As I have been reading him in this work, one of Hegel’s most basic commitments is his conceptual realism. This is the view that not only thought, but the nonmental world that is the object of our knowledge and the arena of our action has a generically conceptual structure. Conceptual realism is a consequence of understanding the alethic modal articulation of objective properties and states of affairs as essential to their being the determinate properties and states of affairs that they are. It is essential to their determinateness that properties stand to one another in relations of modally robust exclusion. An object’s possessing one property precludes it from exhibiting some others, in the sense that it is impossible to exhibit the incompatible properties simultaneously. Nothing can be at once both a bivalve and a vertebrate. This exclusion structure induces a corresponding inclusion structure: if Coda were a dog, then Coda would be a mammal, for everything incompatible with being a mammal is incompatible with being a dog. It is these counterfactual-supporting exclusions and inclusions that are codified in laws of nature. Hegel had learned from Kant that nothing recognizable as an objective natural world can be thought of as wholly anomic, as not exhibiting laws, not supporting distinctions between what is contingently true and what is necessary, and between what is contingently false and what is impossible. This view about the essentially modal articulation of the objective world shows up as conceptual realism for Hegel because by “conceptual” [begrifflich] structure he means what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and (so) material consequence: the relations he calls “determinate negation” and “mediation.”

Understood this way, to talk of the objective world as conceptually structured is not yet to say anything that essentially involves the activities of knowing or acting subjects: the conceptions of concept users. Concepts are exactly as real and objective as the laws of nature they articulate. It is true that objective material incompatibility and consequence relations underwrite inferences, so whatever is conceptually articulated in this sense is something one can in principle reason about. But that does not mean that if there is no one around to do so, the structure is not there. It would still be impossible for something to be a fox and not a mammal even if primates had never evolved to use words such as “fox” and “mammal” to express the concepts fox and mammal and so actually make inferences of the form “if it is a fox, then it is a mammal.” The objective dependence is rather the other way around. For Hegel, as for Kant, what is distinctive of subjects, knowers and agents, is that their characteristic states, judgments and intentional actions, are liable to a particular kind of normative assessment. For judgments and actions are things one can have, or fail to have, good reasons for. They are commitments whose entitlements are always potentially at issue, and are redeemable, if at all, only by such reasons. It follows that it is a condition, not only of the intelligibility, but also of the existence of the thinkings and doings in virtue of which we qualify as subjects in the first place that the objective world—which it is the defining goal of judgment to conform the subject’s commitments to and of agency to conform to the subject’s commitments—be conceptually structured in Hegel’s sense. For only such a world potentially affords reasons for believing and acting. The determinate contentfulness of intentional states requires playing a suitable role in such an inferential structure. Nothing could qualify as a belief or an intention without possessing such a conceptual content: excluding some other such contents and entailing still others.

So there could be an objective, conceptually structured world even if there were no subjects applying concepts in inferentially articulated practices of giving and asking for reasons, hence no believers or agents. But there could not be concept users, hence subjects, except in a conceptually structured objective world. So far, this line of thought articulates a commonsense realism about the asymmetrical dependence of subjects on the objective world they inhabit. I believe that Hegel never wavered in his endorsement of his version of this platitudinous view. It is certainly a consequence of the account of consciousness and self-consciousness as rooted in the triadic structure of erotic awareness, as sketched in Chapter 8.

We also saw in Chapter 7, however, that he thinks that behind the asymmetrical reference dependence of subjective on objective things lies a symmetrical sense-dependence of the concepts articulating subjective processes of concept use and concepts articulating objective conceptual relations. This is the doctrine I called “objective idealism.” According to this thesis, although there could and would be lawful connections among properties even if there were no self-conscious creatures to codify them in counterfactual reasoning, it is not possible to understand what laws are without appealing to the distinctive sort of reasoning they support (and vice versa). Although there could and would be objective facts (say, about the melting point of copper) even if there were no language users to discover and assert them, one cannot say what a fact is without appealing to the possibility of asserting one (nor, conversely, can one make adequate sense of the notion of asserting without appeal to that of fact). Although there could and would be particular objects even in a world devoid of discursive practices of singular reference, one cannot explain the concept object except in connection to the concept singular term—the vocabulary whose distinctive expressive role it is to purport to refer to particulars. (Nor, again, could one make sense of singular term without appeal to that expressive role, and hence to object). That these are sense-dependence claims, and not reference dependence claims means that the connections between concepts expressing the activities, practices, or processes of subjects (e.g., counterfactual reasoning, asserting, referring) and concepts expressing structural features of the objective world (e.g., law, fact, object) are essential to the identity and individuation of those concepts. But there are no corresponding essential relations between the items those concepts apply to or are true of.

Hegel thinks that objective idealism is the price one must pay for conceptual realism; it is a conceptual commitment necessary to make conceptual realism intelligible. He also understands modal and conceptual articulation as two ways of talking about the same thing: relations of material incompatibility and (hence) consequence. In that context, then, objective idealism is also a condition of the intelligibility of seeing the modal articulation of the objective world, as expressed by laws of nature, as a condition of the world’s being determinate. Determinateness in this sense—there being some way the world is, its being one way rather than another, and its being that way ruling out its being some other ways, and having as a consequence that it is some still different ways—is inter alia a condition of the intelligibility of knowledge or experience of the world. But that is just a consequence of its being a condition of the intelligibility of the objective purport of knowledge and experience: their being knowledge or experience of a world. It is important to see that the concern with subjective processes of judging, experiencing, and acting comes at the end of this line of thought, not at the beginning. It begins with the notion of the objective world as determinate, moves from there to the necessity of its modal articulation, and from there to seeing it as in conceptual shape.

As I have told the story, the fact that we readers of the Phenomenology have learned the lesson of objective idealism by the end of the Consciousness chapter is the rationale for the expository transition to the chapter on Self-Consciousness. For we have learned that in order to understand the conceptual structure of the objective world that is empirically known, we must understand the experiential processes and conceptual practices of the knowing subjects. Self-Consciousness accordingly addresses the topic of how to understand selves, self-conceptions, and so the subjective self-consciousness that turns out to be conceptually implicated in our understanding of the objective world revealed to empirical consciousness. As we saw in Chapter 8, consciousness and self-consciousness are rooted in the practical dealings of living beings whose desire-motivated responses to natural things attribute to those things distinctively structured, protonormative, preconceptual orectic significances. Genuinely normative commitments take over the role of merely natural desires in the social context of reciprocal recognition: acknowledgment of the correlative authority and responsibility of each others’ practical responsive classifications. This provenance of communally acknowledged normative significance in practical doings means that the subjective experiential practices of acknowledging incompatible commitments, by relation to which we are to understand objective relations of incompatibility among properties and (so) states of affairs, must be understood as themselves at base practical. What Hegel has called “experience”—the process of identifying with some commitments by sacrificing others, by which both determinate conceptual contents and individual self-conscious selves develop—is a feature of purposive work, or more generally, of the exercise of intentional agency. This is the topic of Reason, because “reason is purposive activity.” [PG 22]

Thus at one level the course of the exposition of the first half of the Phenomenology proceeds by considering different aspects of us as knowers and agents. Beginning with the perceptual language-entry moves expressed in noninferential reports, it opens up the topic of the empirical knowledge of things, in which they play such a crucial role. It then looks at the subjects of that knowledge. Finding their selves, self-conceptions, and empirical consciousness to be developments of purposive activity, we turn to considering language exits in deliberate, intentional action. At this level the order of exposition of the book is not progressive. Although there are reasons for the order of presentation, we are discussing aspects of self-conscious beings, not stages in their development.

[T]he moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence in separation from one another. [PG 679]

Here “Spirit” means the community. In another sense, what they are all aspects of is Spirit. “Their totality, taken together, constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally.” [PG 679] Within the discussion of each aspect or “moment,” there is historical, cumulative development:

We saw that each of those moments was differentiated again in its own self into a process of its own, and assumed different “shapes”: as, e.g., in consciousness, sense-certainty and perception were distinct from each other. These latter shapes fall apart in Time and belong to a particular totality.… These, therefore, exhibit Spirit in its individuality or actuality, and are distinguished from one another in Time, though in such a way that the later moment retains within it the preceding one. [PG 679]

But the transitions from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness to Reason are not like this.

In this way, the arrangement of the “shapes” which have hitherto appeared differs from the way they appeared in their own order.… Thus while the previous single series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by nodes, but continued itself again from them in a single line, it is now, as it were, broken at these nodes, at these universal moments, and falls apart into many lines which, gathered up into a single bundle, at the same time combine symmetrically so that the similar differences in which each particular moment took shape within itself meet together. [PG 681]

The “retrogressive steps” are from a developed conception of empirical knowledge (the Concept as infinite) to the most primitive conception of selves (as desirers), and from a developed conception of selves to a primitive conception of agency. The expository strategy of Spirit is to lay the various stages of our understanding of knowledge, selves, and agency alongside one another, breaking the exposition at the “nodes” between the discussion of different moments, and bundling together the lines of development within those discussions. Spirit discusses the whole phenomenon of which cognition, recognition, and agency are aspects.

This is not to say that the exposition of the Phenomenology up to this point is not cumulative at all, however. It is only to say that it is not an account of a cumulative development, except within the sections discussing each aspect of Spirit: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason. We learn something as we progress through these parallel discussions of different aspects of the whole. What we are learning about is the conditions of the intelligibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms, hence about the nature of Geist, of Nature, and of their relations to one another in the practical (including the cognitive) doings of the individual self-conscious selves and the recognitive communities that comprise and are instituted by them. (“No cognition without recognition.”) Reason focuses on that practical interaction of subjective-social with objective norms—of commitments, recognitive claims of authority and acknowledgments of responsibility, on the one hand, and lawful (modally robust) empirical necessities, on the other—as it shows up in the phenomenon of intentional agency. It does so, as elsewhere, by presenting in allegorical form different forms of practical self-consciousness focused on that phenomenon: ways of understanding ourselves as agents.

One of the principal lessons we are to learn from that discussion is the thesis I call “conceptual idealism.” It is a response to a question raised by the doctrine of objective idealism, which by this point in the exposition of the Phenomenology we have seen to be a condition of the intelligibility of conceptual realism, and hence of modal realism. As we have just been reminded, that doctrine asserts the reciprocal sense-dependence of the concepts expressing the objective relations of material incompatibility (and therefore consequence) articulating the conceptual structure of the world and the concepts that express the subjective practices and processes of experience that constitute self-conscious individual selves by responding to the acknowledgment of materially incompatible commitments through identification with some and sacrifice of others. But now we can ask: Should this whole constellation of objective conceptual relations and subjective conceptual practices and processes be understood in terms of the relational categories of objectivity or the practical-processual categories of subjectivity? Given the education we have undergone about objectivity in Consciousness and subjectivity in Self-Consciousness, should we think of the whole subject-object complex as object-like or subject-like? Even if the answer is both, how should we understand the relation between these two different ways of conceiving our world and ourselves? In particular, is there any sort of asymmetrical conceptual priority to be accorded to one over the other?

Conceptual idealism is the idea that although both ways of construing things are valid and essential, there is a crucial explanatory asymmetry between them. In particular, it is the claim that the relations of sense-dependence objective idealism asserts to obtain between the concepts that articulate our conception of objective relations of material incompatibility, on the one hand, and subjective processes of acknowledging incompatible commitments, on the other, must be understood in terms of the processes that institute those relations. (“The relation is a pure transition.” [PG 279]) These are the very processes of practical experience through the exercise of intentional agency—now understood as “thick” in the sense of incorporating their objective correlates—that constitute self-conscious selves. As a reciprocal sense-dependence thesis relating the concepts that express the structures of subjectivity and of objectivity, objective idealism may not seem to be much of an idealism. If we look at the summary formulations of idealism in the Preface, objective idealism may do as a reading of evenhanded claims such as “Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.” [PG 17] But it does not seem to be what Hegel is after with such one-sided formulations as “Substance is essentially (in-itself, implicitly, in truth) Subject” [PG 18, 25, 37, 54] when the key insight of speculative thought is expressed as “the True is Subject,” [PG 65] or in the claim that “the Phenomenology concludes” with the realization that “Being … is self-like.” [PG 37] Nor does it seem adequate to Hegel’s talking about the “need to represent the Absolute as Subject” [PG 23] or claiming “that Substance is essentially Subject is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit.” [PG 25] These ought to be understood rather as expressions of what I am calling “conceptual idealism.”

