According to the claim I have been calling “conceptual idealism,” the second-order relations between what things objectively are in themselves and the experiential processes in which they show up as something for consciousness are to be understood in the first instance in terms of those subject-constitutive empirical-practical processes: Erfahrung, now understood as the cycle of action-and-cognition, culminating in the recollective rational reconstruction of the experience. This thesis is the assertion of an asymmetrical explanatory priority of subjective processes over objective relations, downstream from (added to, built on top of) the symmetrical reciprocal sense-dependence relations discussed under the heading of “objective idealism.” The relations between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves are the relations between phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality, as Hegel construes them. In this chapter, I want to explicate the doctrine of conceptual idealism by showing what mutual illumination results from understanding recollection also as underwriting an account of the relations between sense and reference.

Talk of phenomena, the way things appear to us, what they are for us, is talk about the kind of understanding of them we exhibit by applying concepts to them in judgment and action. Frege uses the term “sense” [Sinn] for what we grasp that presents objects and their relations to us—what makes them something for us. In virtue of grasping those senses, having Fregean thoughts, we come to stand in referential relations to the objects and relations that are thereby presented to us. The referents determined by and presented to us by those senses are the objective things and relations our thoughts and (so) judgments are about. To say that the referents are what we are talking and thinking about, what we are acting on, is to say that it is those things and their relations that set standards for the normative assessment of the truth of our judgments, the material correctness of our inferences, and the success of our actions. Just so, how things are in themselves (noumena, reality) determines how they ought to be for consciousness (phenomena, appearance). Again, our judgments should be subjunctively sensitive to how things really are with what we are making judgments about. If the referents were different, it should be the case that the contents of our judgments would be different. A suitable mapping of Hegel’s semantic vocabulary onto a more contemporary neo-Fregean one will enable us to see Hegel as offering a novel, interesting, and potentially valuable expressive account of the relations between the concepts sense and reference. It will also, along the way, vindicate the theoretical appeal, made in Chapter 7 and thereafter, to those apparently un-Hegelian notions in explicating Hegel’s views—in the form of the notions of sense-dependence and reference-dependence.

Frege’s notions of sense and reference are his theoretical renderings of two semantic dimensions that are familiar already from our ordinary, presystematic ways of talking and thinking about our talking and thinking. For we distinguish what we are saying or thinking from what we are talking or thinking about. The first dimension concerns the content expressed by an utterance, and is paradigmatically conveyed by the use of a “that” clause: “He said that Goethe was most proud of what he was least successful in doing.” The second dimension concerns what is thereby represented as having certain properties or standing in certain relations, and is paradigmatically conveyed by the use of “of” or “about” phrases: “He was thinking of (or about) Goethe’s scientific work on color.” The term “intentionality” in contemporary philosophical parlance is often used generically, so as to invoke both species. John Searle, for instance, offers this pretheoretical delineation of the subject matter of his book Intentionality: “[I]f a state S is Intentional then there must be an answer to such questions as: What is S about? What is S of? What is it an S that?”¹ A principal task of semantic theories is to say how “that” intentionality and “of” intentionality ought to be understood to be related to one another.

For Frege, words express senses, which is what we in the first instance understand. The senses of declarative sentences are thoughts: things that can be assessed as true or false. To do that job, it must be that by expressing a sense, words represent referents: the things one is thereby talking or thinking about. The senses semantically fix or determine the referents. In virtue of that semantic relation, senses have the cognitive significance of being modes of presentation of their referents. They are accordingly representings of those representeds. What the sense expressed by a word refers to, what is represented by it, what it is about, is whatever settles the truth-value of the thoughts expressed by sentences in which that word is used. Judging, taking a thought to be true, is taking things to be as the sense represents them as being. Frege says it is “an advance from thought to truth-value.”

What we talk and think about, what we refer to, what is represented when we apply concepts in judgment and action, is what things are in themselves, how things really are. The contents of our representings, what we express and grasp, what presents those represented things to us, is what things are for us, how they appear. Phenomena are appearances to (or for) us of the noumena: what things really are, in themselves—that is, apart from any consideration of their relation to us, including how they show up for us. In the Science of Logic, the Wesenslogik (the “Doctrine of Essence,” which is the second phase of the logic) applies wherever there is a distinction between Sein and Schein, between reality (being) and appearance. (The third and final phase, the Begriffslogik, or “Doctrine of the Concept,” applies when one looks at developmental sequences of Sein / Schein distinctions—which is just where our exposition is heading.) At the metatheoretical level, Hegel presents his account of the relations between phenomena and noumena, things as they are for consciousness and things as they are in themselves, appearance and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, in the form of a phenomenology. That is to say that we start with the ways those relations appear to us, with the various philosophical and logical idioms we have actually used in our attempts to understand those relations. And the eventually adequate understanding of the reality—how things really stand between how things are for consciousness and how they are in themselves (a view that comprises at least the nested or layered doctrines of conceptual realism, objective idealism, and conceptual idealism)—is to emerge from consideration of dynamic features of the expressive development of those appearances (“shapes of consciousness”) as retrospectively and retroactively recollected. One of the most basic principles structuring the reading of Hegel that I have been presenting—the strategy of “semantic descent”—is that this feature of Hegel’s methodology for approaching philosophical concepts mirrors the view we are ultimately to achieve of the way ordinary, ground-level empirical-practical concepts work.

In particular, his account of concept application in judgment and action is phenomenological, in virtue of the explanatory asymmetry it accords to the two fundamental semantic dimensions. We are to start with phenomena, with how things are for consciousness, with how they seem or appear, with the contents we grasp and express. The idea that there is some way things really are, in themselves, the concept of what is represented, what we are thinking and talking about by grasping and expressing those contents, is to be understood in terms of features of those contents themselves. The representational dimension of concept use is to be explained in terms of what it is to take or treat conceptual contents as representings, what it is for them to be representings for or to us. Reference is to be explained as an aspect of sense. The way in which the very idea of noumena is to be explicated and elaborated from features of the historical trajectory by which phenomena (conceptual contents) develop and are determined is the essence of Hegel’s distinctive version of the semantics of sense and reference. Of course, Frege does not understand his two basic semantic concepts as independent elements that can yield an intelligible theory simply by being formally conjoined or bolted together. On the one hand, senses cognitively present referents to the one who uses expressions of those senses. On the other hand, senses semantically determine the referents. One of the conceptual challenges faced by broadly Fregean semantic theories is explaining what these cognitive and semantic relations consist in, and reconciling them as aspects of one relation between senses and referents. One of the features of Hegel’s semantics that seems to me potentially of interest in the contemporary philosophical context is the novel and interesting response to this challenge provided by his recollective phenomenological account of representation. This is explaining representational relations in terms of expressive processes of making what is implicit ever more explicit.

Of course, Hegel’s understanding of what corresponds to the Fregean notion of sense is in crucial ways quite different from Frege’s. To begin with, Hegel is a holist about the conceptual contents we grasp in thought and express in speech and action. As we have seen, for Hegel conceptual contents are identified and individuated by their place in a network articulated by relations of material incompatibility and (so) material inference (determinate negation and mediation). Grasp of them consists in the capacity to move around in that network according to those relations, acknowledging their normative force in the experiential process of resolving incompatible commitments, both practical and cognitive, extracting inferential consequences of both sorts, and elaborating, pursuing, and adjusting plans in the cycle of action and judgment. The conceptual contents of judgments and intentions (cf. “What the deed is can be said of it”), ways things can explicitly be for consciousness, are not intelligible one by one or in a static snapshot—apart from their roles in such relational networks and processes of practically acknowledging error and failure. By contrast, however it might be with Frege himself, many contemporary neo-Fregean theories are thoroughly atomistic about senses.

Another significant difference is that Frege discusses senses exclusively in the context of theoretical or cognitive activity: paradigmatically, judging. However, as we have seen in Chapter 11, Hegel is at least equally interested in the relations between how things are for consciousness and how they are in themselves that are instituted by practical activity. In that case, what the deed is for the agent is a matter of the agent’s acknowledging of responsibility by endorsement of purposes in virtue of which the deed has specifications under which it is intentional. And what the deed is for others is a matter of potential audiences’ attributing of responsibility for the deed subsequently specifiable in consequential terms. That the very same deed (in itself) can be picked out both in terms of what it is for the agent and what it is for others, both prospectively in purpose and retrospectively in consequences—that these two senses can pick out the same referent—is the basis of the identity-in-difference that is the process of experience, which in the Reason chapter becomes visible as having the structure of a cycle of action-and-cognition. The fact that some consequential specification can be at once an aspect of what the deed is in itself and what it is for others—indeed, for the agent herself—points to another important and distinctive feature of Hegel’s construal.

A further axial divergence between Fregean and Hegelian construals of sense and reference concerns their categorial heterogeneity or homogeneity. For Frege, senses and referents are different kinds of things. Senses are not like the crystals, carrots, cats, and complex numbers that make up the world we talk about. Thoughts and other expression-senses occupy a distinct “realm of sense,” a third world of directly graspable or intelligible items to be identified neither with subjective ideas nor with objective occupants of the actual (causal) or logical orders. We are not told a lot about what sort of thing senses are—though they evidently can stand in inferential and incompatibility relations with each other. But Frege is explicit that they are ontologically sui generis and that their realm is (largely) disjoint from the realm of reference.²

For Hegel, though, the way things are for consciousness can be just the same as the way they are in themselves. Noumena are a kind of phenomena. They are categorially homogeneous: the same kind of thing. For the basic tenet of Hegel’s conceptual realism is that both are conceptually articulated—that is, stand in relations of material incompatibility and material inference. Hegel warns us in the Introduction against construing the subjective realm of certainty and the objective realm of truth in ways that excavate an ultimately unbridgeable gulf of intelligibility between them—one that would, in Fregean terms, make unintelligible how senses could be cognitive modes of presentation of objects to subjects and could semantically determine what representeds they are representings of. Hegel’s first move is to come up with a notion of conceptual articulation that applies equally to the world we act in and on and know about, on the one hand, and to our thoughts about it, on the other. Both sorts of things are accordingly the sort of thing that is in the right shape to be grasped or understood—not immediately, but the mediation is a matter of material inferential and incompatibility relations to other graspables of just the same sort. (This is the origin of Hegel’s holism.)

