Hegel was a major figure in the philosophy department at Yale during my undergraduate years. But I was occupied with other things (so much being, so little time!) and never attended any of the many classes offered on his works during my time there. When I was in graduate school at Princeton, my Doktorvater Richard Rorty was officially a great admirer of the Hegel of the Phenomenology, but actually much preferred and practiced reading Kant. He esteemed the Hegelian historicizing and naturalizing of Kant that he saw as accelerating through much of the rest of the nineteenth century, only to be dashed when Russell and Husserl, each in his own ingenious way, found things for philosophy once again to be apodictic about. But Hegel’s logic and metaphysics left Rorty predictably cold. He seemed to think that everything he really needed from Hegel he could get from the much more congenial John Dewey. When I left Princeton to take up my first (and, as it turns out, only) academic job, in Pittsburgh, I still had never read the Phenomenology.
I had come to Pitt because of Wilfrid Sellars. He thought of himself first and foremost as a Kantian. He once said that he hoped the effect of his work would be to move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase. But the parts of his work I most admired at the time were what he described as his “incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes.” In the opening paragraph of his masterwork Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind he had explicitly aligned his arguments against the Myth of the Given with those of “Hegel, that great foe of immediacy.” I resolved to look at the original.
I found the Consciousness chapters of the Phenomenology fascinating. As William James described Peirce’s Lowell lectures, they offered “flashes of brilliant light, relieved against Cimmerian darkness.” In Sense Certainty Hegel indeed convincingly made the main point of Sellars’s critique of “the whole framework of givenness”: that to provide reasons capably of justifying beliefs, the senses must deliver conceptually articulated, judgeable contents, and that the capacity to grasp such contents presupposes a whole battery of conceptual abilities. But that line of thought was entangled with another one, which I found obscure but promising. It explored the practical and conceptual stage setting required to support the normative structure of authority that Sellars called “token credibility,” characteristic of the use of demonstratives and indexicals. Sellars had raised this topic in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, but not pursued it. I came to see that Hegel understood the intimate connection between deixis and anaphora, and had thought deeply about its significance. This was not a topic anyone else had put themselves in a position to think about in the intervening 150 years. The Perception chapter gave me tantalizing glimpses of how a metaphysics based on the notion of determinate negation might work, and how it might be connected to a broadly inferentialist picture of conceptual content.
On my first reading of Force and Understanding, I realized that Hegel had also anticipated another important lesson Sellars had taught me. This is to think of the distinction between observable and theoretical entities not as ontological, but as methodological or epistemological: not as a difference of kinds of object, but only of our mode of access to them. Theoretical entities are those we can know about (come to be entitled to claims about) only inferentially. And that is a status that can change—for instance, as new instruments make new kinds of observation possible. Apart from that insight, though, I could make nothing at all of this long, complex, and evidently pivotal chapter of the book. It was enough to prompt a further engagement with the work, however. In 1980 I accordingly offered my first graduate seminar on the Phenomenology. I figured I had enough to say about the epistemological parts of the book to support a term spent reading the book with whatever graduate students were willing to accompany me on the adventure.
As it happened, at this time I was for independent reasons thinking about the normativity of concept-use. It had come to seem to me that the essence of Rorty’s pragmatism was the idea that all norms—including those that govern the justification of knowledge claims—are matters of social practice, and are accordingly plastic and subject to historical variation. I understood this as a line of thought tying together a series of his earlier papers. As I reconstructed it, it begins by thinking of “incorrigibility as the mark of the mental.” What is distinctive about Cartesian minds—and the reason the mind / body problem isn’t ancient—is that pensées are things we can’t be wrong about or ignorant of. This epistemic incorrigibility and transparency is what ties together for Descartes such otherwise disparate items as pains and fleeting thoughts. Rorty understood this as a special structure of authority: sincere first-person avowals of experiencings were not overrideable by other claims. And that structure of authority he understood as a matter of social practice, which need not have always had this structure (it didn’t for Aristotle), and need not continue to have it. “Eliminative materialism” envisaged the possible alteration of our practices after a materialist turn, so as to accord overriding authority instead to cerebroscopic measurements of brain states. We do now, he thought, actually have minds in the Cartesian sense. But we didn’t always, and we might not do so in the future. (This wholly new take on the mind / body problem seemed nonaccidentally analogous to Nietzsche’s new form of atheism: not that the idea of God is absurd and corresponds to nothing in the world, but that when we lived and moved and had our being within traditional practices there was a God, and that when we changed to the practices constitutive of modernity we killed Him.)