The key to conceptual idealism is the rational activity of recollection (Hegel’s “Erinnerung”). It is the third phase of each episode in the process of experience, which we first considered in discussing Hegel’s Introduction. Each episode of experience is initiated by the detection of an anomaly. The subject finds herself with commitments that are, by her own lights, materially incompatible. Their conceptual contents are such that commitment to one precludes rational entitlement to the other. The next phase is repair. This is what one is normatively obliged to do, the changes one is responsible for making, in response to the detection of incompatible commitments. It is what practically acknowledging the commitments as incompatible consists in. The subject must remove the incompatibility by revising the offending commitments: relinquishing commitment to one of the incompatible contents, or altering her conception of the relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate those contents. The final, recollective phase of experience requires the subject to engage in a particular kind of rational reconstruction of the course of experience that led up to the commitments resulting from the reparative phase. Recollection rationalizes a course of experience by retrospectively redescribing it so as to exhibit it as expressively progressive. The result of the reparative phase is a new commitment to how things really are, how they are in themselves. We saw that the conceptual contents one currently endorses, the contents of one’s current commitments, are to consciousness how things really are, how they are in themselves. The contents discarded or amended become to consciousness (are practically treated as) only what things are for consciousness. (This change of status of what the conceptual contents are to consciousness is the “emergence of the second, new, true object” at the end of the Introduction.) Recollection retrospectively exhibits this episode of experience as the culmination of a progressive process whereby the reality that one’s commitments were all along implicitly appearances of, gradually emerges and becomes explicit to and for consciousness. Assuming that things really are as they now show up for consciousness, recollection explains how the subject found out that they are so. Recollection provides a distinctive kind of expressive vindication and justification of the commitments one has acquired through a course of experience.

The concept of recollection is one of Hegel’s Big Ideas. It includes the idea of a characteristic kind of rationality that is on display in retrospective recollective rationalizations. Recollective rationality is at the center of the constellation of metaconceptual categories Hegel calls “Vernunft.” As recognition is the key concept articulating the social dimension of his account of discursive normativity, so recollection is the key concept articulating the historical dimension of his account of discursive normativity. Indeed, as we will see, what is practically necessary and sufficient for us to move beyond alienated modernity to institute the third age of Geist is for recognition to take the form of recollection. (He calls that final, fully self-conscious recollective form of recognition “forgiveness.”)

The paradigm in terms of which we are to understand recollection is the retrospective imputation of an intention as normatively governing an action. The task of the Reason chapter is to offer an account of intentional agency (“Reason is purposeful agency” [PG 22]) and the role of recollective rationality in it. This chapter is the heart of the Phenomenology because it is of the essence of the idealism on offer there to model cognition on intentional agency. The link between them is recollective rationality. To understand exactly how and in what sense practical agency is being taken to underlie and illuminate theoretical consciousness of an objective world, we must understand the distinctive kind of doing that is recollecting. It is the key to understanding norm-governedness generally. We see it first in the discussion of intention (“Absicht”) in distinguishing things done from things that merely happen. For doing something is exercising one’s authority to make oneself responsible.

One of the lessons Hegel learned from Kant is to think of the representational dimension of discursive practice in normative terms. What is represented is what exercises a certain sort of authority, by serving as a standard for assessments of the propriety or correctness of what count as representings of it just in virtue of being in that sense responsible to it. (Besides this deontic dimension, we will see that norm-governedness also involves an alethic modal component. Representings ought to be subjunctively sensitive to how it is with what they represent. Recollection involves both.) The paradigm of norm-governedness is the relation intentions stand in to the deeds they motivate, rationalize, and control. The conceptual connection between the practical-agentive and the cognitive-representational species of norm-governedness is the role recollection plays in both, generically. Recollection is the distinctive form of practical rational activity that establishes the representational relations between how things are for consciousness (representings, senses, appearances, phenomena) and how they are in themselves (representeds, referents, realities, noumena). As we will see in Chapter 12, recollection is the core of Hegel’s expressive account of representation. It is the rational, rationalizing activity that institutes the relations between representing senses and represented referents. As such, it is sui generis, not to be assimilated either to sense-dependence or to reference-dependence relations. For the former relates senses to senses, and the latter referents to referents, while recollection relates senses to referents.

Conceptual idealism asserts the priority of recollective practical activity to the semantic representational relations constitutive of the intentional nexus between subjects and objects. The priority of the practice of recollection to the semantic relations that are constitutive of intentionality and consciousness is a priority both in the order of understanding and in the order of being. Recollection is what one must understand to understand representation and so the “distinction that consciousness essentially involves.” And it is what one must do in order to establish the intentional nexus, establish representational relations between thoughts on the subjective side of the intentional nexus and states of affairs on the objective side of the intentional nexus. It is what one must do to be conscious, in the sense of apperceptively aware. Realizing that, which is endorsing conceptual idealism, is the final form of semantic self-consciousness.

Conceptual idealism builds on and presupposes bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism and objective idealism. Both of those display symmetrical relations between the subjective and objective forms of conceptual contents. Conceptual idealism adds the idea of an asymmetrical priority of this recollective activity to both those kinds of symmetrical relations between the two poles of the intentional nexus.

Hegel does not explicitly identify or distinguish these various strands in his idealism, never mind under the rubrics I have given them. I think, however, that he subscribes to all three views, and that clarity is served by distinguishing them. Conceptual realism emerges in the course of the Consciousness chapters. It is on display already in Perception, in the way in which discussion of the metaphysics of objects and properties based on determinate negation opens up the issue of error [Täuschung] on the part of the perceiver (picking up on the discussion from the Introduction). Objective idealism is introduced already at the end of Force and Understanding, and provides the rationale for the expository transition to Self-Consciousness. Conceptual idealism becomes available only at the end of Reason’s discussion of intentional agency. We will have gathered all the conceptual raw materials needed to articulate it by the end of Chapter 12.

Some confirmation for the thought that conceptual idealism is a lesson to be gathered from an appropriate understanding of purposive action or intentional agency (that is, an understanding articulated in terms of the metacategories of Vernunft rather than of Verstand) can be found in the final substantive move of the Science of Logic. In its idiom, any understanding of the unity-comprising-diversity of thought and being is a version of “the Idea.” This is already a terminological commitment to some sort of idealism—perhaps conceptual idealism. Having seen how unpacking what is implicit in the theoretical Idea of knowledge requires us to investigate the practical Idea of purposive action, we are led by considering what is implicit in it in turn (via the “syllogism of immediate realization,” which is a more developed and explicit version of the “syllogism of external purposiveness” [SL 821]) to the Absolute Idea. For in the proper understanding of practical activity

the Idea of the Notion that is determined in and for itself is posited as being no longer merely in the active subject but as equally an immediate actuality; and conversely, this actuality is posited, as it is in cognition, as an objectivity possessing a true being.…

[I]n this result cognition is restored and united with the practical Idea; the actuality found as given is at the same time determined as the realized absolute end; but whereas in questing cognition this actuality appeared merely as an objective world without the subjectivity of the Notion, here it appears as an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Notion. This is the absolute Idea. [SL 823]

The issue is what it means to say that the subjectivity of the Notion [Begriff, or Concept] is the inner ground and actual subsistence [wirkliches Bestehen] of the objective world. Conceptual idealism is at least a candidate for an answer.

The absolute Idea has shown itself to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical Idea.… The absolute Idea [is] the rational Notion that in its reality meets only with itself.… The Notion is not merely soul, but free subjective Notion that is for itself and therefore possesses personality—the practical, objective Notion determined in and for itself which, as person, is impenetrable atomic subjectivity … it contains all determinateness within it.… Nature and spirit are in general different modes of presenting its existence. [SL 824]

Absolute idealism, I want to say, is what you get when you add conceptual idealism to objective idealism and bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism.

So as we turn our attention to Hegel’s Reason chapter, it is with the aim of understanding not only the account of intentional agency he develops there, but also, in terms of that account, the core of his idealism.

II. Two Sides of the Concept of Action: The Unity and Disparity that Action Involves

When he introduces the topic in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel says that the first determination of action [Handlung] is that “it must be known in its externality as mine,” and that the first right of action is that “the content of my action, as accomplished in immediate existence, is entirely mine.” [PR 113–114] The sense in which the action is mine, its ownedness, is (as are other property concepts) a normative one. It is a way of bringing into view a distinctive—indeed, as we shall see, paradigmatic—constellation of coordinate responsibility and authority: responsibility for a performance, predicated on authority over it. Taking that kind of responsibility, claiming that kind of authority, is acknowledging what is thereby classified as an action as an expression in the objective realm of the agent’s subjective individuality. It is identifying with what one in that distinctive sense does. For “the true being of man is … his deed; in this the individual is actual.” [PG 322] We saw in the discussion of Self-Consciousness in the previous chapters that being something for oneself in the distinctive sense of identifying with it is for Hegel a matter of being willing to risk or sacrifice on its behalf something of what one already is in oneself. In the case of action, that identification with what one does consists in risking and sacrificing some acknowledged commitments for the sake of others. Insofar as the commitments identified with are fulfilled by what is done, those doings have the status of concrete, objective actualizations of those abstract, subjectively endorsed norms—and thereby of the self-conscious individual agent who endorsed them.

The upshot of the discussions of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness has been that we must understand the sort of authority characteristic of agency in order to understand both the ways our empirical judgments are responsible for their correctness to the objective world they thereby count as being about (acknowledge the authority of) and the self-conscious individual subjects of theoretical and practical commitments, who acknowledge and exercise various kinds of conceptually articulated authority. The theoretical challenge confronting all of the forms of practical self-consciousness canvassed in Reason is to understand how the authority over what happens that is constitutive of agency can be genuine without being total. The model of authority as constitutive authority introduced to us by the allegory of Mastery sees attributions of independence (authority) as incompatible with acknowledgment of coordinate dependence (responsibility) that limits that authority. Until a better model is developed, the fact of what Hegel calls “the first division [Bruch] in action”—namely, “that between what is purposed and what is accomplished in the realm of existence”—[PR §114Z] constantly threatens to make practical self-consciousness “become a riddle to itself,” because “the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves.” [PG 365]

What we must learn is how the determinate contentfulness of the paradigmatic subjectivity-constituting authority (independence) exercised in purposive agency, is, when properly understood, not only compatible with responsibility to (dependence on) the objectivity-constituting recalcitrance of things—what drives a wedge between purpose and achievement—but is actually the product of what can then be seen to be this essential feature of the processes and practices of actualization-through-action of purposes, and so of individual self-conscious selves. Friction is a condition of experience; experience is a condition of conceptual progress; and conceptual progress, the process of determining conceptual contents, is a condition of their determinate contentfulness. We learned from the discussion of general recognition that the authority that is acknowledged when one is recognized requires recognizing others by acknowledging their authority in turn. Now we must see how this works out for specific recognition, the attribution of particular determinately contentful commitments and authority, which is what we are implicitly quantifying over in talking about general recognition: taking someone to be a subject of normative statuses and attitudes.