The Fregean theory is notoriously closemouthed about just how we are to understand grasping a sense. For the senses expressed by subsentential signs, it is a matter of mastery of the contributions they make to the senses of declarative sentences (Fregean thoughts) in which they occur. And grasp of those sentential senses seems at least to be sufficient for (and may in the end just consist in) mastery of the use of expressions of those thoughts in judgment and inference. (Sellars claims that grasp of a concept just is mastery of the use of a word.) On the Hegelian approach as here adumbrated, grasping conceptually articulated senses (their being to a subject ways things can be for consciousness) is treating their conceptual relations to other contents in practice as norms governing the proper evolution of experiential processes: as providing standards for identifying errors and failures, and constraints on appropriate responses to such identifications. Of course, specific differences can still be acknowledged between acts of thinking and the world thought about, within the genus of the conceptually articulated. Graspings of contents are elements of experiential processes, and the contents grasped are elements of relational structures. Those differences are the raw materials deployed in the subsequent theoretical moves of both hylomorphic conceptual realism and objective idealism. But what is grasped and what is represented are alike understood as conceptually articulated. Indeed, the reciprocal sense-dependence at the metalevel of the concept of an objective world articulated by conceptual relations of material incompatibility and inference, on the one hand, and the concept of subjective activity articulated by conceptual processes of acknowledging and responding to incompatible and consequential commitments in experience, on the other, shows that these are complementary species of a genus—the conceptual—whose identity is unintelligible apart from its differentiation into these two holistically (and processually) related species.

Frege takes a step in the direction of categorial homogeneity of thought and world when he defines “fact” as “a thought that is true,” a formulation Hegel could endorse.³ But Frege does not go on, as Hegel does (albeit only as a stage on the way to a construal of the world as having the holistic structure of the infinite Concept), to identify the world represented and referred to in thought as a world of facts. For Hegel, the way the world really is can be said (and thought) of it. The world as it is in itself is thinkable (though not, of course, a thinking). As we began to see in the discussion of Hegel’s Introduction, distinguishing within the class of conceptual contents between “noumena” and “phenomena,” between “what things are in themselves” and “what things are for consciousness,” is a way of talking about functional roles conceptually articulated items can be seen to play when thought of in terms of their place in a larger historical-developmental process of experience.

This categorial homogeneity of the way things are in themselves and the ways they can be for consciousness is crucial to Hegel’s expressive account of the relations between them. Both are conceptually structured. Indeed, they can have just the same conceptual content. When they do, when what things are for consciousness is (according to a retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a course of experience) what they are in themselves, these are two forms of that one content. What they are in themselves is what they are implicitly. (“An sich” means not only “in itself” but “implicitly”—and Miller translates it both ways.) What they are explicitly is what they are for consciousness. The recollective phase of each episode of experience rationally reconstructs it as the becoming more explicit for consciousness of how things implicitly were all along. How things are in themselves is the reality that, on Hegel’s rendering, is implicit in its appearances. Those ways things can be for consciousness are exhibited as appearances of that reality precisely by being recollectively assembled into an expressively progressive trajectory, in which what was implicit is gradually made more explicit. By understanding the representational dimension of conceptual content in terms of what knowers and agents do in recollectively rationally reconstructing their experience, Hegel is offering an expressive account of representation.

Another significant point of difference between Hegel’s and Frege’s versions of the sense / reference distinction—besides the issue of semantic holism vs. atomism concerning senses, inclusion vs. exclusion of the practical role of senses in intentional agency, and the categorial homogeneity vs. heterogeneity of senses and referents, with its consequences for how one can think about what grasp of senses consists in—concerns the determinateness of senses. Fregean senses are required to determine classes of referents whose boundaries are sharp, fixed, and complete. To say they are sharp is to say that it is impossible for any possible object to fall partially in the class determined by the sense (excluded middle), or both to fall in it and to fall outside it (noncontradiction). To say that the referents are fixed is to say that the boundaries of the class of referents determined by the sense do not change. (Which sense a given sign expresses may change, if the use of the sign changes, but the senses themselves do not change.) To say that the boundaries of the class of referents is complete is to say that the sense determines a partition of the possible candidates: every particular is classified by the sense either as falling under the concept it determines, or as not falling under it (excluded middle). This is Fregean determinateness, or determinateness in the Fregean sense.

I claimed earlier that Hegel attributes to Kant commitment to conceptual contents being determinate in this sense, and that he is motivated by the thought that Kant has been uncritical about the transcendental conditions of the possibility (indeed, intelligibility) of concepts being determinate in this sense. However fair such a criticism may be to Kant, it is surely one that could with justice be directed at Frege on Hegel’s behalf. Frege says very little about how it is that thinkers have access to senses that are determinate in his very strong sense. How is it that there are such things, and how is it that we can grasp one and that there is a fact of the matter as to whether we are grasping that one rather than a closely related one? He does, of course, go to considerable trouble to develop formal languages that are perspicuous in just this sense: that the senses of their expressions are perfectly determinate, and graspable by mastering the rules for using those expressions. But natural languages, including those in which the work of the sciences (including mathematics) is conducted, he does not take to be perspicuous. Because he also seems to think that nothing that is not fully determinate can count as a sense at all, Frege leaves us with a dilemma: either sentences in non-Begriffsschrift languages do not express thoughts at all, or (more plausibly) each expresses indifferently a whole swarm or cloud of them, which we cannot tell apart (and hence with which we cannot reason carefully—that is, unequivocally).

Hegel does think that an intelligible story can be told according to which what we do, paradigmatically our use of linguistic expressions, gives us access to conceptual contents that are determinate in the Fregean sense. Every retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a course of experience does just that. But the way things are presented within a recollection is only half the story. The collapse of each such story in the face of the next episode of experience, triggered by the inevitable acknowledgment of commitments incompatible by one’s own conceptual lights is the other half. At the very center of the metatheoretical paradigm shift Hegel is recommending, from understanding concept use by means of the metacategories of Verstand to understanding it by means of the metacategories of Vernunft, is the new conception of conceptual determinateness that he crafts to replace the Enlightenment one that Kant implicitly appeals to and that Frege makes explicit.

That conception centers on the experiential process—the cycle of action-and-cognition—of determining conceptual contents. It is the process by which one sense is found to be implicitly defective by its own standards, and is replaced by another. The emergence of that defect, local failure or error, is the acknowledgment that that way things are for consciousness implicitly involves materially incompatible commitments. The standards applied are internal because each way things can be for consciousness is a constellation of possible practical and doxastic commitments articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence: a time slice of what Hegel calls “the Concept.” Sequences of such senses, ways things can be for consciousness, can be assessed as progressive along two dimensions. From one perspective, they are progressive insofar as each experiential episode incorporates a little bit more of how things are in themselves—what is really incompatible with or a consequence of what—into how they are for consciousness, and into the acknowledged incompatibilities and consequences (the concepts) that articulate those practical and doxastic commitments. This is putting what shows up immediately (paradigmatically, in noninferential perception) in mediated, conceptual form. Seen from this prospective point of view, the experiential cycle of action-and-cognition is a process of development of senses by progressive determination of conceptual contents. From another perspective, developmental sequences of senses are progressive insofar as they are the unfolding into explicitness of the commitments and conceptual articulations that were all along implicit in the earliest ways things were for consciousness. Seen from this retrospective recollective point of view, the experiential cycle of action-and-cognition is a process of development of senses by progressive expression of conceptual contents.

Just as truth as Hegel understands it is not a state but a process (“a vast, Bacchanalian revel”), so, too, is determinateness. Indeed, they are aspects of the same process. To understand this conception, we must understand the sort of historical process by which ways things are for consciousness, and so the conceptual contents that articulate them, develop on the one hand by becoming more determinate and on the other by becoming more explicit, and why and how these two sorts of development are two sides of one coin, necessarily complementary aspects of one sort of process. Seeing how the processes by which senses develop institute relations of reference—how the notion of what things are in themselves can be made sense of in terms of its functional role in the processes by which one way things are for consciousness develops by giving rise to another, more adequate one—is then the working out of Hegel’s phenomenological semantic program of explaining noumena (and our relations to them) in terms of the phenomena that are their explicit expressions for consciousness. It requires explaining how the processes by which conceptual contents develop can be understood as underwriting both the claim that sense semantically determines referent and the claim that senses cognitively present referents to the acting-knowing subject. Doing that will also vindicate the thesis of conceptual idealism, by showing how the referential relations between how things are on the subjective side of what things are for consciousness, and how they are on the objective side of what things are in themselves, are to be made intelligible in terms of the more explanatorily fundamental recollective processes by which individual subjects, conceptual contents, and the Concept are both determined and expressed. Relations between representeds and representings are explained in terms of the explicit expression of what is implicit. This notion of expression is in turn explained in terms of what knowers and agents do in recollection: the kind of retrospective rational reconstruction of a course of experience as an expressive progression in which what is implicit is made more and more explicit. Explaining representation in terms of expression, and expression in terms of recollection is a pragmatist semantic strategy.

II. Retrospective and Prospective Perspectives on the Development of Conceptual Contents

What is one talking or thinking about when one talks or thinks about what one is talking or thinking about? Less darkly put, what explanatory function must some conception perform in order thereby to count as a conception of what one is talking or thinking about, what is represented, what one is referring to? The answer Hegel takes over from Kant is that it is a normative function. The objects of thought are normative for thought in the sense that they provide a standard for assessments of the correctness of judgments and deeds, distinguishing truth from error and success from failure. What is represented accordingly exercises a distinctive kind of authority over representings, which count as representings of it just in virtue of their responsibility to it, which consists in being liable to assessments according to the standard of correctness it provides. It is because representation is a normative conception that the semantic and epistemological investigations Hegel conducts in the Consciousness chapters lead us to the consideration of the nature of normativity in the Self-Consciousness chapters. This is the narrative path that leads from cognition to recognition.