In addition to getting from Sellars the inferentialist semantic idea that to be conceptually contentful required being “located in a space of implications” (what, according to him, distinguished descriptions from mere labels), I had taken to heart his lesson that
in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says. [EPM §36]
(Rorty takes focus on this passage to be characteristic of those of us—himself prime among them—whom he calls “left-wing Sellarsians.”) In fact, Sellars didn’t mean this claim to be restricted to episodes of knowing, but to characterize believables generally. The space of reasons is above all a normative space. Sellars here was gesturing at a normative theory of concept-use generally: a normative pragmatics in which an inferentialist semantics is embedded. This context of Sellarsian ideas suggested a broader range of application for Rorty’s pragmatist, social-practice approach to normativity.
I was also coming to think about the normativity of discursiveness more generally. Normativity showed up first as a distinctive Kantian theme. My 1980 essay “Freedom and Constraint by Norms” focused on his apparently paradoxical view of freedom as a special kind of constraint: constraint by norms rather than by causes. Judging and acting intentionally showed up as binding ourselves by rules in the form of the concepts being applied. And what I was thinking of as Rorty’s social pragmatism about norms seemed to be inspired by the later Wittgenstein’s view of discursive norms as implicit in social practices. So when, in connection with that inaugural Hegel seminar, I read the Self-Consciousness chapters for the first time, I was ripe and ready to see there the general outlines of a full-blown theory of norms as socially instituted by reciprocal recognition. Such a theory seemed to promise what I had missed in Wittgenstein: an account of what it means for norms to be implicit in social practices.
Further, it occurred to me that the idea that norms were socially synthesized by reciprocal recognition could provide a model for the use of the logical vocabulary of particularity, individuality, and universality that I had seen Hegel deploy in the Perception chapter, and that I knew vaguely he developed at length in the Science of Logic. For particular living creatures could, by adopting to each other practical attitudes of mutual recognition, simultaneously synthesize universals, in the form of the resulting recognitive communities, and themselves as self-conscious individual selves—that is, particulars as characterized by universals, selves as members of communities. Hegel’s account of self-consciousness as an essentially social achievement seemed to provide a model in terms of which to understand his characteristic use of logical vocabulary. I didn’t understand how all of that might work, but I was hooked.
I adopted the practice (which continues to the present) of offering a seminar on the Phenomenology every third year, as part of a regular rota. This gave me the opportunity (and imposed the obligation) to reread and rethink the book carefully on a regular basis. My partners in this enterprise were the generations of graduate students at Pitt (and later in Leipzig) who participated in these seminars. A gratifyingly high percentage of those who passed through our department during these decades attended them, as a sort of ritual of passage. More than anything else, it was these conversations that shaped the story I tell here. It is impossible for me to disentangle my progress from their suggestions and objections.
Although the main focus of my attention lay elsewhere (1980 is also when the plan for my 1994 book Making It Explicit took definite shape), I made regular progress through this decade on the elaboration of what amounted to a translation manual from Hegel’s ferocious vocabulary into terms that brought his ideas into close, exploitable contact with the issues I found most significant and puzzling in contemporary philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology.
A key development for me was the realization, in the late 1980s, that not only did the Reason chapter offer a sophisticated theory of action in the sense in which Anscombe and Davidson had given shape to that distinctive subfield of analytic philosophy, but that it made some of the same fundamental moves that distinguished Davidson’s transformative account. Hegel, too, thought of actions as having many descriptions, as being actions because some of those are descriptions under which they are intentional, and yet as counting thereby as things genuinely done under all their descriptions, even those under which they are not intentional. He explicitly embraced what Davidson called the “accordion effect,” whereby effects unrolling into the indefinite future permit ever-new descriptions in terms of their consequences of what is still the very same doing. But Hegel went well beyond Davidson in understanding the distinction between intentional and consequential descriptions of doings in terms of normatively significant differences in social perspective. This is the difference between the context of deliberation, in which the agent is authoritative and for which she is responsible, and the context of assessment, in which the recognitive community is authoritative and holds the agent responsible.