The basic problem with which the model of authority as Mastery (independence as constitutive authority) finds itself unable to cope is that of bringing together into an intelligible whole two aspects of the concept of intentional action that stand in at least apparent tension with one another. These are the unity of an action, as it develops from envisaged purpose to completed performance, and “the distinction and dichotomy that lie in action as such and so constitute a stubborn actuality confronting action.” [PG 793] The “unity and necessity” of an action are what constitute its identity. “The necessity of the action consists in the fact that purpose is related simply to actuality, and this unity is the Notion of action.” [PG 408]

Action alters nothing and opposes nothing. It is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and displayed is nothing else but what this action already is in itself. [PG 396]

Action simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit. [PG 401]¹

The Notion of this sphere requires that these various aspects be grasped in such a way that the content in them remains the same without any distinction, whether between individuality and being in general,

or between End as against individuality as an original nature,

or between End and the given reality;

or between the means and that reality as an absolute End,

or between the reality brought about by the agent as against the End,

or the original nature

or the means. [PG 400]

This unity is the true work. [PG 409]

It is a fundamental criterion of adequacy of an account of action that it explain how it is possible for me to succeed in actually achieving what I intend, in the same way and for the same reasons that it is a fundamental criterion of adequacy of an account of cognition that it explain how it is possible for me to succeed in knowing how things actually are. Accounts that do not meet these criteria of adequacy, incorporated in the concepts of action and knowledge, excavate an unbridgeable gulf between certainty and truth of the sort Hegel has told us in the Introduction it is his primary purpose to show us how to avoid. The danger is well illustrated on the side of knowledge by accounts that one-sidedly focus on the distinction that knowledge implies. Thus, noticing that we can think about what does not exist, one might conclude that in such cases, because what one is thinking about is not something actual, it is something nonactual, an ens rationis rather than an ens realis. But then, noticing that we cannot reliably tell the difference between the cases where we are thinking of something actual and those where we are not, one might conclude that the objects of our thoughts are not different in kind in the two sorts of cases.² At this point it becomes mysterious how we can think about anything actual at all. As Franz Brentano objected (a point his student Alexius Meinong apparently did not grasp), it is mysterious how if the object of one’s promise to marry is understood as an ens rationis, the promise could later be kept by marrying an ens realis. The fact that a thought can be false, or not about any actual objects, and that the thinker cannot in general tell these thoughts apart from true ones about actual objects, must not be permitted to render unintelligible the thinking of true thoughts about actual objects. Hegel would say that the possibility of such thoughts are part of the concept of thought. In the same way, the fact that an action can fail to actualize what is intended, indeed, can be the expression of an intention that could not be actualized, and that agents cannot in general tell the intentions that will be successfully actualized from those that will not, must not be permitted to render unintelligible the actualizing of intentions in successful action. This possibility of the identity of what is intended and what is achieved, of the certainty and the truth of action, is essential to its concept. This criterion of adequacy for accounts of practical agency corresponds to the requirement on theories of knowledge that they must make intelligible the possibility both of genuine knowledge and of error, which we considered in connection with the Introduction discussion of skepticism.

On the other hand,

Consciousness … in doing its work, is aware of the antithesis of doing and being.… This disparity between Notion and reality, which lies in its essence, is learnt by consciousness from experience in its work; in work, therefore, consciousness becomes what it is in truth … this [is the] fundamental contradiction inherent in work. [PG 406–407]

The simple original nature now splits up into the distinction which action implies. Action is present at first … as End, and hence opposed to a reality already given. The second moment is the movement of the End … hence the idea of the transition itself, or means. The third moment is … the object, which is no longer in the form of an End directly known by the agent to be his own, but as brought out into the light of day and having for him the form of an “other.” [PG 400]

Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself, the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [PG 365]

The concept [Begriff—Miller’s “Notion”] of action, as Hegel is presenting it, requires something that persists self-identically through it: what he in these passages calls its “content” [Inhalt]. It is the content that moves from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, that is initially implicit and later translated into something explicit, that remains the same without any distinction, unaltered and unopposed, altering only in its form. “Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and a movement.” [PG 396] The concept of action is also structured equally essentially by the distinction and difference between not being seen and being seen, being implicit as purpose and explicit as achievement, and of the transition or movement by which the content develops from one such state or form to the other. The moments of identity and difference, the unity and the disparity that action involve, are both crucial aspects of the concept of agency.

This is of course not the only time in rehearsing some of the principal episodes in the exposition of the Phenomenology that we have been challenged to construe a distinctive sort of identity-in-difference. The concept of consciousness was introduced as essentially involving the interplay of both a certain kind of coincidence or identity of its subjective pole of certainty with its objective pole of truth and a certain kind of disparity between them. The identity of the contents of our empirical cognitions, what individuates them, both on the side of objective states of affairs (“truth”) and on the side of subjective commitments or conceptions (“certainty”), was presented as consisting in their exclusive differences from (material incompatibility with or determinate negation of) other such contents. The identity of both self-conscious individuals and their communities was taken to be a product synthesized by processes and relations of mutual recognition among determinately different particular organisms.

The discussion of agency in Reason is of pivotal importance in the Phenomenology because we are to understand all of these sorts of identity-through-difference on the model and in the context of the sort of identity-in-difference that is the actualizing expression of individuality through its purposive activity. We are going to see in this chapter and the next in much greater detail how the historical-developmental structure first considered in connection with Hegel’s Introduction explains and articulates the relations between the incompatibility-consequential account of conceptual structure and the reciprocal recognition account of normativity. The distinction of social perspective between acknowledging a commitment oneself and attributing it to another plays a crucial role in the administration of the incompatibilities that provide the friction that drives the process of determination-by-development of conceptual contents. But that role can be understood only in the light of the paired reciprocally dependent senses in which, on the one hand, contents remain the same throughout that process, and on the other, alter as they move from one form to another. The concept of the content that shows up as the same throughout the expressive practical process by which what is implicit in the form of a subjective purpose becomes explicit in the form of an objective achievement is the notion of determinate content Hegel has been developing all along. Further, as promised earlier, the constellation of action as identical content and action as movement, transition, or development of the content is the key to understanding the doctrine of conceptual idealism concerning subject-constitutive processes or practices and object-constitutive relations.

III. Two Models of the Unity and Disparity that Action Essentially Involves

One natural way to think about the aspects of unity and disparity that action essentially involves is in terms of the distinction between success and failure. Judgment and belief essentially involve the acknowledgment of responsibility to how things actually, objectively are. Apart from their liability to normative assessment as to their correctness in the sense of truth or error, states and performances are not intelligible as cognitively significant. Intention exhibits the complementary direction of normative fit. For it essentially involves the assertion of authority over how things actually, objectively are to be. Apart from their liability to normative assessment as to their correctness in the sense of success or failure, states and performances are not intelligible as practically significant. We saw in Chapter 8 that primitive forms of such assessments are already an integral part of the triadic structure of orectic awareness, in which the normative structures of consciousness, self-consciousness, and community are rooted.

Practically sorting performances into successful and unsuccessful doings is implicitly acknowledging the two aspects of the concept of action. The distinction that action implies, between purpose and achievement, is in play because these are the elements one must compare in order to assess success or failure. And the unity essential to the concept of action—the fact that endorsing a purpose, adopting it as one’s own is committing oneself to a norm according to which the achievement ought to be what one intends—is just what sets the normative standard for success.³ Disparity of purpose and achievement is failure (in accomplishing what one intended to accomplish); identity of purpose and achievement is success (in accomplishing what one intended to accomplish). Because one cannot understand what intentional action is without understanding that such actions are essentially, and not just accidentally, subject to assessment as successful or failed, it follows that one cannot grasp the concept of intentional action without implicitly acknowledging the two aspects of that concept that Hegel distinguishes.

On a natural way of rendering these claims, the relations between the aspects of unity and difference that the concept of action involves has it that the question of whether those aspects are realized is to be answered differently for each particular performance. That is to say that the relation between the aspects is understood as local, contingent, and disjunctive. It is local in that the assessment of success or failure is made for each action, one by one. It exhibits identity of (content of) purpose and achievement in case it succeeds, and difference of (content of) purpose and achievement in case it fails. The possibility of disparity and the ideal of identity of content between purpose and achievement are universal, but those features are each actualized only in some actions. It is contingent whether any particular action succeeds or fails—for instance, whether, as I intended, the ball goes through the hoop. And the two aspects are disjunctively related (indeed, related by exclusive disjunction) because for any given action either the action succeeds, and so exhibits identity of content of purpose and content of achievement, or it fails, and so exhibits their disparity. I call this sort of account an “LCD” view of the identity-in-difference that structures the concept of action.

The LCD account is so commonsensical that it can be hard so much as to conceive of an alternative to it. Nonetheless, I do not believe that it is a view of this shape that Hegel is expressing. I think that his view of the identity-in-difference that structures the concept of action is rather global, necessary, and conjunctive. Assessment of success or failure in the ordinary sense—what I tendentiously call “vulgar” success or failure—is, although not completely irrelevant to understanding the unity and disparity that action involves, at any rate something that comes into the story only much later.⁴ According to a GNC account, every action (“globally”), as an action (“necessarily”) both (“conjunctively”) simply translates something inner or implicit into something outer or explicit, hence exhibiting the unity of action and the identity of content in two different forms, and necessarily involves an actual disparity between purpose and achievement (“the distinction that action involves”). On this view, if exhibiting the identity of content between purpose and achievement that is the unity of action is in some sense succeeding, and exhibiting a disparity between them is in some sense failing, then in order to understand the GNC approach to the identity-through-disparity of action we must appreciate a sense in which every action succeeds and another in which every action fails, regardless of its success or failure in the vulgar sense. And we must come to see these as two sides of one coin: as reciprocally sense-dependent concepts playing essential roles in the concept of intentional action.

Distinguishing these two sorts of models raises a number of questions. To begin with, how can we make sense of a model of agency of the GNC sort? What philosophical advantages might motivate adopting an account with the GNC structure rather than one with the LCD structure? What reason there is to think that Hegel actually is recommending a GNC-type account? How are we to understand vulgar success and failure if we construe agency in the GNC way? In particular, in what sense do even actions that succeed in the ordinary sense deserve to count as exhibiting the disparity that action involves? It clearly will not do to say that even though the content of what was intended and the content of what was achieved actually coincided, nonetheless they might, had things gone differently, have diverged. For even an LCD account says that. And in what sense do even actions that fail in the ordinary sense deserve to count as exhibiting the unity of content that action involves? Again, it clearly will not do to say that even though the content of what was intended and the content of what was achieved actually diverged, nonetheless it is their identity that was aimed at. For even an LCD account says that.

These questions will occupy us for the rest of this chapter. The key to the first three—the large philosophical and interpretive questions—is I think contained in the observation that LCD accounts take for granted a notion of determinate content, which can be exhibited indifferently by intentions and the performances to which they give rise. Thus I can intend to put the ball through the hoop (intend that I put the ball through the hoop), and I can put the ball through the hoop. The notion of assessments of vulgar success and failure, in terms of which both the unity and the disparity of intention and accomplishment are defined in LCD approaches, depends on the possibility of identifying and individuating the contents of intentions and achievements antecedently to the processes by which they are related in intentional action seeking to actualize those intentions in the form of achievements. But Hegel’s overall claim is that that notion of determinate conceptual contents is ultimately intelligible only in terms of the process of determining such contents—making them more determinate—by seeking the objective fulfillment of subjective practical commitments. If we are to understand the sense in which subjective commitments and the objective states of affairs they are fallibly responsible to or authoritative over are determinately contentful, we must understand how the processes and practices that are the exercise of intentional agency are intelligible both as the mere expression, revelation, and translation from subjective to objective form of already fully determinate contents and simultaneously as the means by which initially less determinate contents become more determinate: the process of determining conceptual contents. The former perspective is that of the unity of action and the identity of contents realized in it (on an account of the GNC type, in every action, whether it succeeds or fails in the ordinary sense), and the latter is that of the disparity of action and the difference between the content subjectively intended and the content objectively achieved (in every action, whether it succeeds or fails in the ordinary sense). The difference between an approach that presupposes a notion of determinate content without deploying the resources to make intelligible its nature, origin, or accessibility to finite knowers and agents, on the one hand, and one that concerns itself precisely with explaining determinateness of conceptual content and the processes and practices by which such contents arise, develop, and are deployed by knowers and agents, on the other hand is just the difference between the standpoint of Verstand and that of Vernunft, as those Hegelian meta-metaconcepts have been brought into view in this book.

IV. Intentional and Consequential Specifications of Actions

Hegel offers us strong statements of two views about action that starkly contrast and stand in at least apparent tension with one another: a broadly behaviorist, externalist view, which identifies and individuates actions according to what is actually done, the performance that is produced (cf. Anscombe’s “I do what happens”), and an intentionalist, internalist view, which identifies and individuates actions by the agent’s intention or purpose in undertaking them. According to the first view, the inner can be understood only in terms of its outer expression, so that it makes no sense to think of intentions as states whose content is related only contingently to, and so can diverge radically from, that of the performances to which they give rise. “Action simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit.… Consciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become explicit for it.… An individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action.” [PG 401] “The deed [Tat] is the actual self,” [PG 464] and the agent “only gets to know … his End, from the deed.” [PG 401] “The deed does away with the inexpressibility of what is ‘meant.’ ” [PG 322] If the content of the inner intention is settled by what is true of the actual external performance that expresses it, then it is epistemically available, even to the agent, only retrospectively.