Hegel then gives the question a further, pragmatist, turn, by asking: What must one do in order thereby to be taking it that one’s cognitive and practical commitments answer to such a standard? To ask that is to ask what one must do in order to be taking them to be cognitive and practical commitments. For answering for their truth or success to something objective (something that is independent of the individual’s attitudes of cognitive or practical commitment) is an essential feature of cognition and agency. That is why they can be understood as taking-true and making-true, respectively. Thus it is an integral feature of conceptual contents (the contents of judgments and intentions) that they are directed at objects, in the sense of answering to them for their success. “That”-intentionality is unintelligible apart from “of”-intentionality. But what is it that the subject must do with the contents it manipulates or takes up attitudes toward in order thereby to be taking or treating them as representing, as having the representational dimension that is an essential aspect of their being conceptual contents?

Hegel’s answer is that it can be understood to begin with in terms of what one is doing in taking them to have conceptual contents at all: namely, taking them to stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. That is, taking it that commitments to some contents preclude or exclude commitments to some others, and include commitments to still others. Doing that, we have seen, is practically taking it that acknowledging one commitment obliges one to do various further things: to change one’s commitments when one finds oneself with incompatible ones, and to acknowledge commitment to consequential ones. The cash value of taking it that there is a standard distinguishing cognitive and practical success or correctness from failure or incorrectness is acting differently in response to those assessments. What one does to distinguish those cases is respond to the error or failure that consists in undertaking incompatible commitments by revising one’s commitments: withdrawing or adding some, or adjusting the conceptual content one takes some of them to have—which is to say the material incompatibility and consequence relations one takes them to stand in. This is the deep connection between determinate negation as characterizing relations of exclusive difference and determinate negation as a principle and motor of activity, change, and disruption. The connection between them is normative: incompatibilities make those who acknowledge them responsible for doing something.

In taking it that acknowledging the incompatibility of one’s commitments obliges one to change them, one is taking how things are for one to answer to a standard of how they are in themselves. That is taking them to be about something, to be appearances of a reality, phenomena presenting some noumena, senses presenting referents, in short, ways things are for a subject, rather than merely states of a subject. The incompatibility can be between two cognitive commitments, between two practical commitments, or between a practical commitment regarding how things are to be and a cognitive commitment regarding how things in fact turned out to be. It is the way one acknowledges obligations to change one’s commitments in the face of incompatibilities of these sorts that drives the experiential cycle of action-and-cognition. Being so driven—practically acknowledging that responsibility—is taking one’s conceptual contents to be representings answering for their correctness to representeds.

This is the shape of a story about referential purport in general: what it is for a conceptual content (a sense) so much as to seem to be, or be put forward as, to function practically for the subject as being, about or representing how things objectively are. Here “how things objectively are,” or are “in themselves,” means “always already are anyway,” in the sense that how they are in themselves swings free of how they are for the subject. That sort of attitude-independence is presupposed by their functioning as a normative standard for assessment of appearances, a standard that what things are for the subject may or may not satisfy. Functioning as a representing is playing the role of being subject to assessments as correct or incorrect depending on how things are with the things it thereby counts as being about or representing.

The next question is then: How is it settled what those things are—what one is actually referring to, representing, talking or thinking about? How, on this picture, does sense semantically determine reference, so that the referents count as what is cognitively presented to the manipulator of those senses (the one who undertakes those commitments, including commitments as to what is incompatible with what and what follows from what)?

For Frege, truth is what connects sense to reference. That is why judging (= taking-true, and we could add, though Frege does not, acting = making-true) can be thought of as an “advance from thought to truth-value,” i.e., from sense to referent. Put otherwise, one can specify the sense of a judgment in an ascription de dicto, using just a “that” clause: “Late in his life, Kant believed that his treacherous servant abused Kant’s trust in him.” But if one wants to assess the truth of that judgment, taking into account the possibility that the conceptual role (sense) ascribed may be defective, one must specify it de re, i.e., with respect to what (or who) is actually being talked about: “Late in his life, Kant believed of his faithful and long-suffering servant Lampe that he abused Kant’s trust in him.” The idea that one’s commitments express how things are for one (that they are appearances of a reality, the way what things implicitly are becomes explicit for one) is the idea that in addition to the de dicto specification of their sense or content (how it is for the one whose commitments they are) there are also de re specifications, of how things that are that way for one are in themselves. The preceding de re specification would be the one relevant to truth-and-success assessments for someone who believes that the one Kant referred to late in his life as his “treacherous servant” was in fact his faithful and long-suffering servant Lampe. The sense Kant would have used only speaker-referred to the one the ascriber takes it is semantically referred to by (the sense expressed by) “Kant’s faithful and long-suffering servant Lampe.”

In Hegel’s picture, the role played here by concern for truth is played instead by concern for correct inferences, for what a sense or content really follows from and is really incompatible with what. The referents determine the correct inferences and incompatibilities—that is, the correct sense. That is why the truth process (the “Bacchanalian revel” of conceptual development) is the process of getting not only better (more successful) cognitive and practical commitments, but doing that by getting better inferential and incompatibility commitments to articulate them. The notion of what things are in themselves is the notion of how what things are for us ought to be. Hegelian referents are expressively ideal senses. Error and failure are the results of mistaken senses, endorsements of conceptual contents that implicitly involve mistakes concerning what follows from and is incompatible with what. What one must do to be treating some objects and not others as what we are talking about or referring to is to treat one sense (a particular role articulated by a particular constellation of material incompatibility and inferential relations) as implicitly guiding, governing, and controlling the process by which explicitating senses evolve and develop under the sequential impacts of experiences of error and failure. Those experiential episodes must be seen as nudging the conceptual contents one endorses and deploys in the direction of the correct incompatibility and inferential relations (the ones that reflect how things are in themselves), in response to finding oneself with commitments acquired by following the norms one currently endorses (how things are for one) that are nonetheless incompatible by one’s own current lights.

On this account, then, the way things are in themselves must be a way things could be for consciousness—the implicit form of a content that can be made explicit. For it is the way things should be for consciousness. The way things are in themselves is intelligible as guiding, governing, and controlling the process by which how things are for consciousness develops only if it is already in conceptual shape: already articulated by relations of material incompatibility and (therefore) inference. The systematic reason for Hegel’s conceptual realism is accordingly this understanding of the normative character of the reference or aboutness relations that constitute “of”-intentionality. Hegelian referents are a privileged kind of sense. Those referents are practically graspable or intelligible, in that one can reason in response to experience according to those relations. One can acknowledge those incompatibility and consequence relations and not others as authoritative for one’s commitments, by using them to structure one’s experience: how one acquires consequential commitments, what one treats as incompatible and hence requiring adjustment of commitments, and how one responds to the experience of incompatible commitments. This is privileging one conceptually articulated constellation of senses over another.

What is the nature of this privilege or authority? Transposed into the practical key underwritten by Hegel’s understanding of norms, this is to ask what subjects must do to be acknowledging the privilege or authority of how things are in themselves over how they are for consciousness. What is taking or treating one conceptual content as providing the norm for others? The first point is that how things are for a subject is just how the subject takes them to be in themselves. That is just what it is for reality to appear that way to the subject. The distinction between de dicto specifications of conceptual content and de re ones arises in the first instance when one assesses the commitments of others. (Compare: what the deed is for the agent, and what it is for others, descriptions in terms of an endorsed purpose and in terms of achieved consequences.) But that fundamentally social difference of perspective can also be achieved diachronically, when one subject / agent looks back over her prior commitments.

So what establishes the relation between sense and referent is treating one’s current commitments as setting a normative standard that now governs (and implicitly already all along did govern) one’s previous commitments. What one must do in order thereby to be taking it in practice that one is talking or thinking about some way things are in themselves is to perform a recollection [Erinnerung] of the experiential process that yielded that result. This is a rational reconstruction of the development of the conceptual contents one currently endorses. It is telling a certain kind of retrospective story about it: a story that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive trajectory selected from one’s actual experiential past. That is one in which the way things are in themselves—as one currently takes that to be—is presented as having been all along implicit in each of the ways things were for oneself, with each included transformation in response to the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments getting one closer to the actual conceptual contents. One treats one’s currently endorsed conceptions and commitments as presenting the reality behind prior appearances, as having been such a guiding, governing, and controlling norm for how things showed up for consciousness. One does that by sorting experiential episodes into those that did and those that did not reveal aspects of what eventually (so far) turned out to be the truth. One rehearses a story about how what was implicit became gradually explicit. This is providing an expressive genealogy vindicating the current view: exhibiting how, given that things are as they are now taken to be, one came to find out that that is how they are. The responsibility for this distinctive sort of expressive epistemic vindication is baked deep into Hegel’s semantic account of representation.

The actual experiential process that produced the current constellation of commitments is no doubt replete with what show up from that retrospective vantage point as wrong turns, blind alleys, and retrograde steps. These are experiential episodes—applications of concepts in judgment and intention that obliged the subject subsequently to acknowledge incompatible commitments—that did not, from that perspective, turn out to have revealed aspects of how things really are. They were not expressively progressive. That is, the revisions with which the subject responded to error or failure took one further away from, rather than nearer to, the truth. In order to have a picture, suppose that at each stage each concept (universal) is assigned a pair of sets of possible particulars serving as its extension and an antiextension, and incompatibility and inferential relations to other such concepts. Then a revision that puts in the extension a possible particular that does not, according to the currently endorsed standard, belong there, because the universal does not in fact characterize that particular (or dually for the antiextension), will count as expressively retrograde. Likewise, if the response to the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments (taking two universals one treats as incompatible to characterize the same possible particular) is to stop treating the two universals as incompatible, where one now takes it that they really are incompatible, that will be an expressively retrograde step. And similarly for revisions of endorsed material consequence relations.