In 1990 Bert Dreyfus and David Hoy invited me to be one of the speakers at a six-week National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in Santa Cruz, California, devoted to Heidegger and Davidson. I dutifully wrote a Heidegger piece—as I had a few years earlier for another NEH summer seminar they had put on in Berkeley. (Egged on by my friend and colleague John Haugeland, they thought I should be thinking more about Heidegger, and seized on these occasions to entice / compel me to do so. The results are reprinted as the Heidegger chapters of Tales of the Mighty Dead.) Though I did present that Heidegger material, because Davidson himself was attending, I spent most of my week’s seminar talking about Hegel on agency. Bert’s and David’s best efforts were unable to arouse in Davidson any interest at all in Heidegger, but he was intrigued by the story I was telling about what Hegel had to add to his own theory of action. While he was not moved to take on reading Hegel himself, he remained actively interested in what I had to say on the topic, and we continued to engage fruitfully on the topic (and after Making It Explicit came out, on a host of others) for many years.
At this point it seemed to me that what I had learned from Hegel about a variety of issues of great contemporary interest (at least to me) formed a critical mass. Abstract objects depend for us for their actualization. So when we get within telling distance of a story of sufficient potential interest, there is a palpable obligation for us to do right by it. I resolved to write a book-length report of what I thought I understood about the Phenomenology. The initial result, in 1992, was the first draft of this book, then titled “Action, Recognition, and Trust.” It took the form of fourteen lecture-length chapters, following the order of Hegel’s chapters, addressing the parts of the book from which I thought we had the most to learn philosophically on the topics I cared most about. Lindsay Waters had recently moved to Harvard University Press and he and I were deep in the final preparations for the publication of Making It Explicit. As a young editor, he had stuck his neck way out in championing that massive, technically demanding tome. And of course we didn’t have any idea at that point how that project would be received. But he nonetheless enthusiastically also adopted the nascent Hegel book project, filing away that first draft and claiming for HUP the right to publish its eventual successor. He knew how long it had taken me to get MIE into final form, and was not only unfailingly supportive of the new endeavor, but prepared to be endlessly patient. Neither of us knew how long it would end up taking. I am glad that I could deliver this manuscript to him before he retired (though only just before). Thanks, Lindsay.
John McDowell joined us at Pitt from Oxford in 1985—attracted in part by Sellars’s presence. (He had attended the first of Sellars’s disastrous Locke lectures at Oxford in 1965, finding the material fascinating but incomprehensible. He would later devote his Woodbridge lectures at Columbia to deciphering that lecture on Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, which had been published as the first chapter of Science and Metaphysics.) He participated in my Hegel seminar in the late 1980s and found my mapping of Hegel’s vocabulary onto more contemporary ones helpful for and encouraging to his own burgeoning interest in German Idealism (as he generously recollects in the preface to Mind and World). This was the beginning of a fruitful, ongoing conversation on these topics that has now lasted thirty years. John sometimes professes disbelief that I have actually heard anything he has said over that time, because as far as he can see, I never took to heart any of his patient explanations of how I was getting things radically wrong. That view is far from the truth. There are lots of things I see differently because of his criticisms—though I almost never end up seeing things as he thinks they are. In particular, his pointing out the Einseitigkeit of my early rendering of Hegel’s view of intentional agency was the catalyst for my eventual realization (as I would like to think of it) of the essential temporally biperspectival character of conceptual content modeled on the relations between prospective and retrospective characterizations of intentions—which is one of the core structural features of the reading of Hegel I recount in this book. I think John tends to underestimate the extent to which I am helpless in the face of an emerging narrative.
In spite of the hint about the possibility of understanding the relations between particularity, universality, and individuality in terms of the simultaneous synthesis of recognitive communities and individual normative subjects by reciprocal recognitive relations among particular desiring organisms, I found myself unable to see any substantial connection between what Hegel was doing in the Phenomenology and what he did six to ten years later in the Science of Logic. I simply couldn’t make anything of that work. In particular, I couldn’t see how someone who understood everything I took Hegel to have understood in the Phenomenology about the nature of conceptual content and concept-use could be moved to go on to write that later work about whatever it was about. My jocular take at the time was that as far as I could see, the enforced boredom of years spent presiding over recitations as an instructor in the Nuremberg Gymnasium had basically driven him crazy. Of course this was not a sustainable position, but I didn’t see how to do better.
