intelligible as being how those things (the ones represented or thought about) arefora


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consciousness. This is to say what it is about them in virtue of which they are correctly understood

as representingsof some representeds, appearancesof some realities,phenomenacorresponding to

some noumena.

e) In discussing Hegels account of the conceptual Ive already pointed out, ineffect, that phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality, are the samekindof thing for Hegel.

As Frege said: A fact is a thought that is true. If that is right, facts are kindsof thoughts. Not, of

course, kinds of thinkings, but kinds of thinkables. Facts, ways the world really, objectively, is, initself

are conceptually structured by their relations of incompatibility (and so inference) to other possible

states of affairs. Their contents can be the contents of commitments, which are conceptually

structured by their relations of incompatibility (and so inference) to other possible commitments.

The way things are inthemselves canbe a way they areforconsciousness. Noumena are a kind of

phenomena. The challenge of a semantic phenomenology is then to say whatdistinguishesthe

phenomena that are noumena (the ways things can beforconsciousness that arethe way they are in

themselves) and what it is for all phenomena as such topurportor aspire to have that distinction,

and to do that while appealing to nothing outside the realm of phenomena.

f) Hegels strategy is to explain the representational purport of phenomena as afeature of the experientialprocessby which they develop: by which they arise, mature, decay, and

are replaced. The basic idea has already been introduced. It is in practically acknowledging anobligation to do something, to changesomething to alterones commitments when they turn out to

be incompatible that subjects in practice take or treat their commitments as answerablefortheir

correctness and acceptability toa structure of objective incompatibilities, and so as being about,

beingfor consciousness presentations or appearances ofsome way things are inthemselves.

Experience isthe experience of errorandfailure. For that manifestation of negativityfinding

oneself with commitments that are by ones own lights incompatibleis the motor of the process of

selecting, revising, and grooming ones commitments that is Erfahrung. Acknowledging error (on the

theoretical side, and failure, on the practical side) is taking the erroneous commitment to be about

something, which it gets wrong. It is to take that commitment to be a way things werefor

consciousness that was subject to assessment accordingly as it did oras it turned outdid not

present how things actually are inthemselves.g) This representational aspect that turns out to be implicit in judgment (a kindof commitment) can be made explicit by offering a certain kind of rational reconstructionof a

previous stretch of experience. Hegel calls this an Erinnerung: a recollection. It is what turns apast

into a history. As I understand it, an Erinnerung traces out a trajectory through past experience,

selecting index episodes where finding ones current commitments to be incompatible has led to

changing them, so as to yield a monotonic, cumulative series of expressively progressivediscoveries,

culminating in ones current view. Ones current view, how things areforone, is how one now takes

things to be inthemselves. The recollection is an account of how one (takes oneself to have)found

outhow things actually are, in themselves. Doing this is presenting ones experience as having a

certain form: as the gradual unfolding into explicitness of what now appears as having been all along

already implicit. The commitments one now hasthe whole, holistically construed constellation of

judgments and conceptsis seen as presenting how things are inthemselves, in the sense of having

all along been the standard that earlier constellations were assessed according to, and found wanting

in various respects.

h) The model of this process that I find it most useful to keep in mind (though itis not one Hegel ever suggests) is the development of concepts of common law by precedent.

Common law differs from statute law in consisting entirely of case law. It is not the interpretation of

explicit founding laws, rules, or principles. All there is to it is a sequence of applications of concepts

to actual sets of facts. It is for this reason often thought of as judge-made law. The only justification


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that a judge is allowed to offer for a judgment consists of appeals to previous judgments. That

appeal postulates a principle, which, it is claimed, can be discerned as having been implicit in

previous decisions, guiding them, or at least codifying them. The precedents must be presented as

sequentially revealing different aspects of the principles, distinctions, and applications the judge now

enunciates. They are, the judge claims, what this tradition in common law all along was really about,

what it was getting at. A commitment to justifying ones current decisions by always telling a story of

this shape is what in practice taking it that the tradition isthe revelation of an underlying set of

principles, distinctions, and so on consists in.