An Erinnerung rationally reconstructs the experiential past into an expressive genealogy in the form of a Whiggish history. It ignores expressively retrograde episodes of experience and instead traces out a trajectory of expressively progressive improvements in how things were for us that culminates in the way we currently take them to be in themselves. In this way it shows how we found out what we take ourselves now to know. It does that by exhibiting a cumulative, monotonic process of revelation—of the implicit becoming gradually explicit. This is the recollective expressive form of triumphalist textbook histories of science and mathematics, of reconstructions of the development of the concepts of common law, and of Hegel’s own histories of philosophy, art, and religion. Such stories exhibit at each stage the generic sort of retrospective necessity characteristic of both the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic. Each step is necessary, not in the prospective sense that things could not have happened otherwise—the wrong turns that clutter up the messy actual past omitted from the reconstructed history show otherwise—but in the retrospective expressive sense that if they had not happened, some aspect of what the story claims was all along implicit would not have become explicit. It is in this sense that there can be expressive dependencies: one feature could not have become explicit unless another already had. So, for instance, though it was in no sense inevitable that we should ever have had either insight, we could not in principle have understood the significance for our knowledge of what is made explicit by the use of modal vocabulary to state laws relating theoretical (nonobservable) universals unless we had already understood the significance of at least sense (observable) universals in articulating our knowledge—that is, understood why knowledge could not in principle be wholly immediate. (Chapters 4–7 rehearsed Hegel’s phenomenological Erinnerung of this aspect of our theoretical self-consciousness in the Consciousness section of the Phenomenology.)

So what one must do in order thereby to be taking it that one is talking or thinking about something is to perform a suitable Erinnerung of the development of one’s views. For constructing that sort of expressively progressive genealogy is exhibiting the sequential experiential transformations of what things are for one as governed, guided, and controlled by how things all along were in themselves. Distinguishing in this way between expressively progressive transformations and those alterations in how one applies those very same concepts that were not expressively progressive is treating all the prior applications of those concepts as subject to assessment according to the normative standard set by how things have been revealed (so far) really to be: the actual objective facts and intentions, and the material incompatibilities and consequential relations that really articulated their properties and relations. This is treating them all as appearances of that one reality, all phenomena presenting one noumenal situation. That is to say that performing such an Erinnerung is treating all the senses as cognitively presenting the referent, in that they actually produce knowledge of it as the culmination of the reconstructed trajectory through the actual course of development. And those same senses semantically determine the referent in that they are exhibited as having been all along imperfect and incomplete expressions of it, in that that referent, the way things are in themselves, sets the norm that distinguishes expressively progressive from expressively retrogressive experiential steps: the difference between more and less revelatory appearances.

On this Hegelian account, the link between sense and reference is in the first instance an expressive one: the senses express the reference, making (some aspects of) it explicit. It is a relation established retrospectively, by recollectively turning a past into a history, an expressive genealogy. And it is in terms of this retrospectively discerned expressive relation that the representational dimension of concept use is explained. Recollections retrospectively reconstruct experiential processes into expressively progressive traditions. And expressive reconstruction is rational reconstruction. For this is the process that explains how senses can be revelatory of referents. And it is the referents that determine what is really rational: what is really incompatible with what, what really follows from what, and in general, how one ought to apply concepts and draw inferences from those applications. So determining the referent that a reconstructed series of senses reveal is determining what is rational: how one ought to reason. This is a distinctively expressive kind of rationality. On the one hand, one finds out in this way (according to that recollection) what is rational. On the other hand, one makes the experiential process have been rational—in the sense of expressively progressive, gradually revelatory of the rational—by performing such an Erinnerung. For Hegel, we always understand what is implicit in terms of the process by which it is made explicit: the process of expressing it. His account of the cumulative progressive expression by which how things are in themselves implicitly normatively governs their appearances for consciousness is in terms of what one does in retrospective recollection of a course of experience. And he explains the representational dimension of conceptual content by appeal to the process of recollection, which exhibits experience as a process that at once expresses and determines conceptual contents.

So it is the retrospectively discerned reconstruction of a tradition that is expressively rational that ties together senses and referents, representings and what they represent. Whereas for Frege it was a truth relation (making true) that connects them, for Hegel it is this recollected truth process—experience recollected as a truth process (that is, as progressively and cumulatively expressing the real more fully and truly)—that secures the semantic and cognitive relations between senses and their referents. This structure is what supports the asymmetrical sense-dependence relation asserted by the thesis of conceptual idealism. Each revision of concepts-and-commitments in response to the experience of error or failure (the acknowledgment of the incompatibility of one’s commitments, given one’s current understanding of the concepts one is applying in judgment and intention) is the implicit acknowledgment by the subject of the existence of a standard for the normative assessment of those concepts-and-commitments: some way things are in themselves to which the ways they are for consciousness is answerable. And that is to say that a realist commitment is implicit in practically acknowledging the representational dimension of concept use. As Hegel often tells us, following Kant, his idealism is his way (he claims, the only ultimately satisfactory way) of making realism intelligible.

From the perspective of any such retrospective reconstruction of some course of experience, the reference is constant. It is what ties the whole process together into a unity, grouping a whole sequence of senses together as representings of the same represented way the world is. On Hegel’s account of representation in terms of expression, this means explicit expressions of the same implicit content. The senses that (according to the recollective reconstruction) elaborate, express, and culminate in that invariant, implicitly governing content unifying those senses, by contrast, are various and variable, differing in the extent to which and the ways in which they make that implicit content explicit. They are the moment of disparity of form of expressing of the identical content expressed. Up until the very end (the current, temporary culmination), according to each recollection the senses, the ways things are for consciousness, are never quite right, never fully adequate expressions of their content, still subject to error and failure when they are applied to novel particulars. But the way things are in themselves, reality, persists unchanged and unmoved by the flux of its appearances. This constellation of sense and referents, of relations instituted by processes, is the basic semantic structure of identity-in-difference constitutive of consciousness. It is instituted by recollection.

We are now in a better position to understand what it means to say that for Hegel, determinateness, like truth, is in the whole process, not in the relations at any one stage between subjectively endorsed conceptual contents (concepts_subj = senses) and objectively correct conceptual contents (concepts_obj = referents), which will always eventually be discovered to have involved a disparity. We must reconstrue the concept determinate, so as to think of it in the first instance as a feature of the whole process of determining conceptual contents, and only derivatively of the snapshot stages of that process, rather than the other way around.

We must distinguish determinateVerstand from determinateVernunft. The metaconcept of concepts that are determinateVerstand is the idea of a universal that settles, for every particular, whether or not the particular falls under the universal, independently of any consideration of the process of determining the boundaries of that universal. This is the Kantian-Fregean idea that Hegel thinks is incoherent on its own. For there can be no satisfactory account of how we come to have access to and be able to deploy such concepts. There are no determinateVerstand concepts that really (never mind finally or fully) articulate the world—outside of a recollective story. Each recollection discerns such concepts, but it is doomed to be found inadequate and in need of replacement by the next experiential episode.

Concepts that are determinateVernunft articulate the world only via the process of refining them—a process that in principle has no end point. It is the process that is the truth. Thinking that it must have an endpoint, on pain of leaving an unconceptualizable residue, is looking for determinatenessVerstand. DeterminateVerstand is what you get if you take one of the perspectives—the retrospective, Whiggish one—and understand the relation between the whole process, including the prospective shift to a new Whiggish story, on the model of how things look from within just one of those stories. This is one-sidedly mistaking one aspect of the process, one perspective on it, for the whole thing. The only way to ask whether one concept-slice is correct or not is to ask about whether the content of the concept it is a temporal slice of is correct or not. That is to ask about the whole unfolding (becoming-more-explicit) process. Compare: Asking whether an intention is satisfied is asking about the content of the whole action that it is a perspective on. We have seen that Hegel’s initial take on conceptual contents makes him an inferential (incompatibility) holist, and that his recognitive picture of normativity makes him a social holist. We can now see that he is also a temporal or historical holist about the contents of concepts. This is the resolution of the Hegelian antinomy that while no particular temporal slice content (a Verstand content) is correct, or could be correct, still the whole developing / becoming-more-explicit concept (a Vernunft content) is (always already) correct. But it is not correct in the way Verstand contents would be. And no temporal slice of it is or could be correct in that way either.

III. Intentional Agency as a Model for the Development of Senses

The home language game of Frege’s distinction between sense and reference is empirical, cognitive, or theoretical discourse. I have accordingly phrased in terms appropriate to that aspect of experience much of my compare-and-contrast discussion of how Hegel’s account of the development by expression and determination of conceptual contents can be mapped onto Frege’s two-pronged semantic theory. But by the time we have reached the discussion of Reason, we know that the process Hegel calls “Erfahrung” in general has the structure of a Test-Operate-Test-Exit cycle of action and cognition. In the cognitive phases of such a cycle what is revealed by an expressively progressive process of transformation of what it is for consciousness is what the world is in itself. But there are also the practical phases, in which what is revealed by an expressively progressive process of transformation of what it is for consciousness is what the action (and so, the self) is. The contents of concepts are clarified and expressed not only by the application of concepts in the undertaking of cognitive commitments that are judgments, eventually but inevitably leading to the acknowledgment of incompatibilities showing up as errors; those contents are also clarified and expressed by the application of concepts in the undertaking of practical commitments that are intentions, eventually but inevitably leading to the acknowledgment of incompatibilities showing up as failures.