Then, in the early 1990s, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, founding professor of the post-DDR philosophy department at the University of Leipzig, came to Pitt as a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science. He had just finished his massive 1992 book Hegels Analytische Philosophie: Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung. He read the Science of Logic as presenting a theory of meaning, an account of both conceptual content and concept-use. And he could not understand how someone who had such sophisticated things to say on that topic already in 1812 could have gotten there from the literary and anthropological stylings of the neo-Romantic coming-of-age novel that was the 1807 Phenomenology. During our increasingly intense conversations during his year in Pittsburgh (conversations that continue to this day), we came to realize that we each had hold of a different part of what was the same elephant. Further, we were both outliers within the interpretive community in understanding Hegel’s overall topic in broadly semantic terms, and in seeing him as addressing in a metaconceptually sophisticated way deep issues that contemporary philosophy of language had by no means yet seen its way to the bottom of. If we were right, the vast majority of Hegel’s readers were overlooking the elephant in the room. They weren’t seeing anything of the largest philosophical issues he was addressing, the sophisticated criteria of adequacy for responses to them that he acknowledged, and the big, bold moves he was making in his semantic theories.
For what it’s worth, I take it that the tradition’s losing sight of Hegel’s principal motivating concerns was the result of the confluence of a number of historical accidents. Hegel left no first-rate students who focused on his logic and metaphysics. It was a tumultuous time, and it was his social and political theories that aroused the most interest. Then the eclipse of Hegelian thought in Germany in the middle years of the nineteenth century cut off the stream of continuous transmission of his ideas, obliging later generations to read the works basically de novo. One result is that the neo-Kantians who revived philosophical interest in discursive normativity and in particular its historicity (I’m thinking of the earlier works of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp) saw their work as a continuation of Kant’s (as Hegel himself had regarded his own) and did not recognize their concerns as having much in common with what they understood of Hegel’s. Instead, Hegel’s talk of Geist as self-conscious and reflective was interpreted in neo-Cartesian terms, to yield a bizarre picture of a supersubject whose consciousness is to be understood on the model of Descartes’s understanding of ours. Appreciation of and concern for the normative dimension of intentionality waned in the first half of the twentieth century (despite echoes of his neo-Kantian teachers in Division One of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit). That topic was brought back to center stage philosophically only by the later Wittgenstein. And even there, understanding of this as one of his principal topics was slow to dawn on his readers. By the time the topic I take to be Hegel’s principal concern became visible once again to philosophers, it was in terms far removed from anything anyone could recognize in his texts. It is fascinating to wonder what nineteenth-century philosophy (and indeed American pragmatism, and subsequent analytic philosophy—if there would have been such movements at all) would have looked like if Hegel’s readers then had understood both his theories and their explanatory targets, in anything like the terms in which they are presented here.
The broader perspective on Hegel’s project that resulted from ongoing conversations with Pirmin yielded new ways of thinking about both his social account of the norms governing discursive practice and his account of conceptual content in terms of material incompatibility and consequence (Hegel’s “determinate negation” and “mediation”). By 1999 I had rewritten the manuscript from the ground up, under the new title “A Spirit of Trust.”
Wrestling with what came to be called the “rule-following considerations” in the wake of Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein led me to see Hegel as directly addressing what is perhaps the central question that Wittgenstein raised in the vicinity. If all there is to confer meaning on linguistic expressions and content on intentional states is the use that we make of them, the functional role they play in our practices, how is it that such use can institute norms that are determinately contentful, in the sense of providing definite standard for assessments of the correctness of further uses in a whole range of possible novel situations? In Making It Explicit I had taken for granted the availability to scorekeeping linguistic practitioners of conceptual contents that were determinate in this sense. They were understood as settling what else those who applied concepts with those contents in assertion had committed themselves to thereby, what would entitle them to do so, and what was incompatible with such applications. I had self-consciously not addressed the question of where such determinate contents and their associated norms came from, and how they could be understood to be available to practitioners. Taking that to be a topic for another day was a divide-and-conquer strategy necessary to focus on a manageable topic in that book, to make the normative pragmatic story about the use of expressions and the inferentialist semantic story about their conceptual contents jointly tellable.
