The Phenomenology aims to help us understand modernity. It is true that to do that we need to understand the traditional forms of life we came from, and how we got here from there. And recollectively understanding modernity is the proper way to realize where we are committed to going from here: what would count as further progress. Nonetheless, Hegel resolutely keeps the narrative center of attention focused on the promises and perils of the still-incomplete project of modernity. The motor of that project is the burgeoning significance of self-conscious individual subjectivity. A principal manifestation of that self-consciously new form of self-consciousness is the felt need for the theoretical legitimation of the norms by which moderns find themselves acculturated. The mere existence of inherited normative structures is no longer accepted as sufficient warrant for them. Entitlement to the acquiescence of individuals to institutionalized constellations of authority and responsibility is conditioned on the provision of sufficient reasons justifying those arrangements to those subject to them. The demand for their theoretical legitimation is an important dimension along which in modernity the authority of normative statuses answers to the attitudes of those bound by the norms in question. The demand for legitimation of authority is an aspect of the modern practical attitude-dependence of normative statuses that does not entail that the statuses in question are instituted by attitudes. The latter, stronger claim (to which the reciprocal recognition model answers) asserts the sufficiency of attitudes for statuses. Conditioning the bindingness of statuses on attitudes on their acknowledgment as legitimate by those whose attitudes they bind asserts only a necessary condition.

The fact that it is a hallmark of modernity that normative force is understood to depend on the possibility of a legitimating account expressing a rationale for it underlines a key feature characteristic of the modern form of Geist: for it, language becomes the medium of recognition. Their specifically linguistic expression is now an essential aspect of recognitive attitudes of attributing and acknowledging normative statuses. Emphasis on characteristic means of linguistic expression was central all along to Hegel’s discussion of different forms of empirical self-consciousness on the side of cognition: indexicals and demonstratives for sense certainty, predicates and singular terms for perception, and subjunctively robust modals for understanding. As it is for cognition, so it is for recognition. We saw that behind and supporting the cognitive practices that embody and enact empirical consciousness lie the recognitive practices that embody and enact normative self-consciousness. Modern normative self-consciousness is articulated by recognitive attitudes and normative statuses that are what they are in significant part because of the language in which they are made explicit.

In particular, we can understand the alienation from our norms that is inherent in modernity only in terms of the deformations of language that express it. It is an essential, principled part of Hegel’s general methodology to understand what is implicit in terms of its explicit expressions—to think of those expressions as essential to the identity of what is implicit. In this particular case, its specifically linguistic expressions are essential to alienation as a distinctively modern metaphysical normative structure. That is so precisely because alienation is at base a pathology of legitimation, undercutting the bindingness of norms. As such, it is rooted in the demand for a linguistically explicit account of the nature and rationale of the bindingness of the norms that make us what we are, in the light of an appreciation of the sense in which we make them what they are. The norms in question are discursive norms, in that they are conceptually contentful. But the demand for explicit legitimation is further a demand for specifically discursive justification. The failure to reconcile the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the attitude-dependence of normative statuses has significant practical expressions. But its theoretical expressions are equally essential to the predicament.

Language [Sprache], Hegel tells us repeatedly (at [PG 652, 666]), is the Dasein of Geist: its concrete, immediate being. Modernity is the age of alienated Geist, and “[t]his alienation takes place solely in language, which here appears in its characteristic significance.” [PG 508] In the middle section of his long Spirit chapter, Hegel accordingly explicitly addresses language, with particular attention to the language characteristic of alienation and the institutions that both foster that language and to which it is addressed.

II. Actual and Pure Consciousness

Hegel’s discussion of the normative structure of the modern world of culture is long, intricate, and interesting. But our purposes do not require rehearsal of many of its details. He distinguishes two aspects of that structure: actual consciousness and pure consciousness. Actual consciousness comprises social institutions, the norms they embody, and individuals playing roles and engaging in practices governed and articulated by those norms. By applying those norms in their practice, individual subjects make them actual and efficacious; they actualize the norms. The norms and the individuals acting and assessing their actions according to those norms collectively constitute the institutions, giving them, as well as the norms, actual existence. To act according to the norms is to appeal to these in one’s practical deliberations about what to do. Similarly, to assess according to them is to appeal to those norms—the ones implicit in custom—as standards in assessing one’s own and others’ performances. This is for one’s attitudes to be governed by the norms in the dual sense that the norms provide standards for normative assessment of the attitudes and that the attitudes are subjunctively sensitive to the content of the norms.

The term “pure consciousness” is a way of talking about how the norms are understood theoretically: their explicit discursive articulation. Hegel says that pure consciousness “is both the thinking of the actual world, and its thought-form [Denken und Gedachtsein].” [PG 485] It is the way normativity is understood, the theory that makes explicit the normativity implicit in the institutionalized practice of actual consciousness. Pure consciousness is the way norms are conceived or conceptualized. Hegel’s term for conceptual articulation—articulation by relations of material incompatibility and inference—is “mediation.” So he says that pure consciousness mediates the relation between actual individual selves and the norms it theorizes about. In traditional society, as opposed to modern culture, the norms implicit in Sitten, in customs, are immediate—not the subject of conceptualization or thematization, not made explicit, and hence not subject to critical scrutiny. Immediate Sittlichkeit has a purely practical, implicit, nonconceptual conception of norms, and so has no analogue of pure consciousness.

Pure consciousness is a distinctively modern form of self-consciousness, a manifestation of the rise of subjectivity. It is a new way the norms implicit in the practices of actual consciousness can be something explicitly for consciousness. Where actual consciousness requires the adoption of practical attitudes toward the norms, applying them in practice by judging, acting intentionally, and assessing the claims and performances of others, pure consciousness requires the adoption of theoretical attitudes toward the norms. In particular, pure consciousness offers explicit accounts of the nature of the binding force and the source of the content of the norms. It reflects on the relations between norms and the institutions that embody them, on the one hand, and their relations to the subjective normative attitudes of those whose practice they govern, on the other. Pure consciousness is a response to a felt need for the norms, their binding force, and their particular contents not only to be explicitly understood and explained, but to be validated, legitimated, vindicated. That demand is itself a prime expression of the newly appreciated authority of self-conscious subjectivity and its attitudes. The question at issue between traditional and modern practical conceptions and constellations of normativity is whether, when the individual acknowledges the norms in action and assessment, that needs to be conceptually mediated or not—whether a theory, a story about it is needed. To say that it is, is to accord a new kind of authority to the attitudes of the individuals who produce, consume, and assess such legitimating stories. That is why the role in the world of culture of what Hegel calls “pure consciousness” is an essential part of the advent of modernity as the rise of subjectivity.

I emphasized in the last chapter that alienation as Hegel conceives it is not primarily a psychological matter, nor a matter of how people feel. It is an ontological matter of the normative structure of social substance, and hence of self-consciousness. It is in the end a recognitive structure, a form exhibited by the recognitive processes that institute both communities and self-conscious individual community members. The failure of norms and normative attitudes to mesh properly, which is alienation, shows up in practical form in the structure of actual consciousness and in theoretical form in the structure of pure consciousness. Recognizing another is adopting a normative attitude: taking the other to be the subject of normative statuses and attitudes, to be bound by and subject to normative assessment according to the norms of the community and to be able to undertake responsibilities and exercise authority. Alienation is a structural defect in the relations between the recognitive attitudes that synthesize the social substance and the communal norms that are its essence—the norms subjection to which make self-conscious individuals out of particular desiring natural organisms. In Hegel’s terms, this defective metaphysical structure is a defective logical structure: a deformation of the way universals characterize particulars to yield individuals.

The alienation of the modern form of Spirit is manifested in the structure of both actual and pure consciousness. On Hegel’s account, both are divided into two ultimately competing substructures. In each case, alienation shows up in the relations between them.¹ The actualization of the substance of culture, its actual world, takes two different forms: those of Wealth and State Power. It is the actions of self-conscious individuals in intentionally producing performances and assessing each other’s performances that give whatever actuality there is to the norms and the institutions. This is applying norms in the judgments and intentions that provide reasons for performances and in the assessment of reasons for performances. The two sides of what Hegel calls “actual consciousness” accordingly correspond to the two aspects of individuality: particularity and universality. Wealth [Reichtum] is the thick institutional form in which the particular aspect of the certainty of individual self-consciousness is expressed by becoming actual or public, acquiring its truth in practical activity. State Power [Staatsmacht] is the thick institutional form in which another universal aspect of the certainty of individual self-consciousness is expressed or becomes actual or public, acquiring its truth in practical activity.

We have seen that the particular and universal aspects of self-conscious individuality correspond to the two structural elements necessary for social substance to be synthesized by recognitive relations: the particular recognized and recognizing individuals, and the recognitive community comprising those individuals. All the components of actual consciousness in the form of Wealth—the norms, institutions, and self-conscious individuals who apply those norms and play roles in those institutions—are to be understood as articulating the contribution to the institution and application of norms that is played by the recognitive activities and attitudes of particular self-conscious individuals. And all the components of actual consciousness in the form of State Power—the norms, institutions, and self-conscious individuals who apply those norms and play roles in those institutions—are to be understood as articulating the contribution to the cultivation and acculturation of self-conscious individuals that is played by norms (universals) whose applicability is adjudicated by the recognitive community in whose practices they are implicit. Modern actual consciousness is alienated insofar as these two constitutive aspects of the recognitive process that produces both self-conscious individual selves and their communities stand in asymmetrical relations of relative independence—that is, insofar as each side acts practically as though its authority over the other were not balanced by a corresponding reciprocal responsibility to it. Overcoming alienation will be moving from recognitive processes exhibiting this structure of immediate, asymmetrical independence to ones exhibiting instead the mediated, reciprocal structure of freedom.