In fact, the model for the retrospective recollective-expressive discernment of the implicit unity of a course of experience—the development of what things are for consciousness in the direction of what they are in themselves—is to be found on the practical side of intentional action. While the initially endorsed purpose, in virtue of which a process counts as intentional (and hence an action, something done) at all, embodies a de dicto specification of the intention (and hence at least in a speaker’s referring way, the deed), it is only retrospectively, from the point of view of the accomplished deed that a de re specification of that intention is available. (Of course, further consequential specifications of the deed, and hence de re specifications of the intention, never cease to become available, as the causal consequences of what is done ripple outward—a point whose significance in this context will be considered below.) We are to understand the way the referent attributed by a retrospective recollection (Erinnerung, Wiederholung) of a course of experience on the cognitive side furnishes a standard for the normative assessment of the variously revised and transformed senses that are thereby taken to express it, in terms of how the intention attributed by a retrospective Erinnerung of an extended action process from the point of the deed accomplished furnishes a standard for the normative assessment of the variously revised and transformed plans that are thereby taken to express it. The reason one can discern the intention only by looking at the deed is that the intention is primarily manifested in the whole evolving plan as concretely executed, and only secondarily in any individual time slice of it. Thus it is in principle only retrospectively available. Intentions in this sense are the guiding norms on the practical side that we are to use as the model of facts that guide the development of concepts on the theoretical side.

The claim that intentions, which are only retrospectively discernible, should nonetheless be thought of as norms that govern or guide the development of doings has a complicated tense-logical character. It is a criterion of adequacy according to which the success of recollections is assessed that the Absicht imputed be displayed as normatively governing the process by which the doing develops. Normative government has two aspects, one deontic and one alethic. On the deontic side, the intention retrospectively discerned serves as a standard for assessment of the success of each of the subdoings, accordingly as it contributes to realizing the intention. On the alethic side, the subdoings rationally reconstructed as a plan structured by the intention are recollected as having been subjunctively sensitive to that intention, in the sense that if the content of that organizing norm had been different, the various subdoings would have been different. These are both features of the model of the rational reconstruction of trajectories of expressively progressive precedents that judges use to recollect implicit norms that are expressed by and rationalize their decisions.

The first point is that a subject’s proper response to acknowledging incompatible commitments, whether in the form of cognitive error or practical failure, is to do something. The subject is responsible for repairing the discordant commitments by actively changing them. The repair might be very local, as when particular judgments or purposes are modified or abandoned. Or it might be more global, as when commitments regarding inferential or incompatibility relations among universals are adjusted. But in any case it is a practical doing, with a distinctive kind of goal or purpose: eliminating the focal incompatibility. There will always be alternative means available to secure that goal. For when two commitments are incompatible, it is always in principle possible to give up either one of them, or to revise one’s view that they are incompatible (perhaps by qualifying it: conditioning the incompatibility on the obtaining of some further state of affairs). And if either is the product of an inference, the consequential relations that underwrote that inference can be modified. The ubiquity of alternative modifications means that every experiential episode implicitly or explicitly involves both a choice and the endorsement of a plan for achieving the goal of eliminating the incompatibility the subject has acknowledged. Regarded prospectively, from the vantage point of a problem that needs to be solved, a purpose that is to be achieved, experience has the open-ended, flexible plan structure characteristic of intentional agency. Coming up with what at the end of the Introduction Hegel calls “the second object,” “the new, true, object” as a candidate reality with whose appearances one has until now been dealing is a practical task.

So for Hegel, not only is experience a process rather than a punctiform event, but it essentially involves a doing, the exercise of practical agency. Recollecting is an essential phase of such doings. This is the explanatory primacy of the practical: cognition is modeled on intentional agency. Experience necessarily involves reflection on and recollection of one’s concepts and commitments—an active taking of responsibility for them and exercise of authority over them, identifying with some by sacrificing others, and a recollective vindication of those decisions as norm-governed. That conception of experience as based on an active process of reflection and recollection is as far removed as it could be from spectator models, where the only necessary reflection is a passive mirroring relation. Those choices and endorsements, normative identifications and sacrifices, and their subsequent recollective vindication are phases of the ongoing experiential process by which on the one hand self-conscious individual selves are determined, and on the other the subjective constellation of concepts-and-commitments, how things are for the subject, is further determined by incorporating aspects of how things are in themselves. This is why “the individual human being is what the deed is” [PG 322] and why “Individuality is what its world is, the world that is its own. Individuality is itself the cycle of its action in what has exhibited itself as an actual world.” [PG 308]

Like all deeds, the revisions of concepts-and-commitments that are their development by determination are doubly doings. The authority exercised by the subject in endorsing a revision plan is balanced by another authority, to which it is responsible. This is a core instance of the general principle that determinately contentful norms are instituted only by reciprocal recognition. Unless authority is balanced by a corresponding responsibility, it cannot have determinate content. (This master idea articulates an important aspect of the connection between Hegel’s recognitive normative pragmatics and his semantics.) The reciprocity in the diachronic historical social dimension is different from that of the synchronic face-to-face social dimension. (Perhaps the genus is more easily discerned if we think of the German term being translated: “gegenseitig.”)

In the case of experience, the counterbalancing authority is supplied by the fact that any experiential revision is subject to assessment by a retrospective recollection. Looking back recollectively from the vantage point of a temporarily stable way things are for the subject—the way things are at that point taken to be in themselves—makes it possible to assess prior actual revisions as expressively progressive or not, as steps in the right or a wrong direction, depending on what functional contribution they appear to have made to the eventual achievement of the current view. The question is always whether and to what extent each revision of the senses moved them in the direction of a more adequate expression of the referent that serves as the normative standard for them all. By retrospectively tracing an expressively progressive trajectory through the actually endorsed past senses (appearances, ways things were for consciousness), culminating in the current one, the Erinnerung incorporates assessments of the functional success of the revisions by which the current content developed.

The model for this on the side of practical agency is the way the de re specification of the content of an intention (a kind of sense) changes when a new consequence occurs, so that new consequential descriptions become available. Retrospectively, we learn something about what we in fact intended. So we can see that very intention as being further expressed. Prospectively, because the consequence is not foreseeable, it had not happened yet, this same process appears as further determination of it. The prior sense or intention appears indeterminate in the snapshot Fregean sense, because it has not yet been settled whether that consequential description is a specification of it.

So producing an expressively progressive recollection is also something done. The doing that creates this retrospective perspective adds a further dimension along which experience is not just something that happens. This is one of the ways in which it is visible as a doing. Recollection is a kind of action, which retroactively affects the significance of the process to which it is directed. We can compare here the story (to be recounted in Chapter 13) that Hegel tells at the beginning of Spirit, about how the exercise of practical self-constituting agency exercised in the social normative form of a burial ceremony can turn merely biological death into a stage of human life, and make the deceased have been not merely a dead organism, but always a community member, who has just changed status.

Telling the right kind of retrospective story is giving the shape of a plan to the process of development that issues in the final sense—and so determines the referent. Doing that also involves making choices among alternatives, and formulating a plan to secure a result. The purpose is to pick out of the actual developmental trajectory of appearances elements structured in what could be called an “expressive plan.” This is a de re specification of an intention retrospectively discernible from the achievement of the currently endorsed sense. Only revision moves get included in it that contribute to the goal—that can be seen retrospectively to have been functionally successful in realizing the purpose, achieving the goal. The subgoals of an expressive plan are expressively progressive revisions: ones whose resulting sense is a move in the direction of the referent-sense that retrospectively serves as the normative standard for assessing the expressive success of all the senses that arose earlier in the process. Some examples of expressive subgoals, from the point of view of an achieved sense, would be saying that property P is (or is not) incompatible with property Q, or that having R is (or is not) a consequence of having P, or that object o has (or does not have) P, where those relations are aspects of the currently endorsed constellation of concepts-and-commitments, and where those relations had not been aspects of what things were for the subject at some prior stage in the process of development-through-experience that in fact resulted in the currently endorsed Concept. It is entirely compatible with being a functional expressive success in this sense that a revision move be a local failure in the vulgar or ordinary sense, in that it immediately led to a further incompatibility, just as in ordinary cases of intentional agency, vulgar success or failure to achieve an immediate purpose does not settle the question of functional success or failure in contributing to the execution of a plan aimed at a larger or more distant purpose.

And in any case, every revision will be found eventually to occasion a further experience of incompatibility, requiring a further revision. Stability of conception is for Hegel at best a temporary achievement, one that is in principle not just fragile but doomed to disruption. The movement of experience is what incorporates concrete particularity into the content of universals, what gives matter-of-factual contingency the form of normative necessity, what mediates immediacy. All the particular, contingent immediacy of things never has been and never will be expressed or expressible in a constellation of determinate concepts-and-commitments. For that would require not only that all our claims and judgments be true, but that all our actions be successful, in the ordinary or vulgar sense. Failure in that sense is failure of a plan to secure a purpose, and that requires either error about what will or would happen if something other than the subgoal were secured, or failure to achieve that subgoal. In either case, the result is incompatibility of commitments, including practical ones, with the consequent obligation to enact the second phase of the experiential process: revision and repair of cognitive and practical commitments. Being successful in all one’s practical undertakings—including the doings that are revisions and repairs—would in turn require the set of claims and judgments to be not only true but complete. For ignorance is as corrosive of practical success as is error. We can accordingly see how filling in the fine structure of the process of experience by applying the model of intentional agency underwrites and explains the Hegelian commitment to the in-principle instability of the Concept.