Therefore, feelings of exaltation or lamentation, or repentance are altogether out of place. For all that sort of thing stems from a mind which imagines a content and an in-itself which are different from the original nature of the individual and the actual carrying-out of it in the real world. Whatever it is that the individual does, and whatever happens to him, that he has done himself, and he is that himself. He can have only the consciousness of the simple transference of himself from the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, from the abstract in-itself into the significance of actual being. [PG 404]

The analysis of this being into intentions and subtleties of that sort, whereby the actual man, i.e. his deed, is to be explained away again in terms of a being that is only “meant,” just as the individual himself even may create for himself special intentions concerning his actuality, all this must be left to the laziness of mere conjecture. [PG 322]

A final index passage expressing this perspective explicitly maintains that the point is not affected by acknowledging the possibility of vulgar failure:

From what has now been said, we may learn what to think of a man who, when blamed for his shortcomings, or, it may be, his discreditable acts, appeals to the (professedly) excellent intentions and sentiments of the inner self he distinguishes therefrom. There certainly may be individual cases where the malice of outward circumstances frustrates well-meant designs, and disturbs the execution of the best-laid plans. But in general even here the essential unity between inward and outward is maintained. We are thus justified in saying that a man is what he does; and the lying vanity which consoles itself with the feeling of inward excellence may be confronted with the words of the Gospel: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” That grand saying applies primarily in a moral and religious aspect, but it also holds good in reference to performances in art and science … if a daub of a painter, or a poetaster, soothe themselves by the conceit that their head is full of high ideals, their consolation is a poor one; and if they insist on being judged not by their actual works but by their projects, we may safely reject their pretensions as unfounded and unmeaning. [PM 140]

Hegel wants to bring into view a sense in which a bad painting, poem, or novel cannot be understood as the botched execution of a fine aim or plan, but must be understood rather as showing exactly what its creator actually intended—however it might seem to its author.⁵ Just how we are to understand this in the light of the acknowledged possibility of such contingencies as slips of the brush remains to be seen. But the perspective Hegel seeks to put in place here is not just a casual literary flourish or a mistake we are eventually to see through. It is an absolutely central and essential feature of the model of expression—making the implicit explicit—that plays such a crucial role in structuring his understanding of the relations between the subjective and the objective in both action and cognition.

It is also clear, however, that it is not the whole story. There are “two aspects possessed by the practical consciousness, intention and deed (what is ‘meant’ or intended by the deed and the deed itself),” [PG 319] and each must be given its due.

It is the right of the will to recognize as its action [Handlung], and to accept responsibility for, only those aspects of its deed [Tat] which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which were present in its purpose [Vorsatz]—I can be made accountable for a deed only if my will was responsible for it—the right of knowledge. [PR §117]

Elsewhere Hegel makes the same point under the heading of the “right of intention”:⁶

So far as the action comes into immediate touch with existence, my part in it is to this extent formal, that external existence is also independent of the agent. This externality can pervert his action and bring to light something else than lay in it. Now, though any alteration as such, which is set on foot by the subjects’ action, is its deed [Tat], still the subject does not for that reason recognize it as its action [Handlung], but only admits as its own that existence in the deed which lay in its knowledge and will, which was its purpose. Only for that does it hold itself responsible. [PM 504]

Indeed, distinguishing within the action some elements for which the agent is responsible from others for which the agent is not responsible is one of the achievements of modernity:

The heroic self-consciousness (as in ancient tragedies like that of Oedipus) has not yet progressed from its unalloyed simplicity to reflect on the distinction between deed [Tat] and action [Handlung], between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances, or to analyse the consequences minutely, but accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety.⁷

The distinction between Tat and Handlung is the distinction between what is done as an actual event, performance, or (as we will see is most important to Hegel) process—something that happens—and those features in virtue of which it is a doing—something normatively imputable to the agent. This latter is what Hegel calls “the first determinate characteristic of an action: that “in its externality it must be known to me as my action.” [PR §113]

What makes what is done (the deed) mine—that is, an action, rather than just something that happens—is its relation to a purpose. For the concept of action includes “the right that the content of the action as carried out in immediate existence shall be in principle mine, that thus the action shall be the purpose [Vorsatz] of the subjective will.” [PR §114] The passages concerning the identity of content of the outer deed and the inner state it expresses previously rehearsed invoked the intention [Absicht] expressed, rather than the purpose. So corresponding (at least roughly) to the Tat / Handlung distinction in Hegel’s account is an Absicht / Vorsatz distinction.⁸ The content of the feature of an action that Hegel calls its “purpose” need not extend to everything the developed deed contains, while the content of the feature of an action that Hegel calls its “intention” does extend to everything the developed deed expressing it contains. The distinction among features of the deed that is induced by the purpose is what determines the deed as the agent’s doing, in the normative sense of being something the agent is responsible for. What the agent thereby becomes responsible for (doing) is the whole deed (what is done). And that fully developed deed reveals an intention that extends beyond what is merely “meant” or purposed.

What has been said up to this point in this section is a sketch of some of the most general features of the idiom Hegel develops to talk about practical agency. It is not yet an attempt to say how we should understand these distinctions and claims and what might entitle one to talk that way. It will be best to elaborate in stages this complex view of agency as a process of expression, development, and objective actualization, in terms of which we are to understand Hegel’s distinctive notion of the content that action “translates” from a subjective to an objective form. At the most basic level, I think it ought to be understood as having a Davidsonian structure.⁹ There are five basic elements of Davidson’s theory of action that seem to me helpful in beginning to understand Hegel’s. Davidson starts by developing a way of talking about events (such as the performances that result from exercises of agency) according to which:

1. One and the same event can be described or specified in many ways.

Further,

2. One important way of identifying or singling out an event is in terms of its causal consequences.

Thus, moving one’s finger, flipping the switch, turning on the light, and alerting the burglar can all count as specifications of one single event. As the effects of an event unfold, each new concentric ripple surrounding it makes available new ways of specifying it by the causal contribution it made to the occurrence of those later events. It is simply not settled yet whether the investment I made yesterday will eventually be identifiable as “the wisest financial decision I ever made,” or “the most foolish,” or (more probably), something less dramatic in between. We will just have to await the results. Davidson calls the way the potential descriptions of an event expand with the passage of time “the accordion effect.”

3. Some, but not all, of the descriptions of an action may be privileged in that they are ones under which it is intentional.

Flipping the switch and turning on the light were intentional, while alerting the burglar (of whom I was unaware) was not. Buying a bond issued by company XYZ was intentional, while buying a bond issued by a company that would go bankrupt the following week, which might be a description of the very same event, would not have been intentional.

4. What makes an event, performance, or process an action, something done, is that it is intentional under some description.

Alerting the burglar and buying the bond of a soon-to-be-bankrupt company are things genuinely done, even though they were not intentional under those descriptions. For they were intentional under other descriptions of the same event: turning on the light and buying an XYZ bond. The performance is an action under all its descriptions and specifications, including all the distant, unforeseeable, consequential ones that come in under the accordion principle. But what makes it an action is that it was intentional under some such specifications.

5. What distinguishes some descriptions as ones under which a performance was intentional is their role as conclusions in processes of practical reasoning.

Turning on the light and buying an XYZ bond were things I had reasons to do, provided by ends, purposes, or goals I endorse, commitments I acknowledge, or values I embrace. Those reasons in the form of ends, purposes, goals, commitments, or values provide premises for potential pieces of practical reasoning justifying the practical conclusion that I ought to bring about an event satisfying a description such as being a turning on of a light or a buying of an XYZ bond—but not being an alerting of a burglar or a buying of a bond of an incipiently bankrupt company. That securing the applicability of those descriptions is in this way practically justifiable is what makes them the ones under which what I go on to do is intentional, and hence counts as an action.

The structure of this account is quite different from one that identifies three distinct kinds of events standing in sequential causal relations: prior internal intentions or states of intending, actions, and consequences of those actions. The place of distinct occurrences of intendings and consequences has been taken by different descriptions of the one thing done: intentional and consequential ways of picking out the same doing. That is why it makes no sense to talk about an intention apart from what was done intentionally.¹⁰ What qualifies an occurrence as an action—something an agent is responsible for—is the existence of a privileged subset of specifications. And they are privileged precisely by their normative relation to the agent. Specifically, they are justified by practical reasons whose normative force or validity the agent acknowledges.

My first interpretive suggestion is that Hegel’s “Tat” refers to the deed done, with all of its accordioned descriptions, and that his “Handlung” is that same deed as the agent’s doing—that is, as specifiable by the restricted set of descriptions under which it is intentional, and hence something done at all. Here is a crucial passage of Hegel’s that puts together a number of the Davidsonian theses:

Action has multiple consequences in so far as it is translated into external existence; for the latter, by virtue of its context in external necessity, develops in all directions. These consequences, as the shape whose soul is the end to which the action is directed, belong to the action as an integral part of it. But the action, as the end translated into the external world, is at the same time exposed to external forces which attach to it things quite different from what it is for itself, and impel it on into remote and alien consequences. The will thus has the right to accept responsibility only for the first set of consequences, since they alone were part of its purpose [Vorsatz]. [PR §118]

Endorsement of the accordion principle, and so of the Davidsonian principles 1 and 2, is implicit in saying that the action’s consequences, the action as an external existence developing in all directions, are an integral part of the action.¹¹ This deed is what the action is in itself. But what the action is for itself is determined by the subjectively envisaged end or goal it serves, the purpose for which it is performed. In Davidsonian terms, the purpose settles the specifications under which it is intentional (principle 3, which are the ones in virtue of which the deed is recognizable as the agent’s (principle 4), in the sense that they are the ones in virtue of which the agent is responsible for what is done. (This is the “right of knowledge” distinctive of modern conceptions of agency, by contrast to those presented in ancient tragedy, further adverted to in the preceding passages.) Thus considerations of responsibility induce a distinction within the consequential specifications of the actual performance produced. The end or purpose endorsed (principle 5) is translated into the external world in the shape of the deed in the sense that the purpose it justifies provides descriptions of the very same deed that also has consequential descriptions under which it is not intentional.

The deed posits an alteration to this given existence, and the will is entirely responsible [hat Schuld] for it in so far as the predicate “mine” attaches to the existence so altered.… But responsibility involves only the wholly external judgment as to whether I have done something or not; and the fact that I am responsible for something does not mean that the thing can be imputed to me. [PR §§115, 115H]

The deed is what I do under all its descriptions. I am responsible for it in the sense that it is “mine”: I did it. But it is imputed to me only under the intentional descriptions: the ones appearing in a specification of my purpose, the descriptions that specify the deed as something I had reason to do.

Indeed, it is just the failure to appreciate this point about the necessary unity of action—the expression (translation) of the inner in the outer as the actualization of the purpose in that intentional specifications and unintentional consequential ones specify the same actual deed—that characterizes the defective forms of practical self-consciousness rehearsed in the Reason chapter:

Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself: the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [PG 365]

For the consequences of the deeds to be the deeds themselves is just for the accordion principle to apply. For what befalls consciousness (the consequential specifications of its deed under which it is not intentional) to be for consciousness what consciousness is in itself is for the specifications under which the deed is intentional (specifications in terms of its endorsed purpose, expressing the agent’s taking responsibility for a doing) to be acknowledged as specifications of the very same deed that also has external consequential descriptions.

Hegel calls the unity that action exhibits as concept and content the “Sache selbst,” which Miller translates as “the very heart of the matter.”¹² The concept of action, the norm according to which it is assessed as such, when adequately conceived is the concept of a unified content that is expressed in action, not only in spite of the disparity of form between the action as implicit in thought or intended and as explicit in actuality or accomplished, which is what is meant by the contingency of action, but as itself consisting in the relation between those disparate moments.

The Sache selbst is only opposed to these moments in so far as they are supposed to be isolated, but as an interfusion of the reality and the individuality it is essentially their unity.

It is equally an action and, qua action, pure action in general, hence just as much an action of this particular individual; and this action as still his in antithesis to reality, is a purpose.

Equally, it is the transition from this determinateness into the opposite, and, lastly, it is a reality which is explicitly present for consciousness. The Sache selbst thus expresses the spiritual essentiality in which all these moments have lost all validity of their own, and are valid therefore only as universal, and in which the certainty consciousness has of itself is an objective entity, an objective fact for it, an object born of self-consciousness as its own, without ceasing to be a free object in the proper sense. [PG 410]

The unity or identity of content in contingent action that is the Sache selbst is not the identity of something that is what it is independently. It is a unity forged out of moments of independence and moments of dependence. Contingency, the manifestation of the dependence of the action on the circumstances of the performance and the talents and material means available is somehow to be incorporated integrally into the unity that is the Sache selbst.