The two sides correspond to the two sides of the distinction that action implies. We saw that these correspond to two social perspectives: the perspective of the agent who intentionally produces a performance, and the perspective of the members of a public audience, who assess it. The agent has a special authority over the specifications under which the performance is intentional, hence a doing at all: the Handlung. But the audience has a corresponding authority over consequential specifications of the doing, which can continue to unfold even after the death of the agent: the Tat. So alienation also shows up in a practical inability to reconcile the deed as intentional with the deed as actual. In Hegel’s picture of the traditional conception of agency, heroic expansion of the self through identification with the whole deed stands in an unalienated equilibrium with the tragic practical understanding of the relation between “knowing and not knowing” in terms of fate. But that is an equilibrium that cannot survive acknowledgment of the rights of intention and knowledge: the recognitive seeds of modernity. In the actual modern world of culture, which results from that acknowledgment, Wealth is the individual as having authority over the application of concepts, and State Power is the individual as being responsible to the conceptual norms. The division of these, their conflict, is the paradigmatic institutional form of alienation.

III. Recognition in Language

One of the most basic interpretive ideas animating the project pursued in this book is that in the Phenomenology (as well as the Science of Logic), Hegel is offering us a sophisticated account of conceptual normativity. For him, as for Kant, all norms are conceptual norms, in the sense that they are conceptually articulated. The conceptual character of normativity is expressed explicitly by and for individual subjects through the use of language. (Cf. Sellars’s claim that grasp of a concept is practical mastery of the norms governing the use of a word.) So it is that Hegel’s account of the relations between individuals, norms, and institutions in the modern world centers on the distinctive role he accords to language in that context.

On his analysis, one of the distinctive features of modernity is the way in which language mediates the relations among individuals, their acts and attitudes, and their norms, institutions, and communities. Language becomes the medium of recognition. The modern institutional expression of the norms is State Power. It can be actualized, the norms it embodies actually applied, only by the activities of self-conscious individuals. “State power is raised to the position of having a self of its own.” [PG 507] Those individuals actualize State Power by relinquishing the pursuit of their private interests, sacrificing their subjective attitudes for the sake of, and so identifying with, the norms that State Power thereby embodies and actualizes. Here there need no longer be a risk of biological death for such identification, for the question is how already-constituted private individuals come to occupy distinctive institutional roles by identification with public norms, rather than how particular desiring animals come to be self-conscious individuals by identification with themselves as recognized. “The true sacrifice of being-for-self is solely that in which it surrenders itself as completely as in death, yet in this renunciation no less preserves itself.” [PG 507] “This alienation takes place solely in language, which here appears in its characteristic significance.” [PG 508] That “characteristic significance” is, as he puts the point elsewhere, that “language is the existence [Dasein] of Geist.” [PG 652, 666] This claim can serve as a motto for the semantic reading offered here of the Phenomenology.

The “characteristic significance” of language is explicated by means of a contrast:

In the world of the ethical order, in law and command, and in the actual world, in counsel, language has the essence for its content, and is the form of that content. [PG 508]

Once again, the “essence” is the norms. “Command” is the preeminent linguistic form of the subordination-obedience structure of normativity. In traditional society, and in the language of counsel (the characteristic means of expression of Wealth), language is the form in which the conceptual norms and the recognitive attitudes of attributing and assessing performances according to them can be explicitly expressed—what they are is said of them. For language is the form of explicitness, of expression. But the characteristic use of language in modernity is not just to make explicit implicit norms and attitudes. It is to institute those norms and adopt those attitudes. The passage continues:

But here it has for its content the form itself, the form which language is, and it is authoritative as language. [PG 508]

To say that the content of recognitive attitudes is also linguistic in the modern era is to say that adopting the distinctively modern recognitive attitudes is performing speech acts. The public speech acts are what institute the normative, recognitive relations in questions. This “authoritative” here is again “Gelten,” which is Kant’s term for normative force, bindingness, or validity [Gültigkeit]. “It is authoritative as speech, as that which performs what has to be performed” [PG 508]. What has to be performed is the constitution of a self by identification, the institution of norms and the acknowledgment of commitments, all of which is specific recognition.

This is followed by a long discussion now of the performative power of language, which constitutes people, by being the medium of recognition: “[F]or it is the real existence, the Dasein, of the pure self as self.” Not only is language the existence of Spirit, it is the existence of the individual self as self. That is because the language and the linguistic utterances and the relations among them is the medium in which recognition takes place. “In speech, self-consciousness, qua independent separate individuality”—the individually self-conscious self, the one characteristic of modernity—“comes as such into existence, so that it exists for others.” That is the petitioning for recognition. What it is petitioning to be specifically recognized as, the commitment it is authorizing others to attribute to it, is the individual as a normative being in the sense of one who identifies with the authority of the norms. One does that by sacrificing one’s particular attitudes to the norms when they conflict. The agent of the state is making his attitudes responsible to those norms by undertaking a commitment that serves as a standard everybody can hold him to and measure his performances against. This is constituting himself as that sort of a self. That recognitive making oneself responsible to the norms is a doing that consists in a certain kind of saying. It is going on record, making a public commitment.

The content of any nonlinguistic act is still implicit. In a linguistic act one actually says what it is that one is doing, what the content is of the commitment one is undertaking. And this is done in a way that transcends one’s own authority over that content. It is open and available for others to attribute, discuss, and adjudicate disputes about. That is what language makes possible. Being authoritative as language is the coming into existence of the individually self-conscious self as such, by coming into existence in way that it exists for others. The passage continues:

Otherwise the I, this pure I, is non-existent, it is not there. In every other expression it is immersed in the reality, and is in a shape from which it can withdraw itself. It is reflected back into itself from its action and dissociates itself from such an imperfect existence, in which there is always at once too much as too little, letting it remain lifeless behind. [PG 508]

The topic here is the alienation that is a way of structuring the difference between Tat and Handlung. What you actually do is always too much or too little, and there is the possibility of distancing yourself from the content as not what you intended. But when you say what you are committed to, when you express your intention, the explicit declaration does not give you that distance. “I” is important here because it is the paradigmatic word by which speakers undertake a commitment, explicitly marking the attitude that is the undertaking of a commitment. “I claim,” “I intend,” “I did,” “I will”: those are forms of acknowledging, sometimes constitutively, various sorts of commitment. Continuing the passage: “Language, however, contains it in its purity. It alone expresses the I, the I itself.… The I is this particular I,” the self that is saying it, “but equally the universal I”—that is, the norms that it is appealing to and applying in undertaking this determinately contentful commitment, whatever it is. “Its manifesting is also at once the externalization and banishing of this particular I.” It is the externalization, the actualization, the public manifestation of it, and the banishing of it in that it is a commitment to sacrifice particular private attitudes. It is essential that the declaration of identification can be heard. For in being public, it gets a significance that runs beyond what it intended. “The I that utters itself is heard or perceived, it is an infection in which it is immediately passed into unity with those for whom it is a real existence, and so is a universal self-consciousness.” “I” is important because it is the concrete, explicit expression of the role of language as the medium of recognition, and hence of the social constitution of self-conscious selves and their attitudes, and the social institution of norms and communal institutions.

The passage continues: “That it is perceived or heard means that its real existence dies away.” It is a saying; it is just an event.

This its otherness has been taken back into itself, and its real existence is just this, that as a self-conscious now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing it is a real existence. This vanishing is thus, itself, at once, its abiding. [PG 508]

Now that makes practically no sense read by itself. But thought about in connection with the end of Sense Certainty, it is a way of telling us to think of “I” in the way Hegel there taught us to think about “now.” Recall that we started off with the analysis of indexicals, of unrepeatable utterances, with the point of their conceptual content being to be unrepeatable, so that different tokenings of the same type could have different contents. As unrepeatable events, the tokenings were connected immediately, nonconceptually, to events that prompt or accompany them. As unrepeatable events or episodes they vanish. But they mark something in the sensuous world in that way. Demonstratives and indexicals are our immediate point of cognitive contact with the world. But what makes them cognitively significant, what gives them conceptual significance, what makes them able to engage with inferential practices—the mediation that articulates their immediacy—is that we can pick them up anaphorically. They can “abide” in these repetitions, in these recollections (Erinnerungen). Hegel is saying that the key to the significance of the “I” in the undertaking of commitments is the way it can be held in place by people attributing the commitment to the utterer, specifically recognizing the utterer of “I” in the sense of attributing a particularly contentful commitment to that individual. The interaction of the social-recognitive and the historical-recollective dimensions of normativity is essential to this story.

Besides Hegel, no other philosopher between the scholastics and Frege put “I” and “now” in a box and worried about their conceptual functioning together. And the further realization that there is something that is expressed in demonstratives and indexicals that is essential to empirical knowledge, on the one hand, and to the constitution of selves, on the other, had to wait for the middle years of the twentieth century.²

We see language, then, in its characteristic significance as the expressive medium for conceptual normativity—the sea in which normative fish swim. By performing speech acts, engaging in discursive practices, individuals make explicit and public both petitions for specific recognition as risking and sacrificing merely particular, subjective attitudes in favor of identification with the norms, and corresponding grantings of those recognitive petitions, in the form of attributions of those self-constituting identificatory commitments.