This fact about the permanent prospective empirical-practical inadequacy of any set of conceptual commitments means that each constellation of such commitments that is retrospectively recollectively vindicated as making explicit how things really are will itself eventually be unmasked as an appearance of some other, at least somewhat different reality. The first phase of that experiential episode, the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments, then normatively requires, as the second phase, not only the postulation of the second “new, true, object,” the proposal of a revision to repair the triggering error or failure, but also a new recollection (Erinnerung) exhibiting prior concept applications as appearances of that reality, senses expressing that referent, however imperfectly. In addition to the prospective practical task of repair and revision, there is also the retrospective task of expressive reconstruction of a tradition. And as with intentional action quite generally, what was functionally successful or unsuccessful with respect to the earlier goal—when construed as a subgoal of the original retrospectively discerned expressive plan—might not retain that status when assessed with respect to the successor goal. What counted as an expressively progressive revision from the point of view of one index sense-as-referent may be classified as expressively retrogressive from the point of view of the one that as a matter of actual fact succeeds it (as a prospective resolution of the next conceptual anomaly). So, for instance, Alfred Wegener’s 1915 theory of continental drift was seldom mentioned, and never emphasized, in geology textbooks until, beginning in the 1960s, it came to seem an important and prescient step toward the current paradigm of plate tectonics. Since then it has been given a prominent place in such disciplinary histories. To vary the kind of example (while staying within a range of contexts in which the construction of justifying genealogies is explicit, central, and institutionalized), it is common in the history of the development of common law that cases that at one point were given great precedential weight by judges—and in that sense taken to have revealed critical aspects of the content of the norms taken to be valid at the time when they are appealed to as precedents—lose that status, privilege, and authority, because of subsequent developments of the concepts in question. The process has no endpoint; the returns are never all in.

But in fact, doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with the “new, true, object,” i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better or worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidate revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme. Viewed prospectively, common law is judge-made law: there is nothing to it except the tradition of actual applications of its concepts to concrete cases. When an application of those concepts to a novel set of facts is made, and the content of those concepts thereby further determined (provisionally), the effect is like that T. S. Eliot describes in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.⁴

But the only justification that the judge can give for the novel application of the old concepts is that doing so is making explicit commitments that were already implicit in the prior, precedential (that is, content-explicitating) applications. It is producing a suitable recollective reconstruction of the tradition of applying a concept that exhibits a candidate conceptual revision as rational, that provides a rationale for it.

We saw that the authority the subject of experience exercises in pursuing the prospective practical project of repairing a discordant conceptual structure is recognitively balanced by the responsibility such plans have to retrospective assessments of their expressive progress: the extent to which they are intelligible as making explicit features that were implicit in the tradition of concept application to which they belong. The present claim is that although that complementary recognitive authority is exercised by Erinnerungen made possible by (and performed from the perspective achieved by) subsequent transformations of the conceptual tradition, in fact that sort of counterbalancing authority is already present also as an essential element of each prospective proposal of a plan for further determination of conceptual contents. Factoring in that consideration yields the triphasic model of experience. Experiential processes can be thought of as sequences of discrete, more or less extended episodes. The first phase of each episode is initiated when applications of existing concepts in judgment and action result in the undertaking and acknowledging of commitments that are incompatible by the subject-agent’s own current lights.

The second phase of each experiential episode can then be thought of in two essential, and essentially complementary ways, from two different points of view. Regarded prospectively, from the point of view of practical deliberation, the subject / agent is obliged by the acknowledgment of commitments standing in relations of incompatibility to do something to the concepts-and-commitments he has inherited, to alter them so as to remove the incompatibility. In a broad sense, this is further determining the contents of those concepts-and-commitments by incorporating into how things are for one the empirical-practical information that is provided by the fact that applying the conceptual norms one currently endorses has led to contradicting oneself. That constellation of concepts-and-commitments must then, according to its own implicit norms, be revised, refashioned, remade. It is a criterion of adequacy on succeeding at this practical task that one can tell a retrospective story about how, if things are as the revised constellation of concepts-and-commitments takes them to be in themselves, one found that out by a privileged subsequence of the actual experiential episodes one underwent. Regarded retrospectively, from the point of view of assessment of the experiential transformation, that remaking must be exhibited as the culmination of a process by which what was all along implicit in the concepts one endorsed and the commitments one undertook in applying them becomes gradually more explicit. That is, one must exhibit the result of one’s revision as finding out how things all along already were in themselves, what one was really talking and thinking about, what one was referring to by deploying the earlier, variously defective senses, the reality that was all along appearing, though in some aspects incompletely or incorrectly.

The disparity of the senses (appearances, phenomena, ways things are for consciousness) that is manifest prospectively in the need to revise yet again the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, and the unity of referents (reality, noumena, ways things are in themselves) that is manifest retrospectively in their gradual emergence into explicitness as revealed by an expressive genealogy of the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, are two sides of one coin, each intelligible only in a context that contains the other. Thus the sense in which many alternatives are prospectively open to the subject-agent of experience in the second phase of an experiential episode is just that many different revisions could be retrospectively rationalized by different expressive genealogies. Hence there are many different referents those senses could be taken to determine semantically and present cognitively. On the other hand, the actual applications of concepts that lead to experiential choices of revision—identification with some features of a constellation of concepts-and-commitments through sacrifice of others—provide the raw materials that must be selected and arranged into expressively progressive, rationally reconstructed traditions vindicating the current conceptual constellation as the reference both semantically determined and cognitively presented by all the senses from which the expressively privileged trajectory is drawn. The process by which what Hegel calls “the Concept” develops, as constellations of conceptual contents-and-commitments are found wanting and replaced or revised—which is the same process by which individual self-consciousnesses develop—must be thought of as a process both of ever greater determination of conceptual contents and of ever greater expression of them.

Regarded prospectively, the conceptual contents are being made more determinate, as features of how things really are in themselves are incorporated into how they are for consciousness by crucial experiential episodes. Regarded retrospectively, the conceptual contents are being gradually but inexorably (with retrospective necessity) revealed and expressed: what was all along implicit made more and more explicit. The key to the Hegelian semantic vision is that talk of the process of sequentially and progressively determining (making more determinate) disparate senses, and talk of the process of sequentially and progressively expressing (making more explicit) referents are two ways of talking about the same process. Recollectively making new senses is how one finds the referents. This historically perspectival practical process of determination and expression relating the two semantic dimensions of sense and reference, what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, is what ultimately makes sense of the relational structure of identity-through-difference that is the leading idea of Hegel’s logic—the metatheoretical constellation of concepts-and-commitments in whose terms he makes explicit how the Concept evolves by determination-and-expression. This process is the activity characteristic of Vernunft. Understanding how this sort of developmental recollective process induces semantic and cognitive relations between phenomena on the subjective side of certainty and noumena on the objective side of truth is understanding the significance of the thesis of conceptual idealism for Hegel’s semantic theory of consciousness.

IV. Contraction and Expansion Strategies

At various points in the previous section I described the dynamic process of determination and expression of conceptual contents as having a “recognitive” structure. At the most general level, this is to say something about the relations of reciprocal authority and responsibility that articulate that process. The demand that recognition be reciprocal in order to institute a norm (here, a determinate concept) is an important element of the story about the process that institutes the relations between the two semantic dimensions (roughly: inferential content and referential purport). Although the topic has been introduced, we have not yet finished explicating the contribution of the recognitive dimension to this story. Already in discussing the Introduction, we saw how prospective and retrospective perspectives on a developing conceptual tradition could exhibit a historical reciprocal recognitive structure of authority. That discussion introduced the crucial jurisprudential model of the evolution of the concepts of common law. In the present chapter, that idea was combined with a treatment of intentional action in terms of the relations between the de dicto specifications under which an action is intentional or purposive (Handlung) and its de re consequential specifications (Tat), and of the plan structure characteristic of intentions (in the sense of Absichten rather than Vorsätze), whether specified de dicto from the prospective standpoint of deliberation or de re from the retrospective standpoint of expressive genealogy. We are headed for an account of the final, fully developed historical-recollective form of reciprocal recognition, which Hegel discusses in the Spirit section under the heading of “confession and forgiveness.” Then, all the prior lessons are deployed in the service of understanding the semantic significance of that final form of reciprocal recognitive process-and-structure, both for our understanding of the historical evolution of constellations of determinate concepts-and-commitments and for our understanding of the form of self-consciousness that results.

When, in the Spirit chapters, Hegel considers the historical development of Geist, the big transition is from traditional to modern structures of normativity. We find out there that the notion of agency we considered in Reason is the distinctively modern one, which is distinguished by restricting responsibility to what the agent knew to be presupposed in his explicitly envisaged purpose:

It is … the right of the will to recognize as its action, and to accept responsibility for, only those aspects of its deed which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which were present in its purpose …—the right of knowledge. [PR §117]

The ancients did not understand the will as finite in this sense—and so did not have the modern kind of practical self-consciousness. In that same addition, Hegel explains:

I am only what has reference to my freedom, and my will is responsible for a deed only in so far as I have knowledge of it. Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father, cannot be accused of parricide, although the legal codes of antiquity attached less importance to the subjective element, to responsibility [Zurechnung].

It was a conceptual advance partially constitutive of modernity to restrict attributions of responsibility in this way to correspond to acknowledgments of it.

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 and action, between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances … but accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety. [PR §118Z]

The heroic self-consciousness, which “accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety” is a feature of Spirit at the traditional stage characterized by what Hegel calls “immediate Sittlichkeit.” Splitting up that “unalloyed simplicity” by distinguishing what is contained in the subjective will and what objective consequences follow from that willing is a feature of Spirit at the level of self-conscious individuality: modernity. But that form of self-consciousness is alienated. Roughly, it cannot understand individual self-consciousnesses as at once creators of conceptual norms and creatures of them. It does not see that these are two necessarily complementary aspects of one process, and that it is only by suitably understanding the role they play in such a process that either individual concepts or individual selves are intelligible as determinately contentful. (Once again, I anticipate: alienation explicitly and officially becomes a topic only in the next chapter—just as Hegel introduces it only in Spirit.) Overcoming alienation and moving to the third level in the development of Spirit and its self-consciousness, the level of self-conscious Sittlichkeit, involves recovering many of the features of the first level, now raised to a higher level. In particular, I will claim, one feature that is recovered is precisely “accepting responsibility for the deed in its entirety.” We are to return, at a higher level, to a heroic conception of agency.