i) I have already talked about the socialdimension of Hegels understanding ofconceptual norms, in terms of recognition. And I have also already talked about the inferential

dimension of Hegels understanding of conceptual norms, in terms of incompatibility. What we see

here is the historicaldimension of Hegels understanding of conceptual norms, in terms of

recollection (Erinnerung). It is introduced already in Hegels Introductionto the Phenomenology

(discussed in Chapter Three ofA Spirit of Trust), and reappears at other crucial junctures such as the

discussion of how to understand the notion of an intentionas guiding and being progressively but

imperfectly revealed in action, in Reason(discussed in Chapter Seven ofA Spirit of Trust), and (I

claim) is important in understanding the significance of the final form of reciprocal recognition,

confession and forgiveness, discussed at the very end of Spirit(and in Chapter Eight ofA Spirit ofTrust).

j) I have already discussed modality in connection with Hegels understandingof conceptual articulation in terms of material incompatibility (determinate negation). The final

understanding of what is expressed by modal vocabulary (which I discuss in Chapter Eight ofA Spirit

of Trust) is couched in terms of the historical-recollective process (that turns out to have the

structure of reciprocal recognition in the form of confession-and-forgiveness) wherebycontingent

contentis given theform of necessity. Mere facts, which could have been otherwise, are

incorporated into the contents of concepts, and the norms those concepts embody are seen

(retrospectively) as having always-already been in play, implicitly governing the development of the

Concept all along. Conceptualization, which is giving the contingent the form of necessity, is the

process of determining (making determinate) conceptual content by incorporating contingency intoit. This is the process of experience that is at once theapplicationof conceptual norms in judgment

and intention and the instutitionof conceptual norms. This pragmatist point (intimately connected

with the Quinean holism of concepts and judgments mentioned above) is that all there is to

constitute conceptual contentis the actual attitudes (in Fregean terms, a matter offorce) of those

who undertake and assess commitments articulated by those contents. There is an apparent tension

between this point and the claim attributed to Hegel above that the boundaries of conceptual

contentand the investment offorce(endorsing a judgment) must come from different sources, if the

content is to be intelligible as providing a normative standardfor assessment of the correctness of

the commitments undertaken by applying those concepts in judgment and intention. This second

point is the one that at (2f) above was argued to be reconciled with the Kant-Rousseau autonomy

thesis by the model of reciprocal recognition. The tension between the tight connection between

force and content required by the pragmatist point, on the one hand, and the distancing of force

from content required if what is right is not to be equated with whatever seems right is resolved by

the historical account of concept formation and reformation through experience, as retrospectively

rationally reconstructed.

HBI #6: Modernity:

a) Though allof our philosophical heroes from Descartes through Kant wereimportant players in producing the theoriesthat rationalized and articulated the practical and


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institutional achievements of modernity: secularization, science, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the rise

of the modern state, and so on, Hegel was the first to take this titanic transformation in all of its

aspects as his explicit topic. In this sense, he was the first theorist of modernity as such. He thought,

roughly, that only one big thing had ever happened in the history of the world, and that was the

transition from traditional to modern societies, selves, and thought. He wanted to understand that

grand change, why the old ways hung together as they did, and the sort of unity becoming visible for

the emerging constellation of practices, institutions, and concepts. In this thought was the germ,

inter alia, of what would become over the course of the nineteenth century, modern sociology, and

indeed, the social sciences more generallywhich still have at their theoretical core the aspiration to

understand this transformation.

b) And Hegel aspired, further, to discern the shape that a secondsuchtransformation might take, and the kind of unity that such an equally radical and progressive third

phase of human development might take.

c) One large division between Anglophone and Contintental Europeanphilosophy is drawn precisely by whether one takes this problem to be a, perhaps the, central

philosophical topic, or not.

d) See (15) below.13.The structure of thePhenomenology:

a. The big book can be thought of as consisting of three apparently self-containedbooks:

i. The long (72 paragraphs, 45 pages)Prefacewas written, like mostprefaces, some months after the body of the book was done, in early 1807.