The “distinction that action implies” is “that between what is purposed and what is accomplished in the realm of existence.” [PR §114Z] More specifically, when we look at the internal articulation of the process that in its unity we identify as an action:

The simple original nature now splits up into the distinction which action implies. Action is present at first … as End, and hence opposed to a reality already given. The second moment is the movement of the End … hence the idea of the transition itself, or means. The third moment is … the object, which is no longer in the form of an End directly known by the agent to be his own, but as brought out into the light of day and having for him the form of an “other.” [PG 400]

The broadly Davidsonian understanding of this “splitting up” of the action can be exploited so as to explain how the deed, unfolding consequentially beyond the ken or compass of the purpose of the agent, can nevertheless be acknowledged by the agent as the agent’s doing—so that the agent does not in its practical activity “become a riddle to itself.” We have learned from the discussion of Self-Consciousness that this sort of practical self-consciousness is what we must understand (phenomenologically) and achieve (phenomenally) in order to be for ourselves what we are in ourselves. (When fully explicit, it will be what Hegel calls “Absolute [Self-]Knowing.”) The Davidsonian suggestion is that the division of action into its aspects is a matter of different ways of specifying one event or performance—or, put in a theory-laden terminology whose Hegelian version is emphasized and developed in the next chapter, different senses with the same reference.

But how does Hegel understand the difference between the different kinds of what I have been calling “descriptions” or “specifications” of the deed? The short version of the answer I offer here is, first, that it is a distinction of social perspective, between the agent, who acknowledges a specifically contentful responsibility, and an audience, who attributes and assesses it. Second, that difference of social perspective is a normative one in a dual sense. What they are perspectives on is a normative status: a question of the imputation of a specific responsibility. And the perspectives are defined by distinct seats of authority concerning the characterization of what the agent is responsible for. Third, the ultimate determinate identity (unity) of the content of the action—what we should understand as common to its inner (in the Hegelian sense of implicit, rather than the Cartesian sense of epistemically transparent) form and the outer (in the Hegelian sense of explicit, rather than the Cartesian sense of epistemically opaque) form that translates, actualizes, and expresses it—is the product of a process of reciprocal specific recognition, in which the competing complementary socially distinct authorities negotiate and their claims are adjudicated and reconciled.

The distinction that action implies is, on the Davidsonian line being pursued, a distinction between intentional and consequential characterizations of one and the same deed. We can already see in this way of setting things out the basis for Hegel’s claim that ethical theories that assess the rightness of actions exclusively on the basis of the purposes for which they were performed and ethical theories that assess the rightness of actions exclusively on the basis of the consequences to which they give rise are equally “one-sided.” The two sorts of assessments ought rather to be seen as two sides of one coin, at least in the sense of being reciprocally sense dependent. We are now asking after the nature of the whole that necessarily comprises these two aspects of practical activity. The essentially social character of that distinction shows up if we think about who is in a normative position—who has the authority—to offer specifications of the two sorts. To say that the deed or work is actual is to say that it is public, available to all. The truth of the performance, what it is in itself, is expressed in all of the descriptions of what is actually achieved, all the specifications of the content in terms of its consequences. These descriptions are available in principle to anyone in the community to recognize the performance under or to characterize its content. “The work is, i.e. it exists for other individualities.” [PG 405] For others, who witness or hear about my action (coming to know about it in any of the various ways we come to know about actual occurrences), what my deed is can be said of it. [PG 322]

Actualization is … a display of what is one’s own in the element of universality whereby it becomes, and should become, the affair of everyone. [PG 417]

The consequential descriptions specify what the action is for others, and for the agent qua other—that is, as recognizing and assessing his own action via his empirical consciousness of it as an actuality.

The work produced is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is explicitly for himself what he is implicitly or in himself, and in such a manner that the consciousness for which the individual becomes explicit in the work is not the particular, but the universal, consciousness. [PG 405]

The universal consciousness is that of the community, as opposed to the individual agent. The other members of the community can describe what it is that I have done; they can specify what I have achieved or accomplished. Accordingly, the distinction between what I intended and what I accomplished, between what the performance is for me and what it is in itself, takes the form of the distinction between what it is for me and what it is for others.

The actuality available to all is the explicit form of the commitment the agent has undertaken in acting. But what makes the commitment, and so the action, the agent’s (the moment of certainty) is his acknowledgment of it as such. And for that the specifications under which the agent endorses it have special authority, not shared by those who merely observe the results of that endorsement. These are the specifications under which it is intentional. We can look at this notion in terms of its circumstances and consequences of application. What in this distinctive way privileges the association of some descriptions of the deed with the doer is that they are the ones that appear as conclusions of processes of practical reasoning endorsed by the agent. For example: It is dark. I need to see. Turning on the light will enable me to see. Flipping the switch will turn on the light. So I shall flip the switch. The agent’s endorsement of such practical reasoning may have been explicitly attached to its actual rehearsal as part of an antecedent process of deliberation leading up to the performance, or it may be implicit in a disposition to trot it out when challenged to give reasons for the performance. The consequences of application of the concept description under which the performance is intentional are that these specify the content of the commitment the agent takes himself to be acknowledging in producing the performance. The performance is intentional under those descriptions the agent is prepared to acknowledge himself as responsible for it under, apart from any knowledge of the descriptions that become available only with its being actualized—specifically, descriptions of it in terms of its consequences. These are the descriptions under which the agent is petitioning the community to be specifically recognized as responsible for the performance.

Both of these socially distinguished recognitive elements—the descriptions under which the agent specifically recognizes or acknowledges himself as responsible, and those under which the community specifically recognizes the agent as responsible—are essential to the unity and identity of the action. Hegel discusses this sort of identity-in-difference, this socially articulated reciprocal specific recognitive achievement, under the rubric of the “Sache selbst.”¹³ The concept of action being invoked is the concept of a unified content that is expressed in action, not only in spite of the disparity of form between the action as implicit in thought, or intended, and as explicit in actuality, or accomplished, but as itself consisting in the relation between those disparate moments induced by the process of reciprocal specific recognition (acknowledgment and attribution of a determinately contentful commitment).

The Sache selbst is present as the in-itself or the reflection into itself of consciousness; the supplanting of the moments by one another finds expression there, however, in their being established in consciousness, not as they are in themselves, but only as existing for another consciousness. One of the moments of the content is exposed by it to the light of day and made manifest to others; but consciousness is at the same time reflected back from it into itself and the opposite is equally present within consciousness which retains it for itself as its own. [PG 416]

It is doings that one is responsible for. Something must be done for it to be intentional under any description. (So no deed, no intention, i.e., nothing intentional.) What is done is exposed to the light of day (actualized, expressed, made explicit) in the sense of existing for other consciousnesses, being made manifest to others.

The result is that the agent is specifically recognized by those other subjects. The deed is attributed to the agent under consequential descriptions as the explicit expression of a determinately contentful implicit commitment. “What the deed is can be said of it,” and the ones for whom it is something that can be said of it are “others, for whom it is something actual and observable, like any other fact.” [PG 322] The content is what is both acknowledged by the agent and attributed by the community: the product of a process of reciprocal specific recognition. The content of my action accordingly does not depend on me alone. It is not just what I take it or make it to be, but depends as well on its determinate acknowledgment by others who attribute to me responsibility for the performance specified in ways that go beyond those in terms of which I made it mine.

Consciousness experiences both sides as equally essential moments, and in doing so learns what the nature of the Sache selbst really is, viz. that it is neither merely something which stands opposed to action in general, and to individual action.… Rather is its nature such that its being is the action of the single individual and of all individuals and whose action is immediately for others, or is a Sache and is such only as the action of each and everyone: the essence which is the essence of all beings, viz. spiritual essence. [PG 418]

The spiritual [geistig], in Hegel’s usage, is the normative substance that is socially synthesized by a process of reciprocal specific recognition (which shows up not only as “action” and “work,” but also as “experience”). The recognitively constituted character of the determinately contentful practical commitments whose intentional and consequential specifications (subjective and objective forms) are said to stand in relations of “translation,” “actualization,” and “expression” is explicitly acknowledged by (and forms the principal progressive insight of) the phenomenal form of understanding of agency that Hegel discusses under the heading of “conscience”:

The existent reality of conscience, however, is one which is a self, an existence which is conscious of itself, the spiritual element of being recognized and acknowledged. The action is thus only the translation of its individual content into the objective element, in which it is universal and recognized, and it is just the fact that it is recognized that makes the deed a reality. The deed is recognized and thereby made real because the existent reality is directly linked with conviction or knowledge; or, in other words, knowing one’s purpose is directly the element of existence, is universal recognition. [PG 640]

The Sache selbst is a spiritual expression of individuality, compounded out of the moment of independence displayed by the particular deliberating self-consciousness in privileging some specifications of its responsibility as the descriptions under which the performance is intentional, and the corresponding moment of dependence on the universal or assessing consciousness in characterizing in consequential terms the achievement and so what one has actually accomplished and so is responsible for in that sense. Contingency, the manifestation of the dependence of the action on the circumstances of the performance and the talents and material means available, is somehow to be incorporated integrally into the unity that is the Sache selbst.

V. Practical Success and Failure in the Vulgar Sense: The Vorsatz / Absicht Distinction

But it can hardly be said that we yet understand just how this is supposed to work, how the social recognitive perspectives of agent and audience, deliberation and assessment are taken to be combined. How are we to understand the promised identity of the determinately contentful commitment that, it is claimed, is forged as the product of the acknowledgment of the practical commitment couched in the subjective terms of intentional specifications and the objective attribution of that commitment couched in the objective terms of consequential specifications? For in spite of the distinctively modern acknowledgment of a “right of knowledge” or “right of intention,” alerting the burglar or buying a bond of an incipiently bankrupt company are things I genuinely do, albeit unintentionally. They are not just accidents, or things that happen to me. That notion of doing involves some sort of responsibility. Yet it seems on the face of it that it is a different sort of responsibility from that associated with what I did intentionally. What, exactly, is the relation between the acknowledgment of responsibility articulated in agent-privileged intentional descriptions and the attribution of responsibility articulated in audience-privileged consequential descriptions? How are we to understand the sense in which these are two perspectives on one content? We need to put more pieces of the puzzle on the table in order to see how one could explicate and become entitled to the commitments implicit in the idiom that results from understanding the Tat / Handlung distinction along Davidsonian lines, elaborated recognitively in terms of socially distinct seats of authority and responsibility.

These are still-open questions about how to understand the unity of accomplished deed and intended doing that every action as such necessarily involves, according to the concept of action, on Hegel’s view. We are, by contrast, at this point in a much better position to explain the disparity that every action as such necessarily involves. It is the social-perspectival disparity between intentional and consequential specifications of the action, which will characterize even actions that are fully successful in the vulgar sense. For it is never the case that the purpose or end an agent acknowledges or endorses encompasses every true specification of what is actually achieved. If for no other reason, this is so because the purpose and the end must by their very nature be general, and so abstract, while what is actually accomplished must by its very nature be fully determinate—that is, concrete. Another way of putting the same point is that while the ways of picking out the performance for which the agent is responsible under which it is intentional (those subjectively authoritative ways available in the context of deliberation) can be at best definite descriptions, the ways of picking it out in terms of its consequences (those objectively authoritative ways available in the context of assessment) can be demonstrative specifications: “He made that mess.”¹⁴ Pointing out that this disparity characterizes even vulgarly successful actions satisfies what in Section III I called a “GNC” (globally necessary conjunctive) view of the relations between the conceptual unity of actions and the distinction that action as such implies. The other half of that conjunctive requirement, however, is the claim Hegel affirms in the passage cited earlier:

There certainly may be individual cases where the malice of outward circumstances frustrates well-meant designs, and disturbs the execution of the best-laid plans. But in general even here the essential unity between inward and outward is maintained. [PM 140]

Even in actions that in the vulgar sense count as failures, there is a single, constant content for which the agent is responsible in both the intentional and the consequential senses, or from those points of view, or showing up in those forms.

But how, at this point, should we understand the distinction between success and failure, even in the vulgar sense in which I fail to achieve my purpose to turn on the light if my finger misses the switch and fail to achieve my purpose to pour water if in reaching for the pitcher I knock it over? On the Davidsonian story told so far, a performance must be intentional under some description in order to count as an action at all. And that means that some intentional description is true of it, which might be paraphrased by saying that some intention must be fulfilled by it. Even if I miss the switch, the performance is intentional under the description “moving my finger.” Even if I knock the pitcher over, the performance is intentional under the description “moving my arm.” So in what sense are these actions failures?