We have already seen a good bit of what is needed to make sense of this idea: treating de dicto and de re specifications of the content of an intention as specifications, from different perspectives, of the same content—which is acknowledged in the former terms and attributed in the latter. The way in which determinate conceptual norms (governing both practical and cognitive commitments) should be understood to be instituted by this sort of reciprocal recognitive structure has been our theme throughout—though as just indicated, we are by no means through with it. The relevant point in the present context is that this final move to reconstrue agency in terms of the metaconcepts of Vernunft—that is, in terms of the Concept construed as infinite—is not on the horizon of the Philosophy of Right, but it is part of the expressive agenda of the Phenomenology. Passages from each work can safely be appealed to in interpreting Hegel’s claims about the nature of agency, so long as this difference is kept firmly in mind (so the mixing is not “indiscriminate”).

The key point is that the rights of knowledge and intention are exercises in the characteristically alienated modern strategy of Mastery. They result from the application of metaconcepts having the structure of independence, rather than freedom. As we saw in Chapter 10, the deformation characteristic of Mastery is to take it that unless authority is total, it cannot be real. It is a conceptual mistake because apart from the friction produced by confrontation with some countervailing authority, the notion of determinate content is unintelligible. In order so much as to have a will (indeed, a mind at all), one must be able to bind oneself with determinately contentful concepts—concepts that articulate what one intends, desires, orders, or believes. One can exercise one’s authority in adopting such attitudes only if one can thereby make oneself responsible, for success or truth, to something else, submit oneself to the authority of what one is acting on or thinking about. What is right about an insistence on a “right of knowledge” or a “right of intention” is that the authority of the individual in endorsing a purpose is an essential element in a resulting performance being something done rather than just something that happens. But it is a mistake characteristic of modernity—the middle period in the conceptual evolution of Spirit—to misconstrue this point by understanding it in terms of the finite categorial structure of pure independence.

One way or another, this is the defect exhibited by every one of the finite forms of understanding of agency retailed in Reason. Rather than rehearsing all the different shapes in which this deformed conception shows up there, we can look at one particularly clear case: the “honest consciousness,” introduced at the beginning of the third part of Reason. It is a particularly pure form of a contraction strategy for securing authority over its doings construed as independence—that is, as total authority. We see (in the next chapter) that the infinite, begrifflich version of this expression of individual self-consciousness construing itself under categories of finitude is rather an expansion strategy, which is what lies behind the alarming claim introducing this section of the Phenomenology, that “Reason is consciousness’s certainty of being all reality.” The idea of contraction strategies is to restrict the notion of doing to whatever one does have complete authority over. This requires that there be no room for the contingency or recalcitrance of objective actuality. What one really does is understood as restricted to a kind of pure willing. This is the analogue on the side of action of a strategy that is familiar to us from the defective conception of cognition discussed in Sense Certainty.

The concepts of both cognition and action require the coincidence of their certainty and their truth. On the face of it, each is prevented from being realized by the stubbornness of reality. As T. S. Eliot puts the point in “The Hollow Men”:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow.…

Between the conception

And the creation …

Falls the Shadow.…⁵

The Cartesian strategy for realizing the concept of knowledge was to stake out a realm of genuine cognition unriven by any gap between appearance and reality, by restricting its objects to appearance itself. For while something could appear to be red and not really be red, it could not appear to appear red and not really appear red. For this restricted realm of certainty as both subject and sole object of knowledge, whatever appears to be so is so. The boundaries of the knowing self were taken to coincide with what could be known in this special way of realizing the concept of knowledge on the side of its unity. A similar Cartesian strategy exists for realizing the concept of action in the face of the stubborn resistance of the real to remaking according to the purposes of thought. This is to delineate a realm of action for which the gap between attempt and achievement does not exist, a domain of ends for the achievement of which no means are required. As mistakes of perception and errors of belief are banished from the privileged Cartesian realm of cognition, so failures of attempt and miscarriages of intent are banished from the privileged Cartesian realm of action. This realm consists of volitions or willings. They are conceived of as mental episodes that are minimal actions, as appearances are mental episodes which are minimal knowings. The knowing is minimal in that no inference is endorsed beyond the internal content which is the evidence. Without interpretation, no error can arise, so success is guaranteed. The actions are minimal in that no commitment is made to achieve anything other than the framing of a purpose. Every attempt counts as an achieved success (as of appearances we could say that their appearance counts as their reality), so the reach of intent cannot exceed its grasp. In the Meditations Descartes invokes the existence of mental episodes that are neither volitions nor caused by volitions (i.e., willed) as evidence of the existence of a not-self, thereby identifying himself with that over which he had the sort of indefeasible dominion that corresponds on the side of action to privileged incorrigible access on the side of cognition.

Kant, at the other end of the Enlightenment, adopts a version of this contraction strategy for morality. The intentionalist restriction of the objects of moral appraisal (that is, actions) to volitions is the attempt to achieve the immediate realization of the concept of action, banishing the significance of reality by contracting action and thereby the self to the vanishing point of minimal attempts, whose aim is only attempt. The strategy is described as immediate because in this understanding of action thought does not return to itself out of otherness, but never ventures outside its own gates to begin with.

If this [honest] consciousness does not convert its purpose into a reality, it has at least willed it, i.e. it makes the purpose qua purpose, the mere doing which does nothing, the Sache selbst. [PG 413]

The understanding of normative appraisal is purged of the contagion of causal contingency for Kant only by restricting such appraisal to the will alone. Hegel’s attitude toward this strategy could be characterized in terms of the advantages of theft over honest toil, except that theft on occasion succeeds, and the strategies of immediacy never can. What he calls the “Sache selbst” is the unity of action as a movement from thought as purpose to thought as appraisal of achievement, and the coincidence of the actuality of action and its concept in that unity. It is misunderstood if it is treated as something that in principle could be private, a metaphysical happening in a particular agent, without social mediation by a reality resistant of individual purposes. To begin with, the social nature of action is missed if actual achievement is not distinguished from both purpose and appraisal, and conceived as the normative product of their recognitive mediation. A performance is not an action because it is caused in a certain way or results from a volition or other special antecedent state, but because of its place in the social mediation of thought with thought.

The attempt to see the concept of action realized immediately in volition is a strategy of independence with varieties analogous to the strategies of independence pursued by the stoic and the skeptical consciousness. Where the cognitive stoic withdraws into his freedom to interpret as appearance, and hence in a certain sense assign the significance of experience, and thus master it, the volitional stoic withdraws into his freedom to attempt, which reality is powerless to interfere with. The stoic admits other descriptions of his actions are possible, but insists that their true significance is to be found only in the description under which they were purposed. The volitional skeptic, more radically, would identify action with volition, treating willing as the only sort of action possible—as the cognitive skeptic identifies knowledge with appearance. Moral intentionalism—a one-sided strategy complementary to moral consequentialism—finds what is to be appraised (that is, the achievement) in the purpose. It is accordingly to be understood as committed to one or the other of these strategies of independence.

Now, the Sache selbst in being merely willed … has the meaning of an empty purpose and of a unity of willing and achievement only in thought. [PG 414]

In “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” Sellars offers an account of the perversity of the Cartesian attempt to base all knowledge on that privileged knowledge of the mental for which no mistake is possible. Ordinary claims to knowledge express an endorsement of a content by the claimer. Error is possible insofar as that endorsement cannot be redeemed or vindicated justificatorily in the context of other claims that may come to be established. In the ordinary case of a noninferential report such as “that is red,” the subject does two things: expresses a responsive disposition to call the object red and endorses the claim that it is red. Appearance talk, as in “that appears (looks, seems) red,” is explained as secure from error only because in saying that something looks red one expresses the same responsive disposition, but explicitly does not endorse the claim one is responsively disposed to make. Because no claim is endorsed, no error is possible.⁶ Once this account of the source of the incorrigibility of “looks”-talk is grasped, it can be seen how inappropriate this sort of secure cognition is for playing the role of original or basic knowledge that can be extended by inference beyond the realm of appearance only by incurring for the first time the risk of error. For appearance talk so understood presupposes reality talk; the ability to use the safe “looks” presupposes the ability to use the risky “is.” Claims about how things look secure their independence from error simply by withholding the endorsements that could turn out to be inappropriate. But one must have mastered the practice of making such endorsements before one can engage in a practice of withholding those endorsements.

A similar diagnosis can be offered of volitions, construed as that privileged form of action for which no failure of achievement is possible. As language entries require both responsive dispositions and resulting endorsements, so language exits require both dispositions to perform and commitment to an achievement under the description expressing the purpose of the action. Corresponding to “that is red,” we have expressions of language exits such as “I shall start the car.” Corresponding to “that looks red,” which withholds endorsement of the “is” claim, we have “I shall try to start the car,” which withholds commitment to achieving the intended result. One may if one likes treat minimal “tryings” as a special kind of action, one that one cannot try to accomplish and fail. But as on the side of cognition, one must not think of these as the original kinds of actions, which are extended to extramental actions only at risk of failure of achievement. For once again, one must already have mastered the social practice of committing oneself to an accomplishment before one can master the practice of occasionally expressing an intention while withholding such commitment. “Trying” talk is parasitic on “doing” talk, and abstracts a derivative private (as in “privation”) and only apparently independent dimension from the social, essentially dually perspectival practice of undertaking commitments and appraising achievements to which others have undertaken commitment. The picture of action as demarcated from other behavior by the causal role played by volitions in bringing it about thus rests on the reification in the causal order of an inversion in the order of explanation. The identification of the active self with its volitions as a way of realizing the notion of action immediately, the strategy of the honest consciousness, is thus a doomed strategy of independence. The notion of action can be realized only with the social mediation of others, not by contracting the self to a circle of transparence to cognition and action, but by expanding it to include the whole cycle of social linguistic practice returning to itself out of the mediation of reality in cognized action, which is the real Sache selbst.