I had long thought that Hegel was the one to look to for wisdom about the relations between the historical development of conceptual contents and their determinateness. But I hadn’t been able to assemble the various things I took him to be saying into a detailed account. In 2002–2003 I was fortunate to have the opportunity for undisturbed reflection afforded by a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. While my main efforts during this halcyon period were directed at preparing my upcoming John Locke lectures at Oxford (published as Between Saying and Doing in 2008), I resolved to use this opportunity also to try to figure out what Hegel had to say about the nature and structure of the historical processes by which conceptual contents are determined. I was convinced that Hegel had in 1806 asked himself the Wittgensteinian question about how to understand the use of expressions as at once the application of concepts subject to assessment according to norms and the institution of the norms that serve as standards for assessing such applications. In what I experienced as a breakthrough, I came to discern a detailed answer to this question in Hegel’s account of recollective rationality, whose paradigm is the retrospective rational reconstruction of an intention (Absicht) normatively governing and unifying an extended exercise of agency (such as building a house or writing a book). I would like to think that he invented this concept, and I then discovered it. But it is probably best just to understand us both as having forgivingly recollectively rationally reconstructed it. Developing this interpretive idea led to completely new treatments of the Reason and Spirit chapters of the Phenomenology, and so to a new draft of the whole book in 2004.
In the 2004 draft, all that remained substantially the same from the 1999 draft was the treatment of Consciousness. In 2008 Stekeler invited me to Leipzig for a term as Leibniz Professor. I offered a graduate seminar on the Phenomenology and for the first time made the then-current version of my manuscript available to people other than the graduate students and others who attended my seminars at Pitt. This working through made Hegel’s Introduction look quite different to me than it had before. It now seemed to be taking place at two levels, offering an account of the development of determinate conceptual contents through the experience of empirical error as well as the development of forms of consciousness to ever-greater self-consciousness. I wrote up a detailed reading of Hegel’s telling sixteen paragraphs (the topic of a seminar by Heidegger, later published in English with a superb translation by Kenley Dove—whose Hegel courses I had missed out on at Yale), and presented it in the form of three lectures at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 2011.
In Between Saying and Doing I had followed out some hints from Sellars about the deep relations between what is expressed by deontic normative vocabulary and what is expressed by alethic modal vocabulary. In crudest terms, the idea was that the former lets one say what one must do to be using expressions so as to say what the latter lets one say. Having had this thought myself, I came to see a version of it as animating Hegel’s understanding of the relations between determinate negation as it applies in the objective sphere of things (where it is impossible for one object to combine the properties of being copper and being an electrical insulator) and in the subjective sphere of commitments (where it is not impossible, but merely impermissible to combine in one subject commitment to an object’s being both copper and an electrical insulator). When faced with such incompatible commitments, the subject is normatively obliged to do something, to change those commitments. Here, I thought, was the key to the hitherto mysterious (to me) connection between determinate negation and a principle of movement that lies at the center of Hegel’s metaphysics. It seemed to me that I now had the tools to understand Hegel’s accounts of knowledge and intentional agency in terms of his conceptual realism: the idea that one and the same conceptual content can take the form of an objective fact, conceptually articulated by counterfactually robust relations of incompatibility and consequence expressible in alethic modal terms and also the form of a subjective commitment, conceptually articulated by relations of incompatibility and consequence expressible in deontic normative terms. This thought, I came to think, lay at the core of Hegel’s idealism.
Too much had changed in my overall take on Hegel’s project for me to be satisfied with the 1999 treatment of the Consciousness chapters—now the oldest part of the manuscript. I started over with this material, helped along by the 2013 iteration of my Pitt Hegel seminar. I had written new treatments of Sense Certainty and Perception in time to include them in the draft that was circulated to the eminent interlocutors Gilles Bouche brought together for a workshop on the then-current draft of A Spirit of Trust at the Free University in Berlin in the summer of 2014. Soon after I felt that I had finally understood the most mysterious bits of Force and Understanding, including a new way of thinking about the transition it effects from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness.