The structural alienation of modern actual consciousness shows up in the fact that the avatars of Wealth, those who actualize the particular aspect of recognitive processes, refuse to recognize the avatars of State Power as identifying with the norms to which they profess allegiance. Rather than genuine identification, they see only the pursuit of the private interests and motives of the holders of state office, under cover of their roles as officials.³ The petition for recognition and so self-constitution is rejected as a false description of what is really going on. The attempt at making something so by an act of identification—something that, as essentially mediated by language, cannot be achieved by the unreciprocated activity of one individual—is taken as contradicting how things are found to be. For self-interested motives of various kinds can always be found for the actions of individuals, be they state officials or not. We return to this issue beginning in the next chapter in connection with the discussion of the meta-attitude Hegel associates with “playing the part of the moral valet.”

Because the modern medium of recognition—what mediates the relations among individuals, their acts and attitudes, and the norms implicit in their practices and administered by their institutions and communities—is language, the alienated character of the modern recognitive structure is itself expressed linguistically. Hegel offers a strikingly apt botanization of modern discursive forms of expression of alienation. When the alienation of the particular from the universal, the practical construal of individual actions in terms of private attitudes rather than public norms or statuses, is expressed and enacted linguistically within the sphere of State Power (rather than in the relations between Wealth and State Power), Hegel says the result is that “the heroism of silent service becomes the heroism of flattery.” These are forms of “heroism” because in each case the interests of the particular individual are sacrificed to something else. In the case of silent service, the aim is immediate practical identification with the norms (duty). What the explicitly alienated language of flattery professes is the sacrifice of the flatterer’s private interests and attitudes for those of the flattered. As with Wealth’s accusation of the agents of State Power, norms and duties (universals) drop out of the picture in favor of the purely subjective attitudes of particular individuals. And it is easy to see that the flatterer makes true what Wealth finds true of the agents of State Power. For flattery of a superior is the pursuit of personal advantage in the guise of sacrifice of it.

There is a corresponding form of flattery on the side of Wealth: “the language that gives wealth a sense of its essential significance,” which likewise dissembles because “what it pronounces to be an essence, it knows to be expendable, to be without intrinsic being.” [PG 520] The most explicit expression of alienation, however, “pure culture,” is a linguistic way of being in the world that manifests the asymmetrical recognitive relations between the two forms of actual consciousness. It is a “nihilistic game” of “destructive judgment,” “witty talk” that undercuts the validity of every distinction and assessment, “stripping of their significance all moments which are supposed to count as the true being.” [PG 521]

What is learnt in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth, nor their specific Notions, “good” and “bad,” or the consciousness of “good” and “bad” (the noble and the ignoble consciousness), possess truth. [PG 521]

The whole normative dimension of life is rejected as illusory. There are not really any norms, no distinction in how things are in themselves between what is appropriate or fitting and what not, between what one is obliged to do and what is not permitted. So the institutions that administer and apply those norms are founded on lies, are deceptive frameworks for the pursuit of private ends and interests. This conclusion is the consequence of the modern discovery that the norms are not simply objectively there, independently of our attitudes and activities, in the context of a conception of normative authority as independence that obliges one to treat that fact as demonstrating that they have no real authority over our attitudes at all. If the norms are dependent on what individuals do, if the acts and attitudes subject to assessment according to those norms bear some responsibility for those norms, then what individuals do cannot, on the alienated practical conception of authority as independence, be genuinely responsible to those norms. Norms are an illusion. There are only attitudes. The hyperobjective traditional picture of normativity gives rise to a hypersubjective modern, alienated conception, according to which the very idea of a norm is a mere projection of our attitudes, of practical distinctions made by individuals.

But if there really are no norms, then the attitudes themselves can have no real content. If the distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong, correct and incorrect, have no genuine content, then neither do attitudes of acknowledging or assessing acts as good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect. And if that is right, then what of the attitudes of those who practice the witty, nihilistic talk? On the one hand, it represents the triumph of individual subjective attitude over norms, the assertion of the authority of attitudes, in particular, its own attitudes, over normative distinctions. “This judging and talking is, therefore, what is true and invincible, while it overpowers everything.” [PG 521] On the other hand, that nihilism is self-undercutting. “[T]he vanity of all things is its own vanity, it is itself vain.” [PG 526] The witty talk—which “knows how to pass judgement on and chatter about everything”—denies the correctness of talk of how things are in themselves, seeing only how they are for consciousness. So it has no way to make intelligible even the notion of how things are for consciousness, including for itself. For the content of such an attitude depends on its normative exclusion of other such attitudes.

The consciousness that is aware of its disruption and openly declares it, derides existence and the universal confusion, and derides its own self as well.… This vanity of all reality and every definite Notion [is] vanity which knows itself to be such. [PG 525]

The practical understanding this disrupted consciousness has of its own attitudes is ironic. It still makes distinctions and employs concepts, but it does not take its commitments seriously, does not take itself to be undertaking responsibilities by its talk. “The content of what Spirit says about itself is thus the perversion of every Notion [Begriff] and reality, the universal deception of itself and others.” [PG 522] “In that vanity, all content is turned into something negative which can no longer be grasped as having a positive significance.” [PG 526] What goes missing is something required for normative attitudes to have determinate content. So the attitude of this “lacerated” consciousness to its own attitudes must be distanced and remote. Its ironic stance consists in not identifying even with its own attitudes, which it knows to be in the end vain and contentless, never mind with the norms to which those attitudes on their face profess allegiance. Its language expresses and enacts pure alienation:

[I]t knows everything to be self-alienated, being-for-self is separated from being-in-itself; what is meant, and purpose, are separated from truth; and from both again, the being-for-another, the ostensible meaning from the real meaning, from the true thing and intention.… It is the self-disruptive nature of all relationships and the conscious disruption of them. [PG 526]

Still, the adoption of this nihilistic recognitive attitude remains a characteristically modern assertion of the authority of the individual—a manifestation of the rise of subjectivity, even if a perverse overreaction. It is a “self-centred self” [PG 526], which seeks recognition of itself in its exercise of the power to make the norms vain by taking them to be so.

This vanity at the same time needs the vanity of all things in order to get from them the consciousness of self; it therefore creates this vanity itself and is the soul that supports it. Power and wealth are the supreme ends of its exertions, it knows that through renunciation and sacrifice it forms itself into the universal, attains to the possession of it, and in this possession is universally recognized and accepted: state power and wealth are the real and acknowledged powers. However, this recognition and acceptance is itself vain; and just by taking possession of power and wealth it knows them to be without a self of their own, knows rather that it is the power over them, while they are vain things. [PG 526]

Its merely ironic; mock renunciation and sacrifice is no genuine recognition at all. It is a petition to be recognized as not recognizing. Irony is accordingly visible as a strategy of Mastery. The same application of categories of independence (the atomistic practical conception of authority as asymmetrical and nonreciprocal, as not only not necessarily, but not even possibly balanced by a coordinate responsibility) that shapes its take on the relations between norms and attitudes shapes its self-consciousness as well.

IV. Authority and Responsibility in Language as a Model of Freedom

Language is the medium in which the ultimately recognitive relations among self-conscious individuals, their acts, their normative attitudes, the norms they are bound by, the practices in which those norms are implicit, their communities, and their institutions are not only expressed, but instituted and instantiated. That is why the deformations in that recognitive constellation of attitudes distinctive of alienation take the form of characteristic linguistic practices. In particular, they take the form of ironic relations between individuals and the culture-constituting norms, which are viewed as pious fictions. Modernity is characterized by a one-sided focus on the normative significance of some of these elements at the expense of others. Paradigmatically this is the privileging of the authority of individuals and their acts and attitudes, construing them as independent of and authoritative with respect to the norms they fall under. The very fact that language has come to the fore as the recognitive medium in which conceptual normativity is articulated offers some guidance as to how the one-sidedness of the modern appreciation of the significance of subjectivity (alienation) can be overcome, without having to give up the insight that marks the shift from traditional to modern culture as an expressively progressive transformation of our self-consciousness. It sets criteria of adequacy for an unalienated, postmodern form of recognition. For it means that our model for the articulation of Geist should be the relations among individual language users, their speech acts, the attitudes those speech acts express, linguistic norms, linguistic practices, linguistic communities, and languages. The move beyond modernity will require us to understand how the bindingness of objective conceptual norms is compatible with both those norms being what makes particular desiring organisms into geistig, self-conscious individuals and with those norms being instituted by the practices such individuals engage in of applying concepts in the judgments and actions that express their commitments and other attitudes. Implemented practically, in actual and not just pure consciousness, that understanding will take the form of a move from the relations between individuals and their conceptually articulated norms exhibiting the structure of irony to relations exhibiting the structure of trust.