The deficiencies of this immediate conception of the relation between the certainty and the truth of action, what it is for the agent and what it is in itself, are manifested in a kind of deception, which is analogous to the defects diagnosed in Perception. For Hegel, the performance as achieved or accomplished is the publicly accessible perspective on a content whose private aspect is that performance as purposed—the intention specified de re rather than de dicto. If this connection is denied, as the honest consciousness does, then the distinction that action implies introduces systematic deception about the true nature of the action. For that true nature is identified exclusively with the purpose, which is publicly misrepresented by achievements that diverge from the subjectively endorsed purpose.

Since in this alternation consciousness keeps, in its reflection one moment for itself and as essential, while another is only externally present in it, or is for others, there thus enters a play of individualities with one another in which each and all find themselves both deceiving and deceived. [PG 416]

Action cannot be adequately understood by seizing one-sidedly on one of its aspects as independent and essential, and treating another, in this case the public, external aspect, as inessential. Doing so turns acting into deceiving. Action is deception if only the volition that lies hidden within it matters. This is not in fact what action is. As we have learned,

[a]ctualization is, on the contrary, 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]

As a result, the honest consciousness implicitly contradicts its explicit understanding of itself and its action every time it acts.

[I]n doing something, and thus bringing themselves out into the light of day, they directly contradict by their deed their pretence of wanting to exclude the glare of publicity and participation of all and sundry. [PG 417]

Deception thus goes deeper into the honest consciousness, which holds fast to what it (merely) meant to do. In conceiving of itself and others as essentially and in principle deceivers about their intent, it shows itself to us as deceived.

It is then equally a deception of oneself and of others if it is pretended that what one is concerned with is the “matter in hand” alone. [PG 418]

Moral theories like Kant’s, which restrict normative assessments of action exclusively to the purposes with which it was performed, and moral theories like the utilitarian (in either the eighteenth-century flavors Hegel addressed or their more recent incarnations), which restrict normative assessments exclusively to the consequences that actions give rise to, are for Hegel alike defective. They are defective in the one-sided view they have of the initial objects of moral assessment: actions. The conceptual content of the action (“What the deed is can be said of it.”), the intention that develops in it both by determination and by expression, can be specified either de dicto, in terms of the purpose that is endorsed by the agent as the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, or de re, in terms of its various consequential descriptions. Both are genuine expressions of that content, but neither is by itself a complete expression of it. Conceptual contents are things that are essentially specifiable, expressible, and assessable from both prospective-deliberative and retrospective-consequential perspectives. Grasping that content requires understanding the process by which those perspectives are related, and by which the two semantic dimensions of sense and reference, which articulate that content, are related. It must show up at once as a process of determination of a referent by a developing sequence of senses and of expression of referent by the senses in that sequence. In the practical case, the referent is the intention specified de re, and the senses are that same intention specified de dicto at various points in the realization of a plan—what is expressed throughout the process and the determination by actualization of the purpose. Intentionalist and consequentialist theories are alike one-sided, in treating one or the other of these perspectives as fundamental.⁷

Moral theories predicated on inadequate, one-sided analyses of the nature of practical agency are themselves bound to be one-sided and inadequate. In the broadest terms, Hegel condemns Kant for depending on a contraction strategy for understanding agency in terms of willings thought of as minimal, safe actions. Such a strategy is motivated ultimately by the mistaken supposition that an agent’s authority is intelligible only if it is total and indefeasible: the model of independence. This is incompatible with what Hegel takes to be Kant’s real insight into autonomy: that it consists in being able to bind ourselves by conceptual norms. Worked out properly, that notion of binding oneself will turn out to have the structure of reciprocal recognition, in which the agent’s authority (as the one doing the binding) is exercised only in undertaking a coordinate responsibility (what one binds oneself by). The conceptual contents one endorses in judgment or action articulate that responsibility. Hegel takes it that Kant has been insufficiently critical in his investigations of the semantic conditions of intelligibility of determinately contentful concepts, and so of the nature of the pragmatic normative force of the self-binding involved in applying them in endorsing propositions and maxims in judgment and action.

We can see retrospectively that the rationale for the expository transition from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness is our dawning appreciation of the recognitive presuppositions of cognition. Applying concepts in judgments about how things objectively are is an essentially norm-governed practice. One cannot understand the modally robust relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate determinate objective states of affairs without understanding what one is deontically obliged to do when one finds oneself with incompatible commitments, or finds an unacknowledged consequence of a doxastic commitment one does acknowledge. This is the pragmatist insight into the reciprocal sense-dependence of semantics and a normative pragmatics. Its explicit expression is objective idealism. The norms that govern theoretical activities in cognition are socially instituted by reciprocal recognition. In the Reason chapter we see that practical activities, no less than theoretical ones, are essentially norm-governed. What distinguishes intentional actions from mere behavior, doings from happenings, is that they are performances agents are responsible for. They are exercises of the authority of particular organisms who become self-conscious individual agents precisely by being subjects of the normative statuses of responsibility and authority. Those normative statuses, on the practical side as on the cognitive side, are socially instituted by recognitive attitudes.

Already in discussing the Introduction we saw that the third, retrospective, recollective phase of experiential episodes is what makes the distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness (the distinction between objective reality and its subjective appearances that is “essential to consciousness as such”) be something practically significant to cognitive consciousness. In discussing Reason we saw that the retrospective recollective imputation of intentions as norms governing the evolution of a deed plays the role both of a model for and the context within which represented referents are practically associated with representing conceptually contentful senses. The relations between them are a species of normative government. Determinately conceptually contentful ways things are in themselves provide standards for normative assessment of the propriety of attitudes of acknowledging cognitive commitments (what the represented things are for consciousness), and those attitudes are recollectively selected and rationally reconstructed into an expressively progressive sequence that is subjunctively sensitive to the determinate contents of the states of affairs that fix the governing norms. The same retrospective recollective rationality exercised in understanding this semantic representational relationship on the cognitive side is exercised on the practical side in “making what happens into something done,” by discerning an intention [Absicht] that normatively governs the consequential specifications by which what was purposed in an action in the narrow sense [Handlung] develops into a full-blown deed [Tat].

So at this point we can see that both the theoretical-cognitive and the practical-agentive sides of consciousness are to be understood in terms of their subjects engaging in norm-governed practices. And they each have both social-recognitive and historical-recollective dimensions. The higher form of self-consciousness Hegel calls “absolute” (in the concluding chapter of the Phenomenology, titled Absolute Knowing) consists in an explicit understanding of the relations between recognition and recollection, the social and the historical dimensions of normativity. It comprehends the relations between normative statuses and normative attitudes, on the side of discursive pragmatics, the relations between representings and representeds (senses and referents, appearance and reality) on the side of semantics, and the relations between pragmatic accounts of the use of concepts and semantic accounts of the conceptual content as codified by the theses of bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism, objective idealism, and recollective conceptual idealism. Further, this theoretical self-understanding enjoins a practical change in the recognitive structure of Geist. It reveals that implicit in our discursive practice is a commitment to bringing together in a particular way the social and the historical dimensions of normativity, by giving recognition the form of recollection. This is the postmodern, self-consciously historical form of norm-instituting social-practical recognitive attitudes: forgiveness, confession, and trust. At the center of the newly self-conscious form of normativity is a new structure of practical intentional agency. We will not be in a position fully to appreciate it until the very end of this story.

The final, adequate conception of action that Hegel expounds and endorses is the opposite of the sort of one-sided contraction strategy that has just been considered. It is an expansion strategy. The concept of what is done is expanded to encompass the conceptual content as specified from both perspectives: subjectively endorsed intention-as-purpose and objectively achieved consequences. Instead of being identified with punctiform events of willing, actions are thought of as extended plan-structured processes. And the consequential specifications of those doings, in accordance with Davidson’s “accordion principle,” are open-ended. Consequences of the doing ripple through the indefinite future, making retrospectively available new objective, de re specifications of the doing. But there is also another, less conventional sort of conceptual expansion involved in Hegel’s final view. It is a consequence of recovering, at the third stage of the expressively progressive development of Spirit, the commitment characteristic of the first, and characteristically rejected by our own, second stage: the commitment to “accepting responsibility for the deed in its entirety,” including those features of the doing that stem from its contingent, unforeseen, indeed unforeseeable consequences.

As we shall see in the next chapters, and in most detail in the final sections of the Conclusion, making sense of a fully begrifflich conception of self-conscious agency that has this “heroic” feature requires a new, expanded recognitive conception of the agent. It is possible only when we understand ourselves in such a way that we all take responsibility for what each of us does, and we each take responsibility for what all of us do. Although the individual is still understood to play an essential role—without which nothing would be done—the recognitive community is understood to play an equally essential role in the individual’s capacity to do anything. In a real sense, to be the doing of an individual agent, each action must also be the doing of all. This expanded notion of the self who is the agent was implicit all along in the notion of individual self-consciousnesses and their communities as alike synthesized by reciprocal recognition. It will be made explicit—which is necessary and sufficient for achieving the third stage of self-consciousness of Spirit—by further consideration of the recognitive role of recollection in determining the contents both of concepts and of the commitments that are their applications in action and judgment. In particular, we must explain the final, fully self-conscious form of recognition as recollection, which Hegel calls “forgiveness.” That is what Hegel does in the next chapter of his book, Spirit, and what we will do in the final chapters of this one. The aim of both is to explain why

[t]he wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind. The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes. The self that carries out the action, the form of its act, is only a moment of the whole, and so likewise is the knowledge, that by its judgment determines and establishes the distinction between the individual and universal aspects of the action. [PG 669]

Chapter 12

Recollection, Representation, and Agency

I. Hegelian vs. Fregean Understandings of Sense and Reference

II. Retrospective and Prospective Perspectives on the Development of Conceptual Contents

III. Intentional Agency as a Model for the Development of Senses

IV. Contraction and Expansion Strategies