One way to begin to answer this question is to notice that there are many descriptions to which the agent is committed to the performance being intentional, even in the toy examples invoked here. I do not just intend to move my finger, I also intend to flip the switch and to turn on the light. I do not just intend to move my arm, I also intend to grasp the pitcher and to pour the water in the glass. And if we look at the practical reasoning that has these intentional descriptions as conclusions, we see that these intentional descriptions are not just an undifferentiated bundle or set. The relation between the descriptions of ends that serve as premises and the various purposed descriptions (the ones that I have practical reason to make true) induces an instrumental structure. I intend to turn on the light by flipping the switch, and I intend to flip the switch by moving my finger. I intend to pour the water by gripping the pitcher, and I intend to grip the pitcher by moving my arm. In the cases envisaged here, the actual performance is not intentional under those descriptions (it does not have those consequential descriptions), because they are not true of what I actually achieve.

Whereas theories of action of the sort epitomized by Davidson’s find their paradigmatic actions in momentary, punctiform events such as flipping a switch or letting go of a rope, the paradigms of the actions Hegel addresses are to be found rather in complex, extended processes such as writing a book or properly burying a slain brother. Such processes develop according to a distinctive kind of internal normative structure. That is why, in the passage quoted four paragraphs earlier, Hegel refers to “well-meant designs” and “best-laid plans.” In all except degenerately simple cases (indeed, even in the case of intending to turn on the lights or pour water in the glass) one plans to realize one purpose by realizing others that function as instruments or means to that end. (Even when talking about events rather than actions, his paradigms are complex events such as the French Revolution.¹⁵) And those subgoals may be subserved in the plan by further sub-subgoals. So the intention endorsed does not in the general case consist of a single description under which the performance is to be intentional, but something more like a tree structure or flowchart in which the performance-description nodes are linked by intended means-end connections.

This thought is the basis for Hegel’s distinction between purpose [Vorsatz] (and the closely related end [Zweck]), on the one hand, and intention [Absicht], on the other.

An action as an external event is a complex of connected parts which may be regarded as divided into units ad infinitum, and the action may be treated as having touched in the first instance only one of these units. The truth of the single, however, is the universal; and what explicitly gives action its specific character is not an isolated content limited to an external unit, but a universal content, comprising in itself the complex of connected parts. Purpose, as issuing from a thinker, comprises more than the mere unit; essentially it comprises that universal side of the action, i.e. the intention. [PR §119]

The “complex of connected parts” is structured as a plan, articulated by an instrumental “by” relation. Even in the very simplest sort of example, one intends to achieve the purpose of turning on the lights by flipping the switch, and intends to flip the switch by moving one’s finger. “The action may be treated as having touched in the first instance only one of these units” in that the rest are consequential descriptions of the action that is intentional under this initial description. If things go wrong, contingencies intervene (one’s finger misses the switch, the switch is broken, and so on), then those consequential descriptions may not, as planned, be true of the doing that is intentional under the specification “moving one’s finger.”

What Hegel calls the “intention” associated with an action encompasses the plan that prospectively links what is immediately done (the unit the action may be treated as having in the first instance touched) with the purpose aimed at. It is a “universal” in that it comprises all of the “units” [Einzelheiten] into which the process can be divided. The content of the action is not to be identified solely either with the initial immediate means adopted or with the purpose whose realization is eventually aimed at, but with the plan-structured intention of which they are elements.

The universal quality of the action is the manifold content of the action as such, reduced to the simple form of universality. But the subject, an entity reflected into himself and so particular in correlation with the particularity of his object, has in his end his own particular content, and this content is the soul of the action and determines its character. [PR §121]

The particular, subjective content of the action (what one decided to do) is the content of the Vorsatz, while the universal, manifold (articulated) content of the action as planned is the Absicht (which includes how one decided to do it). What is intended is the whole structure (the universal), not just the end or purpose aimed at, nor (at the other end of the planned process) the immediate initial means adopted:

Actuality is touched in the first instance only at one individual point (just as in arson the flame is applied directly only to a small portion of the wood. [PR §119Z]

[W]hat the arsonist sets on fire is not the isolated area of wood an inch wide to which he applies the flame, but the universal within it—i.e. the entire house. [PR §132Z]

This Vorsatz / Absicht distinction gives Hegel a theoretical way of saying what vulgar success and failure of actions consists in. An action succeeds in this sense if the consequential descriptions that are true of it include the purpose whose achievement is the endorsed end in the service of which all the other elements of the intention-plan function as means. An action fails in this sense if, although some things are done intentionally, i.e., as part of the plan, the purpose is not achieved, because the means adopted do not have the consequences envisaged. (In a further, subtler, subsidiary sense the action can be said to fail if, although the purpose or end, which was endorsed as the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, was achieved, the welfare [Wohl] or interest appealed to as a premise in that reasoning was not satisfied. But this level of assessment need not concern us here.)

Even an action that fully succeeds in this sense—in which the actual process unfolds through the successive realization of subsidiary ends serving as means to the realization of the final purpose exactly according to plan (i.e., as intended)—still necessarily exhibits “the disparity that action involves.” For even in such a case, there remains the distinction between Handlung and Tat: between the plan-structured instrumental constellation of realized descriptions under which what is done is intentional and the deed, comprising the whole panoply of consequential descriptions, unfolding to the infinite future, which, whether originally envisaged or not, were not elements of the intention structure, but are elements of what one did in realizing that intention. So at this point we can see the rationale behind one half of what in Section III I call the “GNC” (for global, necessary, conjunctive) reading of the structure of identity-in-difference characteristic of agency on Hegel’s view: the claim that that every action, whether a success or a failure in the vulgar sense that the motivating purpose or end aimed at was realized or not, exhibits both the unity and the disparity that action, by its very concept, involves. For at this point it should be clear how the combination of the Davidsonian reading of the Tat / Handlung distinction and a rendering of the distinction between success and failure in terms of the plan-structure understanding of the Vorsatz / Absicht distinction together underwrite the claim that even fully successful actions necessarily exhibit the “disparity that action involves.”

VI. Identity of Content of Deed and Intention

It remains, then, to ask in what sense it is that even failed actions should be understood to exhibit the necessary unity that action involves. We were told that even in such cases there is an identity of content between intention and achievement. In what sense does such a failure to realize the intended purpose “simply translate an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit”? [PG 401] In what sense can we say of it that it

alters nothing and opposes nothing. It is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and displayed is nothing else but what this action already is in itself. It is implicit: this is its form as a unity in thought; and it is actual—this is its form as an existent unity. Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and movement. [PG 396]

The Tat / Handlung distinction already entails that “actions, in their external existence, include contingent consequences.” [PR §120Z] But Hegel is claiming something much stronger. The contingencies to which the process of trying to realize a purpose is subject are somehow to be understood as features of the content that are retrospectively discernible as always already having been implicit in the intention. That is why, for instance, “Consciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become explicit for it.… [A]n individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action.” [PG 401] And, as we have seen, Hegel explicitly tells us that failed actions are not to be considered exceptions to the conceptual truth that in action one and the same content appears in two forms, once as intention and once as actuality. Here is a passage from the part of the Rechtsphilosophie that presents the Tat / Handlung and Vorsatz / Absicht distinctions we have been considering:

It is certainly the case that a greater or lesser number of circumstances may intervene in the course of an action. In a case of arson, for example, the fire may not take hold, or conversely, it may spread further than the culprit intended. Nevertheless, no distinction should be made here between good and ill fortune, for in their actions, human beings are necessarily involved in externality. An old proverb rightly says, “The stone belongs to the devil when it leaves the hand that threw it.” By acting, I expose myself to misfortune, which accordingly has a right over me and is an existence of my own volition. [PR §119H]

The issue is not always couched in terms of the unity or identity of content to be found within the distinction between Handlung and Tat, or between purpose and achievement. We have already seen that this difference corresponds to a difference in social perspective, between the specifications under which the agent undertakes or acknowledges responsibility (those occurring as elements in the plan-structured intention instrumentally governed by an avowed purpose or endorsed end) and those available to a potential audience that attributes responsibility (consequential specifications, which in principle can never be restricted to what is envisaged as playing a role in the intention). We are asking after the nature of the unity of the practical commitment on which these are two perspectives. The necessary disparity of these perspectives Hegel denominates “the finitude of the will.” [PR §117H] He says: “The development in the realm of existence of the contradiction which is contained in the necessity of the finite is simply the transformation of necessity into contingency and vice versa.” [PR §118Z] “Necessity” is his way of talking about a norm. The intention functions as a norm that governs the process of realizing a purpose. So another way of putting the question, besides that of identity-in-difference, concerns how determinate actualities (“contingencies”) are understood to be subjected to such a norm, and how the norm is realized by those contingencies. The way this works for the case of agency will then be available to serve as a model of the process in terms of which we are to understand the relation of necessity to contingency (norm to actuality) through which determinateness arises or is revealed as traditions of concept application develop. We will see in the next section, as was already suggested in the discussion of the Introduction of the Phenomenology, that the key to the development / expression of determinate conceptual norms through the incorporation of contingency in agency is the distinction of historical perspective between prospective and retrospective perspectives on actions (the distinction between purposes and intentions).

As a first step toward that result, we need to look more closely at the sort of development intentions exhibit as part of the process of being realized. For a further, functional-instrumental sense of “success” and “failure” arises in that connection. An action is successful in the ordinary, nonphilosophical sense just in case the purpose for the sake of which it was performed and in virtue of which the performance is intentional (and so a doing at all) ends up as one of the consequential specifications of that doing. Looking at the microstructure of the action process reveals a distinctive sort of evolution. Any prior intention that is successfully fulfilled must progress to a demonstratively specifiable performance: “I will raise my arm in one minute,” “I will raise my arm in thirty seconds,” “I raise my arm now.” But at this point in the process, the general description can also be replaced by a demonstrative specification: “I do this now.” The realization of any particular subgoal (one “unit” of the extended action for which the intention serves as a norm) must include an evolution of intentional specifications from the less definite to the more definite, from more general descriptions to completely particular demonstrative specifications. I start off with reasons leading me to endorse the purpose of making it true that φ(t), say, that the north wall has a doorway in it. But to carry through the intention that governs the process of achieving that end, I must eventually reach a phase in which I intend to do this, here, now—say, nail this board between these two here, now. I cannot merely make true the further determinable, abstract, general description that expressed the content of my original commitment, without doing so by making true a fully determinate, concrete, demonstrative specification.

Sense Certainty offered an account of observational language entry moves. These are responses to things that are not subjective processes (that is, processes engaged in or undergone by a subject) of applying determinate concepts; the responses—endorsing observational or perceptual claims—are subjective processes of applying determinate concepts by the immediate production of mediated judgment. An essential feature of such observational or perceptual processes was seen to be the transition from unrepeatable demonstrative specifications (“Night now,” “Tree here”) to repeatable, hence potentially inferentially significant, expressions (“Night then,” “Tree there”). The link between them was anaphoric: a matter of picking up the demonstratives by using pronouns having them as antecedents. (Though “then” and “there” also have demonstrative uses, it is their anaphoric uses that matter for “recollecting” other demonstrative uses so as to make them subsequently available—in general, after redemonstration is no longer possible—for use as premises in inferences.) This was the first sort of recollection (Erinnerung—cf. [PG 808]) mentioned in the body of the Phenomenology. The anaphoric link is a matter of the acknowledged authority of the antecedent over the content of the anaphoric dependent, the pronoun’s responsibility to its antecedent for what it expresses.

This historical, normative, inferential structure linking unrepeatable demonstrative tokenings and repeatable anaphorically dependent tokenings on the cognitive or theoretical side of a subject’s activity provides conceptual raw materials that are helpful also for thinking about the maturation of a prior general purpose into a later concrete doing on the practical side of a subject’s activity. In this case, what matters is the sense in which an earlier description of what is to be done can be thought of as inheriting some of its content from the later demonstrative specification of what is done, on which it is understood to be anaphorically dependent. To begin with, in the case of successful actions, the demonstratively specifiable performance that fulfills the purpose or intention can be thought of as what was aimed at all along: “I meant to do that,” or “That is what I intended to do.” That switch flipping was intended—even though another might have done as well.