We have seen that there is a fundamental social division of normative labor corresponding to the distinction between the force and content of speech acts. The force (Fregean “Kraft”) is the normative significance of a speech act: what difference it makes to the commitments and responsibilities that the speaker acknowledges, undertakes, or licenses others to attribute. The content is what determines what one has committed oneself to or made oneself responsible for by performing a speech act with that content. The key point is that performing a speech act (expressing a linguistic attitude, such as a belief or intention) involves coordinate dimensions of authority of the speaker concerning the claiming, and responsibility with respect to what is claimed. When we talk, making claims about how things are, or expressing intentions as to how they shall be, there is always something that is up to each one of us, and something that is not. It is up to each of us which move we make, what concept we apply, what counter in the language game we play. And then it is not up to us what the significance of that is, given the content of what we have said. So it is up to me whether I claim that this pen is made of copper, whether I play the “copper” counter that is in play in our practices. But if I do play it, I have bound myself by a set of norms; I have committed myself to things independently of whether I realize what I have committed myself to. In this sense, the normative status I have taken on outruns my normative attitudes. What I am actually committed to need not coincide with what I take myself to be committed to. (The linguistic Tat goes beyond the linguistic Handlung: the distinction that speech acts involve.) If I say that the pen is copper, then whether I know it or not I have committed myself to its melting at 1085°C, because what I am saying cannot be true unless that is true, too. It is up to me whether I play the counter, make that move, invest my authority or normative force in that content, but then not up to me what I have committed myself to by it, what commitments I have ruled out, what would entitle me to it. The normative significance of the move I have made, the boundary of the responsibility I have undertaken is not up to me; it is a matter of the linguistic norms that articulate the concepts I have chosen to apply.

The conceptual norms determined by the content of the concepts speakers apply in judgment and intention are administered by the linguistic community, which accordingly exercises an authority correlative to that of the speaker. Metallurgical experts know a great deal more than I do about what I have claimed, what I have committed myself to, by calling the pen “copper.” Those to whom I am speaking, those who attribute and assess my speech act, have a certain kind of privilege: the authority to keep a different set of books on its consequences than I do. It is important to Hegel that even expert audiences are not fully authoritative concerning the content. They do not determine the melting point of copper. That is a matter of how things are in themselves, which is not a matter of how things are for the experts, or the rest of the community, any more than it is a matter of how things are for the speaker. The norms are not something that can simply be read off of the attitudes of either. We have already seen something of how Hegel wants to reconstruct the objective, representational dimension of discourse, what it is for there to be referents that are authoritative for our inferences, the noumena behind the phenomena, the realities behind the appearances, in terms of the recollective historical structure of discursive practice. One of the principal aims of the rest of the discussion here of Hegel’s Spirit chapter is further to delineate the fine structure of the diachronic, historical account of the relations between normative force and conceptual content. But the fact that there is a third pole of authority, besides that of the speaker and of the linguistic community, should not be taken to minimize the authority that the community does exercise with respect to conceptual content.

Further, if we ask how the term “copper” came to express the content that it does, so that assertions employing it have the normative significance that they do, the story we tell is going to have to include the practices of the linguistic community in question, the acts individual speakers have actually performed in concrete circumstances, and the assessments of the correctness or incorrectness of those performances that their fellow community members have actually made. Somehow, by using the expression “copper” the way we have—in concert with the uses we have made of a whole lot of other expressions—we have managed to make “copper” claims beholden to how it objectively is with copper. We have incorporated features of the world into the norms we collectively administer, instituting a sense of correctness according to which the correctness of our “copper” claims answers to the facts about copper. Judging and acting intentionally must be understood both as the process of applying conceptual norms and as the process of instituting those norms. (Recall the slogan that, in this respect, Hegel is to Kant as Quine is to Carnap.) In terms we will be concerned with further along, the first is the process of giving contingency the form of necessity, the second the process of incorporating contingency into necessity. As we will see, the account of recollective rationality and the relations between normative statuses and attitudes that are instituted by the recollective phase of experience points the way to a postmodern form of recognition that overcomes ironic alienation. This is the recollective-recognitive structure of trust.

Hegel talks about the move from theoretical and practical application of categories of independence to categories of freedom (from Verstand to Vernunft) as giving us a conceptual apparatus for both, on the one hand, identifying ourselves as the products of norms that incorporate features of the objective world like what the melting point of copper is and, on the other hand, seeing our activity as having instituted those norms, the norms that make that fact potentially visible and expressible. Focusing on the linguistic character of modern recognitive processes—the practices of adopting specific recognitive attitudes—that is, of acknowledging and attributing conceptually contentful commitments, responsibilities, and licensings—provides a new perspective on the notion of freedom, which is characteristic of Vernunft. According to the Kantian framework Hegel takes over, agency is thought of as a matter of what agents are responsible for. Agents (and knowers) are creatures who live and move and have their being in a normative space, creatures who can commit themselves, who can undertake and attribute responsibility and exercise authority. Concepts determine what one has committed oneself to, what one has made oneself responsible for in acting intentionally (and judging). This framework leads Kant to distinguish between the realm of nature and the realm of freedom in normative terms. To be free in his sense is to be bound by norms, to be able to perform intentional actions and make judgments, which is to say to be able to undertake commitments. That is to be able (in the normative sense of having the authority) to make oneself responsible in the ways articulated by concepts, which are rules for determining what one has committed oneself to—for instance, by calling the pen “copper.” One of the radical features of this normative conception of freedom as constraint by norms is that it is a conception of positive, rather than negative, freedom.⁴ Negative freedom is freedom from something: the absence of some sort of constraint. Positive freedom is freedom to do something: the presence of some sort of ability. In Kant’s picture of the freedom characteristic of geistig, normative beings, the capacity that they have to commit themselves, to undertake responsibilities, is of a kind of positive freedom. They are able to do something that merely natural creatures cannot. Freedom for Kant is the capacity to constrain oneself by something more than the laws of nature—the capacity to constrain oneself normatively, by undertaking commitments and responsibilities, acknowledging authority, and so on.

One way in which the model of language helps us think about the possibility of overcoming alienation, then, is that it exhibits an unalienated combination of the authority of individual attitudes and their responsibility to genuinely binding norms. For linguistic practice exhibits a social division of labor. It is up to each individual which speech acts to perform: which claims to make, which intentions and plans to endorse. The original source of linguistic commitments is the acts and attitudes of individual speakers. In undertaking those commitments, those speakers exercise a distinctive kind of authority. But in doing so, as an unavoidable part of doing so, they make themselves responsible to the norms that articulate the contents of the concepts they have applied. Committing oneself in asserting or expressing an intention is licensing the rest of one’s community to hold one responsible. The speaker and agent’s authority is not only compatible with a coordinate responsibility (that is, authority on the part of the norms, administered by the community); it is unintelligible as determinately contentful apart from such responsibility. The individual has authority over the normative force, the undertaking of a commitment, only by making himself responsible to the world and to others for the content of the commitment. The positive freedom to exercise authority by undertaking determinately contentful commitments requires giving up some negative freedom, by making oneself responsible.

Unlike Kant, Hegel has a social practice account of the nature of normativity. Freedom for him is accordingly not a wholly individual achievement, not something that can be understood agent by agent. It is possible only in the context of communities, practices, and institutions that have the right structure. Because normativity is a social achievement, freedom is an essentially political phenomenon, in a way it is not for Kant. This difference between the two thinkers is connected to another one: freedom is a comparative normative phenomenon for Hegel in a way that it is not for Kant. Not everyone who is constrained by norms is free, according to Hegel. Only norm-instituting recognitive communities and institutions with the right structure constitute free self-conscious individuals. The paradigm of that ideal freedom-instituting structure is linguistic normativity.

A classic, perennial, in some sense defining problem of political philosophy has always been to explain how and on what grounds it could be rational for an individual to accept some communal constraint on her will. What could justify the loss of negative freedom—the freedom from constraint—that you get by entering into a community and subjecting yourself to their norms, acknowledging the authority of those norms? One can easily see how that could be justified from the point of view of the community. Unless people act rightly and conform to the norms, there are lots of things the community cannot do. The challenge has been to say how one could justify that loss of negative freedom as rational on the part of the individual. Responses to this challenge form a favorite literary genre in the Enlightenment. (Hobbes and Locke are paradigmatic practitioners.) Hegel saw in Kant’s notion of positive freedom the possibility of a new kind of response to this challenge. In this context the fact that language provides both the medium and the model of recognition takes on a special importance. His idea is that some kinds of normative constraint provide a positive freedom, which, in Hegel’s distinctive view, and moving beyond Kant, is expressive freedom. And the model for the exercise of that sort of freedom is talking.

Subsequent developments have put us in a somewhat better position to say what is promising about the linguistic model of positive freedom. Think to begin with about the astonishing empirical observation with which Noam Chomsky inaugurated modern linguistics—the observation that almost every sentence uttered by an adult native speaker is a novel sentence. It is new, not just in the sense that that speaker has never produced or heard exactly that string of words before, but in the much stronger sense that no one in the history of the world has ever heard exactly that string of words before. “Have a nice day” may get a lot of play, but for any tolerably complex sentence (a sentence drawn at random from this text, for instance), the odds of anybody having uttered it before (unless we are in quotation mode) approach the infinitesimal. This is an observation that has been empirically verified over and over again by examining large corpora, transcribing actual conversations, and so on. And it is easy to show on fundamental grounds. Although we do not have a grammar that will generate all and only sentences of English, we have lots of grammars that generate only sentences of English. If you look at how many sentences of, say, fewer than twenty-five words there are, even in the vocabulary of basic English, five thousand words (the average speaker may use twenty thousand), you can see that there has not been time for a measurable proportion of them to be uttered, even if everyone always spoke English and did nothing but talk. So linguistic competence is the capacity to produce and understand an indefinite number of novel sentences. Chomsky wanted to know how that is possible.