It remained only to redo my discussion of Self-Consciousness. I had produced a new reading of the transition from desire to recognition, which I first presented at a meeting of the Hegel Verein in Münster in 2003. But I needed to start over with the crucial treatment of the social achievement of self-consciousness by reciprocal recognition, and the pathologies of it that Hegel diagnoses in his allegory of Mastery and Servitude. I had been thinking hard about the relations between Kant’s and Hegel’s views on normativity and concept-use, and reported some of the results in my three Woodbridge lectures at Columbia (reprinted in my 2009 book, Reason in Philosophy). Trying to get clearer about how Hegel’s understanding of normativity in terms of recognition develops out of Kant’s understanding of normativity in terms of autonomy, it came to seem to me (perhaps not surprisingly) that Hegel himself provided exactly the metaconceptual expressive resources required. As applied to subjects rather than objects, his distinction between what a self-consciousness is in itself and what it is for consciousness is the distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes. Prime among the terms Hegel uses for what consciousness can be in itself are “independence” and “dependence,” by which I understand the normative statuses of authority and responsibility. And consciousness can be something for itself or for others, which I read as normative attitudes distinguished by their social perspective: attitudes of acknowledging (oneself) and attributing (to others) statuses such as responsibility. Translating both Kant’s and Hegel’s models of normativity into this regimented idiom of normative states and attitudes, it seemed to me, made it possible to be much clearer and more precise about both, and about the relations between them. In particular, this idiom made it possible to analyze complex normative statuses such as autonomy as constellations of simpler statuses and attitudes. The way in which recognitive attitudes institute normative statuses when they exhibit the proper structure also emerges clearly and naturally. (As part of this project, I wrote a long projected chapter recollecting the Early Modern developmental history of the metaphysics of normativity in this regimented idiom, emphasizing the strands that Hegel picks up and weaves together in his account. Useful as it was to me to work this story out in detail, in the end I decided it didn’t pull its weight on the overall story and regretfully excised it from the book.)
Seen through the clarifying lens of this normative metavocabulary, the subject of the Spirit chapters—the great practical and conceptual sea change from traditional to modern normative, and so conceptual structures—shows up as the transition from forms of life expressing practical appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes to forms of life expressing practical appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The challenge of envisaging a third great age of Geist succeeding the first two becomes that of reconciling these two insights. What is needed to resolve the Wittgensteinian puzzle about how discursive practices can be understood as both applying already determinately contentful conceptual norms and instituting those norms shows up as a special case of such reconciliation. And the concept of recollective rationality Hegel introduces as his solution to this problem, too, can be much more clearly articulated in the regimented normative metavocabulary into which I was translating Hegel’s terminology. At this point it finally seemed to me that all the expressive resources needed for a unified, illuminating telling of Hegel’s story were ready for use.
Throughout the time I was wrestling with Hegel’s ideas, I was illuminated and informed in ways too various to mention by the works of, and by conversations with, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard. It always seemed to me that we were moving in generally the same direction, thinking in concordant ways. More recently, I also learned a great deal from Paul Redding and Robert Stern. But I found that I could not do justice to working out the story that was taking shape for me in Hegel’s text and at the same time triangulate that story with what these other insightful and sympathetic readers were making of it. This was my fault, and my loss. May others do better.
In the last years of work on this manuscript, I have been aided immensely by the opportunity to present all the material sequentially in an extended lecture series in Leipzig. In all, I have given eighteen lectures in that series, at the rate of three or four a year over the last five years. They have been sponsored by the Forschungskolleg for Analytic German Idealism (FAGI), in Leipzig. My German-language original book Wiedererinnerter Idealismus, collecting some of my Hegel essays, was published as the first volume in a series Suhrkamp Verlag collaborated on with FAGI. (John McDowell’s Die Welt im Blick was the second entry in this series.) Financial support also was provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in connection with their Anneliese Maier Forschungspreis.
Going through the extended process recounted here was for me an altogether exhilarating experience (in the sense Hegel gives to “Erfahrung”). For it took the expressively progressive shape of a voyage of discovery—the gradual emergence into the fully explicit light of day of themes and stories that then showed up as having been there all along, implicit, having hitherto revealed themselves only by the tantalizing glimpses occasionally afforded by dark but suggestive passages. It is, of course, an experience of this kind that Hegel prepared for us in the Phenomenology, presented as a reading of the development of human self-understanding. And it is such an experience that the body of this work aims at. Like the Phenomenology itself, A Spirit of Trust exemplifies the process of recollective rationality whose structure it is its business to articulate.