It characterizes the project and achievement of thePhenomenologyin

terms that are not indigenous to it. In many ways, it points toward and

forms a bridge to Hegels subsequent great systematic work, the Science ofLogicof 1812.

ii. Roughly the first half of the book:Introduction, Consciousness, Self-Consciousness,andReason.

iii. Roughly the last half of the book: Spirit,Religion, andAbsolute Knowing.Spirit is itself in 3 parts: True Spirit (the Ethical Order=Sittlichkeit), Self-

Alienated Spirit (Culture), and Spirit that is Certain of Itself (Morality).

b. One structural interpretive controversy concerns whether Hegel changed his mindin mid-stream, setting out to write (ii), but then taking the opportunity to write

(iii) as well. Michael Forsters The Idea of the Phenomenologyis a very judicious

discussion of this issue.c. TheIntroductiondiscusses the relations between phenomena and noumena,

historical development of conceptual contents, precipitation of the

representational dimension of conceptual content;d. I think that the first half of the book divides up its topic by aspectsof conceptual

activity (Spirit), and the second half pulls those discussions together to discuss the

development of Spirit as a whole. The aspects are:

i. Consciousness: empirical knowledge, language-entry transitions in non-inferential reports, and the relations between immediacy and mediation.

This is apaleo-Sellarsiandiscussion, which makes an anti-Given point in

Sense Certainty, an anti-atomism in semantics point inPerception, and


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insists on the merely methodological difference of theoretical from

observable objects inForce and Understanding, all within the compass of

a broadly Sellarsian two-factor picture of non-inferential reports andinferential content. It turns out that to understand these commitments and

concepts, we must understand the selves who undertake and deploy them.

(Consciousness is discussed in Chapter Four ofA Spirit of Trust, and thetransition to Self-Consciousness in Chapter Five.)ii. Self-Consciousness: normativity, selves, recognition, and self-

consciousness. It turns out that in order to understand them, we must look

to their practical activity. (Discussed in Chapter Six ofA Spirit of Trust.)iii. Reason: Apaleo-Davidsoniandiscussion of action, intention, language-

exit transitions. Social perspectives on action (intentional/consequential),

historical perspectives on action (context of deliberation / context of

assessment), and the relation between Hegeliansenseand Hegelianreference. (Discussed in Chapter Seven ofA Spirit of Trust.)

e. The tradition takes it that these three sections should be read as mapping ontosequential historical eras. I think that is a confused projection of the order ofexposition into the subject-matter. The exposition is sequential and cumulative.

Withineach of these chapters, the development discussedis also sequential and

cumulative. But acrossthe chapter boundaries, the topic discussed is simply

changed. Indeed, the developments within each chapter are parallel, lining upwith one another. Spiritthen pulls them all together, to discuss the one

development they all partake of, not now from the point of view of empirical

language entries, practical language exits, and the selves who mediate them, butfrom the point of view of the whole constellation that comprises those aspects.

Here is a key retrospective passage (which, unfortunately, from my point of view

confuses the issue it is seeking to clarify by its placement of immediate Spirit,

but ignore that for now):When self-consciousness and consciousness proper, religion and Spirit in its world, or

Spirit's existence, are in the first instance distinguished from each other, the latter consists

in the totality of Spirit so far as its moments exhibit themselves in separation, each on itsown account. But the moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and

SpiritSpirit, that is, as immediate Spirit, which is not yet consciousness of Spirit. Their

totality, taken together, constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally; Spirit assuch contains the previous structured shapes in universal determinations. The course

traversed by these moments isnot to be represented as occurring in Time. Only the

totality of Spirit is in Time, and the 'shapes', which are 'shapes' of the totality of Spirit,

display themselves in a temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality andtherefore the form of pure freedom in face of an 'other', a form which expresses itself as

Time. But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and

Spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence in separation from one another.

[Phenomenology679]

14. On allegory:a. Throughout the book, but much more obviously starting with the Self-

Consciousnesschapter, Hegels way of expressing the semantic considerations he

is raising and the lessons he thinks we should learn from them takes the form of


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allegories. An allegory, dictionaries tell us, is the representation of abstract

ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or

pictorial form. In this case

hegel seminar notes for week 1 10-9-7 b

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