However the trick is done, being able to do it is a kind of positive linguistic expressive freedom. The fact is that when you speak a language, you get the capacity to formulate an indefinite number of novel claims, and so to entertain an indefinite number of novel intentions, plans, and conjectures. That is a kind of positive freedom to make and entertain novel claims, things that could be true, or things one could commit oneself to making true. One gets this explosion of positive expressive freedom, though, only by constraining oneself by linguistic norms—the norms one must acknowledge in practice as binding in order to be speaking some particular language. However open textured those norms may be, they involve genuine constraint. If one does not sufficiently respect the linguistic norms, then one ends up not saying, or thinking, anything at all. Of course, one need not say anything. One could just not ever say anything, though at the cost, as Sellars says, of having nothing to say. But the only way one can buy this positive, expressive freedom is by paying a price in negative freedom. One must constrain oneself by linguistic and conceptual norms. When one is speaking one’s own language and not using fancy vocabulary, that constraint becomes invisible. It becomes much more visible when speaking in a language in which one is not fluent. The point here is that the way in which the language one does constrain oneself by becomes the medium in which one’s self not only expresses, but develops itself is a paradigm of central importance for Hegel.

In the context of the essentially political, because social, account of the nature of normativity, the paradigm of linguistic norms provides the form of an argument about how it could be rational to give up some kind of negative freedom, constraining oneself by norms, making oneself and one’s performances responsible to them (liable to assessment according to them) by practically acknowledging them as authoritative. For consider a rational assessment of the costs and benefits of trading off some minor negative freedom for the bonanza of positive expressive freedom that comes with constraining oneself by linguistic norms. (Any such assessment would have to be retrospective, of course, because anyone who has not yet made the deal is not in a position rationally to assess anything.) Can there be any doubt that the trade-off is worth it? Even though the beasts of field and forest are not in a position to make this argument, it seems clear that it would be rational for them to embrace this sort of normative constraint if they were.

Part of Hegel’s thought about how we can move beyond modernity, and a lesson we should learn from the single biggest event in the history of Geist, is that the positive expressive freedom afforded by engaging in linguistic practices, so subjecting oneself to constraint by linguistic norms, is the paradigm of freedom for normative, discursive beings like us, and that political institutions and the normative constraint they exercise should be justifiable in exactly the same way that conceptual linguistic ones are. In particular, every loss of negative freedom should be more than compensated for by an increase in positive expressive freedom. This is the capacity to undertake new kinds of commitments, new kinds of responsibility, to acknowledge and exercise new kinds of authority, all of which at once express and develop the self-conscious individuals who are the subjects of those new norms. This is a paradigm and measure of justifiable political constraint. This is how it can be rationally legitimated—even if only retrospectively, because the positive expressive freedom in question may not, as in the paradigmatic linguistic case, be prospectively intelligible. The demand is that every aspect of the loss of negative freedom, of the constraint by norms that individuals take on, be compensated for many times over by an increase in positive expressive freedom. The form of a rational justification for a political institution and its immanent norms is to show that it is in this crucial respect language-like.

Language is of course not a distinctively modern institution. There is no Geist of any kind apart from linguistic practices. But we can see that the stakes are high when Hegel specifies the distinctive role language plays in the norm-articulating recognitive structure of modernity. Rather than being just one optional form in which the force of norms can be acknowledged and their content expressed, language becomes the medium in which the norms are instituted and applied. There are profound consequences to seeing the rise of subjectivity in the form of the acknowledgment of the rights of intention and knowledge, the advent of a new kind of self-conscious individuality, as bringing with it this new institutional centrality of language. Hegel’s philosophy of language—his account of the relations among speakers, their acts and attitudes, the linguistic communities they belong to, and the linguistic norms that make up the language itself, and the idiom in which that account is articulated—may be the part of his thought that is of the most contemporary philosophical interest and value. That is partly because he attributes deep political significance to the replacement of a semantic model of atomistic representation by one of holistic expression. It is this line of thought that underlies the contention here not only that Hegel’s semantic theory (his theory of conceptual content) and his pragmatist understanding of how meaning is related to the norms governing the use of expressions (the practical attitudes expressed by applying concepts in judging and acting intentionally) should be thought of as at the center of his thought, but also that he is presenting a semantics that is intended to have a practically edifying effect. Understanding how discursive practice both institutes and applies determinately contentful conceptual norms is to point the way to a new and better, more fully self-conscious structure of practical normativity. It is to lead to a new form of mutual recognition and usher in the third stage in the development of Geist: the age of trust.

V. Pure Consciousness: Alienation as a Disparity between Cognition and Recognition

As actual consciousness is divided into State Power and Wealth, pure consciousness is divided into Faith and Enlightenment. As those competing practical normative structures of individuals, norms, and institutions line up with the two poles of recognition, agency, logic, and form, so too do the competing theoretical normative structures.

Pure Consciousness

Actual Consciousness

Recognition

Agency

Logic Content / Force

Form

Faith

State Power

Recognitive Community

Tat: Agent-

Responsibility

Universal / Necessary (Norm)

In Itself: Objectivity

Enlightenment

Wealth

Recognizing / Recognized Individual Self-Consciousnesses

Handlung: Agent-Authority

Particular / Contingent (Performance)

For Consciousness: Subjectivity

Also like State Power and Wealth, even though Faith and Enlightenment each represent and express just one side of these various distinctions-within-spiritual-identities, they too comprise not only norms and the individuals subject to them, but also practices and institutions in which those norms are implicit. Faith and Enlightenment are not just theories of normativity; they are institutionalized theories. The characteristically alienated structure of modern normativity shows up not only in the relations between the competing forms of actual consciousness, but also in the relations between the competing alienated theories of normativity embodied by Faith and Enlightenment. That is to say that in both cases the relations of authority and responsibility between the two substructures are practically construed on the model of independence, hence as competing and incompatible, rather than on the model of freedom, as reciprocal and mutually presupposing.

By telling us what he thinks Faith is right about, what he thinks Enlightenment is right about, how Faith looks to Enlightenment, and how Enlightenment looks to Faith, Hegel assembles raw materials that are crucial for the transition from modernity to a form of normativity structured by self-consciousness with the form of Absolute Knowing. In general, Hegel’s reading of Faith—the distinctively modern, alienated form of religion—is a successor project to Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone, a book that had had a tremendous influence on Hegel when he was still a student at the Stift in Tübingen (and on his classmates Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin). Where Kant had looked for the rational moral teachings that were expressed in sensuous images in Christianity, Hegel seeks also lessons about the metaphysics of self-conscious individuality and social substance. (The transition from the discussion of Faith and Enlightenment in the middle section, VIB, of Spirit to the discussion of Morality in section VIC parallels that from Perception to Force and Understanding: the move from an understanding of universality that is restricted to sense universals to one in which immediacy merely marks and expresses a structure of universals whose content is articulated by the relations of mediation among them.)

These passages about a core structure of Faith are a paradigm of how Hegel gives a metaphysical reading of religious imagery:

Here, in the realm of faith, the first is the absolute being, spirit that is in and for itself insofar as it is the simple eternal substance. But, in the actualization of its notion, in being spirit it passes over into being for another, its self-identity becomes an actual self-sacrificing absolute being, it becomes a self, but a mortal, perishable self. Consequently, the third moment is the return of this alienated self and of the humiliated substance into their original simplicity. Only in this way is substance represented as spirit. [PG 532]

These distinct beings, when brought back to themselves by thought out of the flux of the actual world, are immutable, eternal spirits, whose being lies in thinking the unity they constitute. [PG 533]

This is his reading of the actual significance and metaphysical meaning of the allegory of incarnation and the Trinity. (Similar accounts are found throughout his work, notably in the Science of Logic.) He thinks that the doctrine of the Trinity is really talking about the structure of Geist—that is, of social normative “substance”—and that the community and the norms that are implicit in the communal doings (its “essence”) is what God the Father in the Trinity is the image of. The substance is social substance synthesized by reciprocal recognition. That is the medium in which the norms inhere. In the model, that is the language. The interfusion of humanity and divinity in God the Son within the allegory stands for the actual individual speakers, who are bound and constituted as self-conscious individuals by those norms “passing over into being for another, becoming a self, a mortal, perishable, self.” The relations between them—the way in which speakers and their utterances are what they are only by virtue of the linguistic norms that govern them, and the norms are only actualized by being applied to actual utterances by speakers and audiences—that is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. So we have the universals or norms, their perishable incarnation raised above mere particularity, which is also the actualization of those norms, and the relation between them in individuality. The lesson Hegel draws is that the being of these spirits “lies in thinking the unity they constitute”—that is, in understanding his recognitive account of normativity and individuality in relation to biological particularity and normative universality. It is a measure of the way he works that Hegel goes back and forth cheerfully between the logical vocabulary, the theological vocabulary, and the linguistic-cum-normative vocabulary for talking about these things. The religious language is a sensuous allegory for the most fundamental metaphysical-logical idea Hegel has.