By way of analogy, consider how one might think of the phenomenon of speaker’s reference in terms of demonstratives and anaphora. To consider a classic case, suppose I say “The man in the corner drinking champagne is an economist,” in a situation where the man I am looking at and mean to be talking about is actually drinking ginger ale, and, unbeknownst to me, there is another man in the corner who is drinking champagne. Of whom have I claimed that he is an economist? The expression I have used to express my commitment semantically refers to, picks out, and is true of the second man. But besides this semantic reference, we can also acknowledge a speaker’s reference to the first man. For I have a whole battery of terms that I could have used to pick out the man I wanted to make a claim about: “that man,” “the man in the corner I am looking at, who is drinking a clear, bubbly liquid,” and so on. I took it that all of these pick out the same individual. And to say that I meant to be talk about him is to say that if I had realized there was an issue about the coreference of these expressions, I would have picked another, less committive expression. In the case described, I have demonstrative specifications of the one I am talking about. Understanding me as speaker-referring to someone other than the one I was semantically referring to is understanding my definite description as anaphorically dependent on one of those possible demonstrative specifications (or, in other cases, on some other description I could have used), and so as inheriting its content from that demonstrative, rather than functioning as an ordinary, nonanaphoric description.

We can distinguish between what I meant and what I said. But in fact we are talking about two ways of specifying the content of one saying. I said that the man in the corner drinking champagne is an economist. But I said of the one drinking ginger ale that he was an economist. One of the lessons of Sense Certainty is that I cannot merely or immediately mean one or the other of them. I can do that only with conceptual mediation, by having some other inferentially articulated and significant specification available. And we can see in this case that the distinction between what I said and what I was talking about—in the sense of what my words semantically referred to and what they speaker-referred to—arises only from a third-person point of view. I cannot myself at the time of utterance separate my speaker-reference from my semantic reference. That requires adopting the perspective of someone else, someone who has different information than I do, someone who can attribute a different responsibility to me than that I acknowledge, by linking my utterance anaphorically to other possible utterances of mine. But, from that third-person point of view, there are two ways to assess the commitment I have made, the responsibility I have undertaken by my claim.

And this phenomenon on the theoretical side of cognition is mirrored on the practical side of agency. The distinction between the success and failure of an action, in the ordinary sense, is underwritten by looking at the semantic reference of the descriptions that I would acknowledge as expressions of my purpose. This is the dictum that I am trying to make true, the de dicto specification of my purpose. And if that same description does not occur in the consequential characterizations of the deed that encompasses my doing, then I have failed. But there is another sense, in which whatever I actually did determines the content of my intention, under the actual circumstances in which I acted. Under the actual circumstances, having the purpose I did amounted to intending to do that—whatever I actually achieved. Intending to turn on the light by flipping the switch was under the actual circumstances in which I intended it, though unbeknownst to me, intending of a particular burglar alerting that I do that. Compare: My claiming that the man in the corner drinking champagne is an economist was, in the actual circumstances, though unbeknownst to me, claiming of a man drinking ginger ale that he is an economist. (Of course, we could also say that, unbeknownst to me, I claimed of a man who is not an economist that he is an economist, just as we could say that I intended of doing something that would not turn on the light—namely, flipping the unbeknownst-to-me broken switch—to turn on the light by doing that.) A failed action is one where the initial purpose only, as it were, speaker-referred to what I go on to do, but does not semantically refer to it.

In this sense, the content of the responsibility I have undertaken in the form of my intention is inherited from the actual deed. Here the thought is that it is the very same intention that matures from being describable in the most general terms, “turning on the light by flipping the switch” to being specifiable in the most immediate demonstrative terms “doing this now.” From this point of view—not available to the agent ab initio—the final demonstrative picks out what we were all along referring to. Prospectively, the agent can pick it out only by descriptions that may or may not semantically refer to it. But retrospectively we can tell what the actual content of the intention was, given the possibly unknown circumstances in which it was to be actualized. Responsibility in this sense is attributed by discerning a kind of forward anaphora: where the expression uttered earlier in a discourse inherits its content from an antecedent uttered only later in the discourse.

This is one sense in which “[c]onsciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become explicit for it.… [A]n individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action.” [PG 401] The contingent, immediate circumstances in which one undertakes a commitment by endorsing a general description are from this point of view incorporated in the content of that commitment, even where they outrun what one has envisaged. If the colonel orders the captain to move his company of soldiers to the far side of the river by daybreak, and, though the colonel does not know that, the only way to obey that command is to cut down sixty trees to build a bridge, then the colonel has in fact, whether he knows it or not, ordered the captain to cut down sixty trees and build a bridge. For, in the actual circumstances, that is what the content of his order turns out to be. He has ordered that the captain take the company across the river by daybreak, and has thereby ordered of cutting down sixty trees and building a bridge that the captain do that.

The disparity that action necessarily involves is the social-perspectival distinction of loci of authority that distinguish between Handlung and Tat: the endorsed acknowledged purpose that the agent is authoritative about, in virtue of which what happens is an action at all, and the consequential specifications that necessarily outrun any specification of purpose available in advance of the actual doing. This is the distinction between what one intended that one do and what one thereby intended of that one do that. The unity that action necessarily involves is the unity of content that takes these two forms. “Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and a movement.” [PG 396] In intending in actual circumstances that one make true the claim that p, there is always something of which one thereby intends to do that. These are two normative perspectives on one action: the intentional and the consequential. (Cf. “the two aspects possessed by the practical consciousness, intention and deed.” [PG 319]) The content of the action can be specified either de dicto (“that”), in terms of the purpose that authorized it, or de re (“of”), in terms of what was thereby in fact authorized. Understanding the concept of action requires understanding actions as unities that necessarily involve this distinction of perspective, and understanding those perspectives as perspectives on one content. The content of the intention, in Hegel’s use of “Absicht,” is the content of the action. The purpose and the accomplished deed are then two perspectives on that content. To understand Hegelian intentions, we must look more closely at how a complex action such as writing a book or constructing a house (the sort of doing Hegel takes as paradigmatic) develops.

VII. Further Structure of the Expressive Process by Which the Intention Develops into the Deed

The intention that, as a norm, governs the process of achieving an end can be thought of as a universal content discernible in all phases of that process, from implicit initial subjective endorsing of the end to its explicit objective achievement. One way in which such an intention can develop so as to culminate in the successful actualization of its purpose is as the gradual, sequential realization of a tree-structured plan, in which various means are envisaged as sufficient for the achievement of (say) sub-subgoals, collections of those as sufficient for the achievement of subgoals, and the subgoals as sufficient to achieve the endorsed end. If the plan is a good one, and nothing goes wrong, then all the various sub-subgoals will be achieved, and by their means, in sequence, the subgoals, and so in the final phase, the ultimate aim. Perhaps in the first stage, the ground is excavated and a concrete foundation prepared and poured. That makes possible the framing of the building in the next stage, its enclosure at the next, exterior and then interior finishing, until all is complete. Each of those stages will involve pursuing myriad subgoals—for instance, framing door and window cut-throughs during rough-in so that the doors and windows can be installed during the enclosure phase. In such a case, the plan remains intact and unchanging. Its development consists simply in actualizing each of its components in appropriate sequence, as planned. The plan is a good one just in case it is possible to fulfill all of the subgoals it envisages, and fulfilling all those subgoals is sufficient to achieve the overarching end.

This is not the only way an initial plan can lead to a successful conclusion, however. For the fact that under the actual, initially incompletely known, circumstances some subgoal is not achievable (or not achievable within the limits of time and other resources allotted by the plan), or that realizing all the sub-subgoals thought to be sufficient to accomplish some subgoal turned out not to do the trick, need not be fatal to the success of the overall enterprise—need not lead to failure to fulfill the intention or achieve the ultimate end. Failure to achieve a subgoal need not be fatal to the whole enterprise. For the internal details of the plan may be adjusted, depending on how things turn out in actuality, so as to find another path to the same ultimate goal. The plan had been to use construction adhesive to attach the sills to the floors, but it turned out not to be strong enough. Countersunk screws were used instead, and the sills remained firmly attached, as desired. As the plan had been to attach the sills firmly by using construction adhesive, the plan had also been to do that by spreading the adhesive evenly over both surfaces and clamping them overnight. The spreading and clamping were accomplished successfully, but doing that turned out not to be a way of attaching the sills firmly to the floors, as had been planned. Thus, just as failure to achieve a subgoal need not be sufficient for failure to achieve the goal to which it is plan related as a means, so success in achieving a subgoal need not be sufficient for success in achieving the goal to which it is plan related as a means.

This is what Hegel talks about as “the cycle of action” in which individuality “exhibits itself simply and solely as the unity of the world as given and the world it has made.” [PG 308] Fulfilling a complex intention is a cyclical process of intervention according to a plan aimed at a goal, observation of the results of the intervention, adjustment of the plan, further intervention, further observation of its results, and so on. It has the dynamic structure of a Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) loop. This is the form of processes by which necessity is incorporated into contingent actuality—that is, an endorsed end is actualized (“the world it has made”). It is also through processes with this structure that contingency is incorporated in necessity, in that the norm (plan) governing the process changes in response to actual circumstances and achievements (“the world as given”). If we compare the plans operative at different times during such a process, they are liable to be different. This is the “character of action as a transition and a movement.” [PG 396] The ultimate purpose, end, or goal remains constant during the process (unless it is abandoned, a possibility whose significance is discussed later). But the unitary content that is to be contrasted with that “transition and movement” is more than just the content of that subjectively endorsed goal. It is also the content of the intention [Absicht] that is being realized. That is, the intention should not be identified with the plan operative at any one time slice of the TOTE cycle of action. The plans change, but the intention endures. For “the intention is the universal content of the action,” [PR §114Z] that which is common to all its particular phases. The certainty of the intention—its subjective side, that about which the agent is authoritative, that in virtue of which what is done is acknowledged as the agent’s own—is the endorsed end or purpose. But “the truth of intention [the objective side, about which others are equally authoritative] is only the act itself.” [PG 159]

The deed is not, except in the most degenerate cases, a punctiform, momentary event such as a muscle twitch. (And this is not because its consequential descriptions unfold into an indefinite future; that much is so even of achievements that are all there at a single time.) Writing a book, teaching a student, building a house, putting on a dinner party, and so on, these better, more representative, examples of actions, are all processes with a rich temporal—indeed, more specifically historical—structure. It is the TOTE structure of a cycle of action in which the plan in force at any given time (endorsed as the current expression of a practical commitment) changes from stage to stage. At each time slice in the evolution of the action, the then-operative plan stands to the purpose as the concrete, worked-out, contingency-incorporating, determinately contentful practical norm for actualizing that abstractly envisaged end. The content of the intention should then be understood as standing to the whole process, in relation to the guiding purpose, as the plan adopted at any one stage is to that time slice of the process, in relation to that same purpose. It is the concrete, worked-out, contingency-incorporating, determinately contentful practical norm for actualizing that abstractly envisaged end, regarded as something whose content does not change as its instantiation in the form of plans does change.¹⁶

To pick an example of particular relevance to this project, consider Hegel’s intention in writing the Phenomenology. I think there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Hegel altered his plan for writing that work, as Michael Forster argues in Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit.¹⁷ Initially, Hegel seems to have envisaged writing a book whose body fell into three parts: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason. Only these “forms of consciousness” seem to be anticipated in the Introduction, written before the rest of the book. In his 1808–1809 Nuremberg version, we go directly from such a three-part summary into a summary of the Logic. The later Encyclopedia (PM) version does not include any version of the chapters on Spirit, Religion, or Absolute Knowing. And the details of the odd, multiple tables of contents seem to speak for the same conclusion. There seems to have been an initial plan for labeling A-Consciousness, B-Self-Consciousness, and C-Reason, but C was then split up into (AA)-Reason, (BB)-Spirit, (CC)-Religion, and (DD)-Absolute Knowing. At some point during the writing of the Reason section, he evidently decided to expand his conception to include the last three chapters, and made a new plan. If we ask, however, whether Hegel wrote the book he intended to write, it seems fair to take into account his own theory of intention. The intention expressed in an extended project of this sort is to be inferred from the accomplishment—the Absicht governing the Handlung from the Tat. For pursuing the initial plan to realize his purpose, in the context of the contingencies that arose in the pursuit of all of the myriad subsidiary expository goals, led to the development of the plan as it became more determinate. Hegel as I am reading him is happy to say that this is a process of finding out what the actual content of his intention had been all along.