Thinking of the universal and particular elements of individuality (the divine and the human) as standing in familial relations is construing mediation under categories of immediacy. Universality is thought of as being a kind of thing: in many ways, like the things here, only somewhere else, over there, in a beyond (“jenseits,” in a different ontological postal code than ours). In a corresponding and complementary approach, Enlightenment construes universality and normativity as rationality. This good thought shows up only in alienated form, however, when rationality is then thought of as a matter-of-factual dispositional property that happens to be shared by some particular organisms or kind of organism—when our being geistig beings is put in a box with having opposable thumbs. The lesson of the transition from Perception to Force and Understanding was that the universals, the conceptual relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate facts and show up in the form of laws, should be understood not as a supersensible world of theoretical entities standing behind and ontologically distinguished from the objects that show up in sense, but rather as the implicit structure or articulation of them—the modal articulation of observable fact. In the same way, here, that is the lesson we are supposed to learn here about what he insists is the common topic of Faith, under the heading of the religious absolute, and of Enlightenment, under the heading of reason. Normativity, universality, is not to be reified into some kind of a thing, either over there (as God) or in individual human beings (as Reason), but rather as implicit in the articulation of individuals in a community, their recognitive interplay, and the utterances and attitudes that actualize and express the norms.

Enlightenment’s critique of Faith shows some understanding of this lesson. As Hegel reconstructs that critique, it is a three-pronged attack. There is an ontological claim, an epistemological claim, and a practical, moral, claim. The first is that Faith makes an ontological mistake. It thinks that something exists, when it does not. God is not in fact part of the furniture of the world. Thinking there is such a being is just a generalization of premodern, magical thinking, which sees ordinary sensible material objects as enchanted, possessed of magical properties. Generically, this mistake is of a piece with thinking that there is a tiger in the next room, when in fact the room is empty. The epistemological objection of Enlightenment to Faith is that even if there were such an object, we could not come to know about it in the way Faith claims to know about God. The actual epistemological grounds for belief in this absolute are prejudice, error, gullibility, confusion, stupidity. Faith claims an immediate relation to the Absolute, but in fact all the content of its purported knowledge depends on contingent, empirical claims. Reports of miracles, accidental preservation of evidence of the knowledge of those occurrences through scripture, and correct interpretation of the text cannot critically bear the weight of the belief that is predicated on it.

Third, enlightenment accuses faith of bad intention or motivation, of practical errors of action, of immoral activity. The priests are accused of trickery, the pretense of insight and knowledge, and of using that as a means to amass power. The proof of that is the way despotism, through the doctrine of divine right of kings, is a state power that employs the gullibility and bad insight of the masses and the trickery of the priests to establish itself. So, Enlightenment says, the ontological mistake and epistemological mistakes of religion are put in service of bad political and moral activity, and despotism and religious institutions are two hands that wash each other. (This is the radical enlightenment attitude that is summed up pithily by Denis Diderot, when he says that he will be happy only when the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest.)

VI. Faith and Trust

Hegel responds to these familiar, telling complaints that Enlightenment is fundamentally misunderstanding Faith by seeing it as in the first instance standing in a cognitive relation to some thing—as consisting at base in a claim to knowledge of the Absolute. The criticisms as to evidence, the ungenerous attribution of ignoble motives for promulgating this belief (which we consider further later on)—all of these things depend on seeing faith as making a matter-of-factual claim about how things are, about which we can then ask for its epistemological credentials, and about the matter of factual truth or falsity of the claim. For Hegel, Faith is, in the first instance, a matter of realizing a certain self-conception. It is not a kind of cognition, but a kind of recognition, and therefore a kind of self-constitution. Generically, it is the identification of the individual self with its universal rather than its particular aspect. That identification with the universal takes the form of sacrificing particular subjective attitudes and interests through service and worship.

In the original, melodramatic allegorical picture of the transition from nature to spirit, the first Masters pulled themselves by their own bootstraps out of the muck of nature by being willing to risk their biological lives for a normative status, for a form of authority, to be recognized as having that normative status, by being willing to die for the cause. The point of the allegory of the sacrifice of service and worship is, rather, to identify with the authority of the norms (the universal) by being willing to live for it, by submerging particular attitudes (beliefs and desires) in the communal norms. In that way, like the Master of the original allegory, believing consciousness succeeds in making itself something other than what it already was, constitutes itself as something more than that. That existential self-constitution—institution of a normative status by adoption of an attitude—is what faith really consists in.

The reason the criticisms of Faith by Enlightenment miss their mark, on this account, is that the self-conception to which a community is in this way practically committed to realizing is not the having of a belief that could turn out to be radically false. It does not stand in that sort of a relation to its world. It is a doing—a making things be thus and so, not a taking them to be thus and so. It is a recognition, a kind of self-constitution, not a kind of cognition. What it is about, the truth that the certainty of the believer is answerable to, is not something distinct from the believer in the community; it is something that if all goes well, the believers make true of themselves. If not, the failure is practical, not cognitive. Faith, for the believer, is not an alien thing that is just found in him, no one knowing how and whence it came. On the contrary, the faith of the believer consists just in him finding himself as this particular personal consciousness in the absolute being, and his obedience and service consist in producing, through his own activity, that being as his own absolute being. [PG 566]

But here Enlightenment is foolish. Faith regards it as not understanding the real facts when it talks about priestly deception and deluding the people. It talks about this as if by some hocus pocus of conjuring priests, consciousness has been pawned off with something absolutely alien and other to it in place of its own essence. It is impossible to deceive a people in this manner. Brass instead of gold, counterfeit instead of genuine money may well be passed off, at least in isolated cases. Many may be persuaded to believe that a battle lost was a battle won, and other lies about things of sense and isolated happenings may be credible for a time. But in the knowledge of that essential being in which consciousness has immediate certainty of itself, the idea of this sort of delusion is quite out of the question. [PG 550]

The language of belief is performative, establishing as well as expressing social normative relations—not just saying how things objectively are, independently of the attitudes of the believers involved.

What is constituted by Faith is a certain kind of self-conscious individuality. The recognitive account of self-consciousness tells us that this is possible only if a corresponding kind of recognitive community is instituted at the same time. The religious community is established by individuals’ reciprocal recognition of each other as serving and worshipping, which is to say as identifying with the norms through sacrifice of merely particular, subjective attitudes and interests of the individuals they would otherwise be. This recognitive relation Hegel calls “trust” [Vertrauen].

Whomsoever I trust, his certainty of himself is for me the certainty of myself; I recognize in him my own being-for-self, know that he acknowledges it and that it is for him purpose and essence. [PG 549]

The second part of this passage puts three requirements for an attitude to count as trust. The trusting one must recognize her own being-for-self, her own self-conception, in the trusted one; the trusting one must correctly take it that that self-conception is acknowledged by the trusted one; and the trusted one must correctly take it that that self-conception is acknowledged by the trusting one also as her own. The first part of the passage says that when those conditions are met, the trusting individual counts as identifying with the trusted individual.

So there is a kind of emergent identification-through-recognition here, according to which identifying with the norms has the effect or significance of identifying with other individuals who also identify their individual selves with the norms. Identifying with (by sacrificing for) the norms, and recognizing other individuals as doing the same, is at once identifying with the communal side of Geist—the recognitive community in whose practices those norms are implicit—and also identifying with the other individuals whom one recognizes as undertaking the same identification. One is not identifying with the norms or the community rather than with the other individuals, but identifying with each by identifying with the other. Put another way, because of the shared renunciation of particularity, the individuals one identifies with by recognizing them as identifying with the community and its norms are not being treated in practice as split into a particular and a universal aspect. This constellation of attitudes foreshadows the final, fully self-conscious form of mutual recognition.

In trust, everyone is identifying with the universal side of individuality—and thereby with others who also do so. The passage quoted earlier continues:

Further, since what is object for me is that in which I recognize myself, I am for myself at the same time in that object in the form of another self-consciousness, i.e. one which has become in that object alienated from its particular individuality, viz. from its natural and contingent existence, but which partly remains therein self-consciousness, partly, in that object, is an essential consciousness. [PG 549]

The community synthesized by reciprocal recognition in the form of trust shows the way to the possibility of an unalienated community of self-conscious individuals. It does not yet constitute such a community, because the particularity of the actual individual self-consciousnesses that actualize the norms by their acts and attitudes (including their recognitive attitudes) is still slighted. Further recognitive progress is required to overcome alienation and move beyond the modern phase in the development of Geist. Unalienated Geist requires further recognitive structure beyond trust as it is on offer here. But that the recognitive community have the structure of trust in this sense is one essential element of Sittlichkeit after the rise of modern subjectivity. What trust brings about is the “unity of abstract essence and self-consciousness,” of the norms believing individuals identify with and those believers. That unity, Hegel claims, is “the absolute Being of Faith”—that is, the distinctive object of religious belief.

The absolute Being of faith is essentially not the abstract essence that would exist beyond the consciousness of the believer; on the contrary, it is the Spirit of the [religious] community, the unity of the abstract essence and self-consciousness. It is the spirit of the community, the unity of the abstract essence in self-consciousness. [PG 549]

On his view, the real object of religious veneration, Spirit, is not a God in the form of a distinct thing that causally creates human beings, but the religious community that believers create by their recognitive identification with it and with each other. That, after all, is the lesson of his reading of the real lesson of the Christian Trinity: God the Father is the sensuously clothed image of the norm-governed community synthesized by reciprocal recognitive attitudes (having the structure of trust) among self-conscious individuals. The spiritual dimension of human life, toward which religious believers properly direct their attention and respect, is what must be added to merely natural animals to make us persons, self-conscious individual selves, agents and knowers, subjects of normative assessment. That is the discursive normativity implicit in the practices of a properly constituted recognitive community of language users.

This view is not as outrageously heterodox as it might otherwise seem, when it is viewed in the context of the Pietist religious tradition in which Hegel, like Kant, was raised. Although in this work I have generally avoided this sort of discussion of the intellectual historical context provided by Hegel’s predecessors, it is worth saying a few words about this movement here, because it provides a concrete example of the way Hegel incorporates, adapts, and transforms the traditions he inherits—what we will come to recognize as the way he recollectively forgives them.

Pietism was a distinctively German intellectual movement that was important as providing the root from which Kantian and post-Kantian pragmatism grew. It thrived because it found an environmental niche in which it could challenge the abuses of an already institutionalized Lutheranism among an increasingly educated and individualistic populace (for instance, the burgher and artisan class from the wealthy cities of the old Hanseatic League), while at the same time not directly confronting its theoretical authority (which was in practice the boundary line over which the religious civil wars had been fought). The pietists did this by focusing not on theory, but on practice. They called this the Second Reformation (and others have called it the triumph of Erasmus over Luther). In theology they spurned Augustine in favor of his old opponent Pelagius, who had long been seen as attempting to rationalize Christianity by synthesizing its traditions with those of Roman Stoicism. Augustine’s emphasis on human dependence on gratuitous divine grace for salvation contrasts with Pelagius’s emphasis on human responsibility for redemption and participation in the project of salvation. In place of a view of man as depraved by original sin, redeemable only in the next world, Pelagius put forward an ideal of perfectibility, of moral progress in this world through self-control, education, and political involvement. This latter involved an ethic of “freedom in and freedom through” community. He had a three-stage picture of the moral progress and education of mankind, with each stage corresponding to a covenant God had entered into with humanity: a covenant of nature with Adam, a covenant of laws with Moses, and a covenant of grace with Jesus. So the eschatology the pietists inherited from Pelagius treats the City of God not as something to be achieved in another life, but as an infinite task for religious communities to achieve here on earth. Praxis pietatis is accordingly a communal striving to do good works, one that puts special emphasis on secular education (Bildung) and personal improvement as the means whereby the good could be rationally discerned, and the will to pursue it rationally cultivated. In this way homo religiosus was to be reformed, and civil life regenerated. The pietists—in particular, Crusius, the preeminent pietist intellectual of his time, and the principal conduit through which these ideas reached Kant and Hegel—attacked Wolffian rationalism, the peak of Enlightenment theory, from the point of view of practice and the primacy of the practical. Hegel’s account of Faith is a metaphysical radicalization of this religious tradition—one that synthesizes it in an absolutely unprecedented way with his own semantic ideas about the transcendental conditions of the possibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms.

Even though its achievement of a community exhibiting the recognitive structure of trust is a positive development, Faith, as Hegel describes it, is still an alienated form of self-consciousness. It is alienated in that it does not suitably and self-consciously incorporate the particular element in its practical attitude toward individuality. It is in fact the activity of individuals that produces the community and its implicit norms. Further, the relation of each believing individual to that for which it sacrifices and with which it identifies, the object of its veneration, is mediated by its relations to other recognized and recognizing individuals, via those recognitive attitudes. But Faith insists that it stands in an immediate relation to absolute essence, and that the existence and nature of that essence is wholly independent of the activities and attitudes of believers. Whereas in fact

[t]hat [the absolute Being of Faith] be the Spirit of the community, this requires as a necessary moment the action of the community. It is this Spirit only by being produced by consciousness, or rather it does not exist as the Spirit of the community without having been produced by this consciousness. [PG 549]

Its norms are actually the product of its practical recognitive attitudes. Modernity is right about that. Faith does not understand itself this way. Hegel has been telling us what the object of Faith is in itself, not what it is for the kind of self-consciousness in question. He is describing for us the referent that they pick out (address themselves to) by means of misleading senses (conceptual contents), the noumena behind the phenomena of religious worship and service. In this respect, Enlightenment is right in its criticisms of Faith. It does seriously misunderstand its object, which is not (as Faith thinks), an objective, independent being, but a product of its own thought and practice. (Making a mistake of this kind is what in Marx’s anthropological allegory is called “fetishism.”)

It is just this that Enlightenment rightly declares faith to be, when it says that what is for faith the absolute Being, is a Being of its own consciousness, is its own thought, something that is a creation of consciousness itself. [PG 549]

Faith seeks to ground its recognitive and practical activities in knowledge of facts—that is, to give an objectivist metaphysical grounding for the bindingness of these norms. That meta-attitude is carried over from traditional society: thinking of the norms not as the products of our activity, but as something merely found in the way the world anyway is. Where for the Greeks the norms had been part of the natural world, for Faith they are part of the supernatural world. But that is a specific difference within a general agreement that norms are grounded in ontology and matters of fact, in something about how the world just is antecedently to its having human beings and their practical attitudes in it. Those norms and their bindingness are not understood as products of human attitudes and activity, though they in fact are instituted by people acting according to the pure consciousness of faith. Believers institute these norms by their attitudes, but they do not understand themselves as doing that. Faith has not embraced the fundamental, defining insight of modernity: the attitude-dependence of normative statuses.

Faith and Enlightenment each has both a cognitive, theoretical dimension and a recognitive, practical dimension. Faith is wrong in its cognitive attitudes, misunderstanding its object and its relation to that object. But it succeeds with its recognitive practices, creating a community of trust. Enlightenment is right in its cognitive attitudes, correctly seeing that the normativity both are concerned with is not something independent of our attitudes and activities. But it fails on the recognitive, practical side. Because it creates a community with the reciprocal recognitive structure of trust, Faith acknowledges norms that can have some determinate content; they are contentful norms because a community like that can actually institute, sustain, and develop determinately contentful conceptual norms. But Enlightenment creates no such community. On the cognitive side, it sees that contentful norms cannot simply be read off of the way the world simply is, independently of the attitudes, activities, practices, and capacities of the creatures who are bound by them. Rationality is a human capacity. But Enlightenment is stuck with a purely formal notion of reason. It can criticize the contents Faith purports to find, but cannot on its own produce replacements.

Enlightenment acknowledges, as Faith does not, that both the binding force and the determinate content of conceptual norms depend on the activity of self-conscious individual knowers and agents. Its disenchanted, objective natural world does not come with a normative structure. The phenomena of authority and responsibility are a human imposition, the product of our attitudes and practices. Enlightenment manifests its alienation by developing its understanding of the norms in a way that is as one-sidedly subjective as Faith’s is one-sidedly objective. The ultimately unsatisfactory result is Enlightenment utilitarianism, which construes the normative significance of things as consisting in their usefulness to us.⁵ “Utility” here is allegorical for the role things play as objects of practical attitudes. This view radicalizes the insight that conceptual norms are not independent of the activities of self-conscious individuals who apply those concepts in judgment and intention (“The Useful is the object in so far as self-consciousness penetrates it.” [PG 581]), by turning it into the view that norms are simply reflections of the particular, contingent purposes of individual self-consciousnesses. In Hegel’s terms, the principle of utility identifies what the norms are in themselves with what they are for consciousness.

The term “Utilitarianism” is now usually used to refer to the sort of moral theory given its classical shape by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The term typically used to refer to the extension of that way of thinking from the practical realm to the theoretical realm of theories of meaning and truth is “pragmatism.” Hegel sees a trajectory of thought that begins with the extrusion of subjective values from an objective world of facts, and ends with an identification of all properties and facts as purpose relative, an understanding of the truth of claims as conduciveness to the success of the practical enterprises of individuals. “Alienation” is his term for the common practical conception of (attitudes toward) authority and responsibility (“independence” and “dependence”) that underlies, motivates, and necessitates the oscillation between one-sided objectivism and one-sided subjectivism. When that alienated practical conception is made theoretically explicit, he calls it “Verstand.” Hegel’s overall philosophical aim is to give us the metaconceptual tools to get beyond the ways of understanding norms that require us to choose between taking them to be genuinely binding on individual attitudes because objectively there, antecedently to and independently of any such attitudes, on the one hand, and taking them to be mere reflections of those subjective attitudes, on the other. Thinking in terms of the categories of Vernunft instead of Verstand is to enable us to overcome not only the naïve, dogmatic ontological objectivism about norms of the tradition, but also this sort of utilitarian pragmatism—quite distinct from the sort of pragmatism I have argued Hegel endorsed—with its ironic distancing from the genuineness of the binding force of the norms, which has been the modern culmination of the rise of subjectivism.

Hegel thinks the practical stakes riding on this enterprise are high. When pure consciousness in the form of Enlightenment is the self-understanding of actual consciousness in the institutional form of State Power (the practical recognitive expression and actualization of a theoretical cognitive view), the result is the Terror, whose epitome is the final bloodthirsty death throes of the French Revolution.

Consciousness has found its Notion in Utility … from this inner revolution there emerges the actual revolution of the actual world, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom. [PG 582]

Norms that are products of subjective attitudes are practically understood as unable to constrain those attitudes. A purely formal notion of reason offers no determinate content. The state is understood on the model of a particular individual self-consciousness—distinguished only in that the will of that consciousness (the “will of the people”), its commitments, are taken as binding on every individual. Thus individuals are obliged to identify with and sacrifice themselves for that will. But this sort of purely formal recognition relation—each citizen recognizing himself in the will or all, the common will—cannot in fact institute a determinately contentful common will. That would require that the particular subjective commitments of the individuals have some sort of authority over the universal, the common will. The result, he thinks, must be a content-vacuum, which can be filled only by the subjective attitudes and inclinations of some despotic individual—in much the same way as in the realm of abstract legal personhood. Absolute Terror is what happens when the authority of individual self-consciousness to institute norms is conceived and practiced as unconstrained by correlative responsibility—as a matter of independence without correlative dependence.