In this case, not only the plan, but also the purpose changed in the course of the project. In launching into the chapter on Spirit, Hegel—let us suppose—has decided to embed his prior discussion of empirical conceptual commitments (inferentially developed from language entry moves in perception), the normative subjects of those commitments, and practical conceptual commitments (inferentially developing into language exit moves in action) in a story of the social structures (“objective spirit”) within which they appear as aspects of the cycle of individual perception, thought, and action. And he decides also to add the last two chapters, indicating how religion, art, and philosophy (“absolute spirit”) develop in their understanding of both subjective and objective spirit. The original purpose, to write a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” (the title he gave the book at the time he wrote the Introduction), now becomes a subordinate element of a larger purpose, to write a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Each is still subordinated to a still larger purpose, to serve as an introduction to (in the sense of a way of motivating and preparing a reader to plunge into, rather than what he later decided he had misleadingly called the “first part of”) systematic philosophy, whose proper exposition was to begin with its logic. Indeed, we can think of Hegel’s plan for securing his enduring purpose of introducing the system whose first proper part was the logic as having changed. His first idea was to do that by writing a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” and his later idea was to do it by writing a “Phenomenology of Spirit,” which included the former plan as a proper part.

Notice that each of these purposes and plans—some subordinate to or nested in others, some adopted at different times during the process of realizing others—provides a context within which we can assess the functional success or failure of the project of achieving a subgoal. Thus it could be, for instance, that as written, the Reason chapter failed to make the contribution necessary for the exposition of a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” containing it to serve as a proper introduction to the system, while it succeeded in making the contribution necessary for the exposition of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” containing it to serve as a proper introduction to the system—or vice versa. (I am not now endorsing either of these alternatives, merely pointing them out as hermeneutic possibilities intelligible within the successive-plan structure of intentionally pursuing an extended project.) Suppose that the local purpose of writing the Reason chapter was explaining how one and the same state of affairs could be recognized as at once having the subjective significance for me of being mine, my doing, the content of my (practical) commitment, and the objective significance of being in itself what it actually is. Hegel’s success or failure to achieve this purpose in the ordinary sense is in principle compatible with either the success or failure of the chapter in the functional sense, with respect to any of the various larger enterprises to which it could be thought of as contributing: writing a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” or writing a “Phenomenology of Spirit” (in part by writing a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness”) and introducing the system by doing one or both of those things. Hegel says that, in contrast to the purpose or end, the “particular aspect which gives the action its subjective value and interest for me,” when the local, particular purpose is put into a larger context,

the immediate character of an action in its further content is reduced to a means. In so far as such an end is a finite one, it may in turn be reduced to a means to some further intention, and so on in an infinite progression. [PR §122]

Each larger, or newly adopted goal provides a new context with respect to which the instrumental contribution, and so the functional success or failure, of each prior achievement can be assessed. These assessments are essentially retrospective, as indeed are assessments of ordinary success or failure at achieving the most local purpose. But because there is no end in principle to the progression to larger or later purposes, it is never too late for a new context to arise within which a previously failed (in the vulgar or the functional-instrumental sense) project can count as successfully contributing to the realization of a plan.

Even the abandonment of a previously endorsed end—perhaps as a result of persistent failure to achieve it—can, when later suitably recontexted, come to have the significance merely of a change of plan for achieving a larger or later purpose. The development of an intention by the alteration of a plan involves sacrificing some commitments—to the rejected plan, perhaps to some of the subgoals it endorsed—and thereby identifying with others. We saw in the discussion of Self-Consciousness that the process by which self-conscious individual selves constitute themselves (in a recognitive community) is a process of relinquishing or altering, in general sacrificing some commitments in favor of other, incompatible ones, which one thereby counts as identifying with. We are now in a position to see that intentional action is a process that has just this self-constituting structure. The process of carrying through an intention is a process of self-determination or self-constitution: making oneself into a (more) determinately contentful self by identifying with some commitments and rejecting others. That is why “what the subject is, is the series of its actions,” [PR §124] “individuality is the cycle of its action,” [PG 308] and “an individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action.” [PG 401] The very same process that is the exercise of intentional agency is at the same time the expression of self-conscious individuality. “[T]he essential nature of the work … is to be a self-expression of … individuality.” [PG 403]

Expression is a process in which what is implicit is made explicit. “The work produced is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is explicitly for himself what he is implicitly or in himself.” [PG 405] What is implicit is a determinately contentful practical commitment. Its explicit form is the actual deed. The passage continues: “[A]nd in such a manner that the consciousness for which the individual becomes explicit in the work is not the particular, but the universal, consciousness.” For although what makes the deed the agent’s own, an expression of what that agent implicitly is (committed to), is something over which the agent has authority—via his acknowledgment or endorsement of a purpose and the sacrifices and identifications he makes in the course of actualizing it by working out an intention—the deed thereby done is public and available to anyone. The agent’s consequential descriptions have no more authority to determine the content of the intended deed than anyone else’s. Quite generally for Hegel, content is attributable as implicit only from the point of view of its explicit expression. That is why the deed is the index of the intention. We want to use what we have learned about agency to understand this paradigm of the expressive relation: the difference of form that one and the same content takes in intention and deed. A principal orienting criterion of adequacy is understanding what Hegel is after in a key passage, appealed to in introducing the hylomorphic model:

Action … is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and is displayed is nothing else but what this action already is in itself. It is implicit: this is its form as a unity in thought; and it is actual—this is its form as an existent unity. Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and a movement. [PG 396]

We have been unfolding some of the fine structure intentional action exhibits as “a transition and a movement.” How can we begin to fill in what is added by the model of expression to our understanding of the other side, the necessary identity of content in two different forms (the unity that the concept of action involves)?

One place to start is with the observation that once agency is understood as necessarily being the expression of self-conscious individuality, that the individual self-consciousness express itself by working to fulfill its practical commitments can itself be thought of as a kind of overarching end or purpose, to which one is implicitly committed simply by exercising intentional agency.

The activity of individuality, all that it does, is in its own self an End … the present, real existence of the process of individuality. [PG 393]

Individuality in its setting-forth or expression is, in relation to action, the End in and for itself. [PG 394]¹⁸

The important point is that if we think of this as an overarching aim, to which whatever one does is instrumentally subordinate, then it has the distinctive feature that in realizing this goal the agent “encounters no resistance from the actual world.” For from this point of view, self-consciousness is

reality in the form of an individuality that directly expresses itself, an individuality which no longer encounters resistance from an actual world, and whose aim and object are only this expressing of itself. [PG 359]

For expressing self-conscious individuality is not something one can try to do and fail. It is part of the concept of agency that whatever one does is the explicit expression of what the individual agent implicitly is. From the point of view of Verstand’s focus on the vulgar, finite conception of success and failure, actuality shows up in the form of stubborn recalcitrance: opacity to knowledge of contingent consequences and resistance to the realization of determinate purposes. The distinction that action involves is to the fore. By contrast, from the perspective afforded by treating the expression of individual self-consciousness in its work and deeds as a purpose with respect to which the instrumental contribution of determinate purposes can be assessed, actuality shows up as a transparent medium of self-expression.

The element in which individuality sets forth its shape has the significance solely of putting on the shape of individuality; it is the daylight in which consciousness wants to display itself. [PG 396]

From this point of view, then, objective actuality just is the medium of self-expression. In practical agency, expression is actualization. What one is implicitly for oneself becomes explicit as something actual, something with a nature in itself, available in that form for others, as well as for oneself in this new form.

Now, explicitly expressing in the medium of actuality what an individual self-consciousness implicitly is is not just one more determinate purpose, which an agent might or might not endorse, at the same level as writing a phenomenology of Spirit, building a house, or putting on a dinner party. It is clearly a second-order phenomenon, in this way like the “purpose” of accomplishing one’s purposes. That one, too, is one that any intentional agent could be said implicitly to endorse, though unlike self-expression, it is not one that is guaranteed to be satisfied. Both are really ways of talking about the structure of agency as such, rather than something peculiar to any particular exercise of it.

But is there any point to thinking of self-expression as self-actualization as itself an end, especially given its immunity to failed attempts to realize it? Why isn’t it just a misleading façon de parler? The point for Hegel seems to be the way of thinking about the objective realm of how things actually, concretely, contingently are in themselves that he sees this expressive idiom opening up: as the artist’s raw materials, the medium, the theater of self-expression and self-realization. Explicating this idiom of expression through actualization by the exercise of intentional agency is to complete the three-stage metaconceptual progression in ways of conceiving how things stand between the subjective idiom of certainty and the objective idiom of truth. It comprises these successive claims:

Conceptual realism: the ontological homogeneity of content between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness. Both are conceptually structured—that is, articulated by incompatibilities and consequences (mediation and determinate exclusive negation). (Notice that because conceptual content can take these two different forms, things are not by this thesis identified with ideas.)
Objective idealism: the reciprocal sense-dependence of the concepts by which we characterize objective relations of incompatibility and consequence, on the one hand, and subjective processes of resolving incompatibilities and drawing inferences, on the other. (Notice that because sense-dependence does not entail reference-dependence, the objective world is not taken to depend for is existence—for instance, causally—on the existence of processes of thinking.)
Conceptual idealism: the constellation of objective, conceptually articulating relations and subjective, conceptually articulating processes should be understood in the first instance in terms of the recollective phase of the process that is the cycle of intentional action (perception-thought-action-perception), and only derivatively in terms of the relations induced by that process. (Notice that because this thesis still addresses our understanding of contents articulated by subjective processes and contents articulated by objective relations, although it can be put, in the idiom of the Preface, in terms of “conceiving Substance as Subject”—though it would be better to say “substance-and-subject on the model of the activity of subjects”—this is not to construe inanimate things as conscious.)

The account we have been exploring retails what intentional agency, and therefore self-conscious individuality, is in itself, or for us—Hegel’s phenomenological audience. He says of the point at which what it is implicitly becomes explicitly what self-consciousness is for itself that

Self-consciousness has now grasped the Notion of itself which, to begin with, was only our Notion of it … the negative self-consciousness in which Reason first made its appearance [the ordinary, finite conception of action as succeeding or failing in the vulgar sense] is set aside; this self-consciousness came face to face with a reality supposedly the negative of it, and only by overcoming it did it realize its End. But since End and intrinsic being [Ansichsein; the content of a practical commitment as subjectively endorsed] have proved to be the same as being-for-another and the reality confronting it [the objective circumstances and achievement], truth is no longer separated from certainty.… On the contrary, intrinsic being and End in and for itself are the certainty of immediate reality itself, the interfusion of being-in-itself and being-for-itself, of the universal and individuality. [PG 394]

Intentional agency as the explicit expression in the medium of actuality of implicitly acknowledged commitments is to give us a model for understanding the sort of process by which universality and particularity give rise to individuality. For in practical agency,

individuality is precisely the actualizing of what exists only in principle … it is in fact really the conversion of the good, as a mere End, into an actual existence; the movement of individuality is the reality of the universal. [PG 391]

An abstract, ideal, merely generally describable end or purpose—a universal—in the context of particular, contingent, actual circumstances, defines a determinate demonstratively specifiable deed, performance, or achievement, which exhibits an individual content: particularity as characterized by universality. The process that links the subjective form of that content on the side of certainty, the individual intention, and its objective form on the side of truth, the individual deed, is the self-development, self-expression, and self-actualization of the individual self-consciousness. The universal (purpose) that governs this process as a norm is the implicit necessity that becomes explicit by incorporating into itself the contingency of setting, available means, powers, and so on.

This is all by way of filling in a little the claim that the explanatory stakes and aspirations for the expressive idiom for characterizing agency are very high. The principal criterion of adequacy for making this expressive model work harks back to the original characterization of it as the paradigm of holistic identity-articulated-by-difference. We must understand why conceptual contents—the sort of thing shared by intentions and actual accomplishments—are essentially and in principle the sort of thing that shows up in two complementary forms. Regarded prospectively, from the point of view of the initially endorsed purpose, the move from implicit to explicit is one of change. The content of the intention evolves and develops, becoming more definite and determinate under the influence of the actual circumstances in which the intention is realized, as plans are formulated, implemented, amended, or replaced. Regarded retrospectively, from the point of view of the finally achieved result, the move from implicit to explicit is one of revelation of the content of an intention that was all along present, albeit in some sense (visible only retrospectively) implicitly. The question is how to understand the determinateness of conceptual content in such a way that these two aspects appear as two sides of one coin: as essential, mutually presupposing perspectives on one fundamental kind of conceptual content-process.

Chapter 11

Hegel’s Expressive Metaphysics of Agency