Contentful norms require incorporation of particularity and contingency in the form of necessity (normative force) and universality (conceptual content) through recognitive relations of reciprocal authority and responsibility articulated not only socially, but also historically, in the form of constraint by a recollected tradition. Understanding that there are no norms wholly independent of the attitudes and practices of individual self-consciousnesses is modern; understanding that authority of attitudes over statuses on the model of unconstrained, pure independence (asymmetrical recognition) rather than freedom is alienated. Any such conception is bound to oscillate between seeing the norms as not constraining attitudes because they are contentless, and seeing them as not constraining attitudes because their content is arbitrary, contingent, and particular, hence irrational, derived from the contingent attitudes, interests, and inclinations of some particular subject. The charge of contentlessness was Hegel’s objection at the end of the Reason section to the “honest consciousness,” which pursues its contraction strategy for construing agency on the model of Mastery by taking responsibility only for what it tries to do, its will, narrowly construed, rather than its actual doing. And we will see the same objection made to the conscientious consciousness, which analogously identifies duty with what it sincerely takes to be duty (norm with attitude) in the discussion of Moralität near the end of Spirit.

Faith and Enlightenment are each one-sided appreciations of the true nature of norms in relation to attitudes. Faith is on the right track on the practical recognitive dimension of self-consciousness, but has the wrong theoretical cognitive take on the side of consciousness. Faith is right in what it does: to give the norms determinate content by building a recognitive community. It builds a community of trust, which can develop and sustain determinately contentful norms. It is right to see that its relation to the norms should be one of acknowledgment and service. It is wrong to think that private conceptions and concerns must or even can be totally sacrificed to make that possible. Faith is wrong to take over the traditional immediate conception of its relation to the norms: to reify, ontologize, and in a sense naturalize them by objectifying them. It does not recognize itself in those norms it identifies with, in that it does not see them as its own product. Neither its community nor its individual activities are seen as essential or as authoritative with respect to those norms. Enlightenment is right that the norms depend for both their force and their content on the attitudes and practices of the very individuals who become more than merely particular, natural beings by being acculturated—that is, by being constrained by those norms. It is wrong to think that all we contribute is the form. And it is wrong in the practical recognitive consequences of its insight into our authority over the norms. It is right in its criticism of Faith’s metaphysics, but wrong to think that undercuts its form of life. On the recognitive side of constituting communities and self-conscious individuals, the contrast between the Terror and the community of trust could not be more stark. The division of legitimating pure consciousness into complementary competing practically institutionalized rivals, one of whom can be successful on the cognitive side only at the cost of failure on the recognitive side, and the other of whom can be successful on the recognitive side only at the cost of failure on the cognitive side, is a structure distinctive of modern alienation. What is needed to overcome it is to combine the humanistic metaphysics of Enlightenment (with its theoretical cognitive emphasis on the contribution of the activity of individual self-consciousnesses) with the community of trust of Faith (with its practical recognitive emphasis on the contribution of the activity of individual self-consciousnesses through acknowledgment of, service to, and identification-through-sacrifice with the norms). The recipe for moving to the third, postmodern phase in the development of Geist is to bring together the cognitive and recognitive successes of Enlightenment and Faith. The key to doing that is appreciating the role recollection plays in both cognition and recognition. When cognitive activity takes the form of forgiving recollection, it institutes semantic representational relations between knowing subjects and the objects known. When recognitive activity takes the form of forgiving recollection, it institutes communities with the normative structure of trust. In short, recollection as forgiveness forges the conceptual link between unalienated cognition and unalienated recognition.

VII. Morality and Conscience

Enlightenment cannot understand the norms as both binding and contentful, and Faith cannot understand the role we play in instituting them: making them binding and contentful. The task is to reconcile the sittlich acknowledgment of the authority of the norms with the modern acknowledgment of the authority of subjective attitudes. The explicit aspiration to do that, which is the bridge forward from modernity to a new epoch in the development of Spirit, Hegel calls “Moralität.” Kant is its prophet. Although it does seek to reconcile the two, it is in its form a development directly of Enlightenment rather than Faith, for

Enlightenment … holds an irresistible authority over faith because, in the believer’s own consciousness, are found the very moments which Enlightenment has established as valid. [PG 572]

Morality ultimately reveals itself as a form of the contraction strategy for understanding agency, which we examined in connection with the honest consciousness in Chapter 12. It is accordingly unable satisfactorily to bring together two sides of agency, to comprehend intentional doings as at once norm-governed and actual objective happenings. In shrinking what the agent is genuinely responsible for to a pure act of will, uncontaminated by particular sensuous inclinations, it precludes itself from understanding agents as having any genuine authority over what actually happens in the objective world. The failure to make intelligible in its purely formal terms the content of the norms agents bind themselves by, which is implicit in the metaconception of morality, becomes explicit in the metaconception of the relation between norms and attitudes that Hegel calls “conscience” [Gewissen].

Thought of from the side of recognition (and so of self-consciousness), morality and conscience are structures of justification and appraisal (and so of legitimation). They are accordingly, practical attitudes toward the constitution of communal norms and their determination of the appropriateness of individual performances. Such norms are actually efficacious insofar as they are expressed in acts, attitudes, and practices of justification and appraisal. Those norms may be explicitly formulated as principles appealed to in justification and appraisal of performances, or may remain implicit in the dispositions of community members to accept particular justifications and appraisals. The configurations of Geist we are considering come late in the process of explicitation of practices in principles, and so here deal with the invocation of principles as principles (“pure consciousness” as the locus of the legitimation of norms).

Morality seeks to combine the universal applicability of moral principles (the consequences of the applicability of a rule) with their origin and validation in the free commitment of an independent individual agent to the principles as universally binding (the grounds of the applicability of a rule). Treating a principle as universal in this sense is committing oneself to accept the appropriateness of appeal to that principle by anyone in justification, challenge, and appraisal of justifications of performances generally. By insisting on universality of principles in this sense, morality attempts to ensure the consilience of justification and appraisal. These attitudes are adopted from two different social-recognitive perspectives: the first-person context of deliberation and the second- or third-person context of assessment. The strategy of Morality understands that overcoming alienation of attitudes from norms requires that the same norms be the objects of attitudes adopted from these two different perspectives. So it seeks to ensure that the same principles will be recognized as valid in the context of deliberation or justification on the one hand and the context of appraisal on the other. Further, it is in virtue of the performer’s relation to such principles treated as universal that she counts as an agent and her performances as actions in the first place. They are actions as being in the space of giving and asking for reasons or justifications. They get into that space by being performed and evaluated as performed according to principles that are taken as universal and are taken as providing reasons for them. Morality’s insistence upon universality of principles, combined with the demand that actions be performed according to such principles (be norm-governed) thus appears to offer the form of a reachievement of Sittlichkeit. For the dependence of individuals upon the normative substance that alone makes (performances with the significance of) action possible is embodied in this structure of acts, attitudes, and practices of justification and appraisal, as is the validity of those norms and appropriatenesses for all individuals.

While the requirement of universality represents morality’s attempt to reachieve Sittlichkeit, its recognition of the role of the individual in constituting the appropriatenesses so acknowledged consists in its account of how universal principles become validated. For morality’s claim (Kant’s claim, as Hegel is understanding him) is that what ultimately legitimates the constraint of principles is their appropriation as binding (because expressive of one’s self as rational) by the individuals bound. Freedom and acting rightly coincide, and consist in acting according to principles one has chosen to be bound by as universal. This is the Kant-Rousseau criterion of demarcation of the normative in terms of autonomy. All genuinely normative force or validity (bindingness) is self-binding. The normative status of being responsible is instituted by the attitude of the subject who acknowledges it as binding. As Kant says, denizens of the realm of freedom are not bound by rules, but by conceptions or representations [Vorstellungen] of rules. The grip of the rules on free creatures is mediated by their attitudes toward those rules. Kant does, of course, think that there are also higher-order, purely formal principles that are binding on us simply as rational creatures, i.e., in virtue of being able to bind ourselves by conceptual norms in judgment and action. Acknowledgment of the bindingness of those principles is implicit in all of our discursive attitudes and practices. As we will see, Hegel develops this side of Kant’s thought as well. The important point to realize here—a point that lies at the base of Kant’s idea of normative autonomy—is that those norms are intelligible only against the background of the ground-level institution of conceptual commitments by attitudes of acknowledgment, in judging and endorsing practical maxims.

The dignity of the Enlightenment individual will permit her to be subject to nothing but her own will. But in her insistence on universalizing that will, the moral individual acknowledges that actions must answer to appraisals that do not simply repeat the particular intentions or attitudes that give rise to those actions. In this way, the strategy of morality seeks to overcome alienation in the specific sense of recognizing that norms are constituted by the actions of community members, while not treating the bindingness of those norms as undercut by that recognition (as did the distracted, ironic consciousness). It is in its appreciation of both of these demands that morality completes the explicitation of the principles governing alienated practice, and at the same time points beyond those practices to the possibility of an unalienated form of life that will combine Sittlichkeit and acknowledgment of the authority of the attitudes of individual self-consciousnesses.

For Hegel, Kant’s attempt to combine the universal validity of principles with individual appropriation and endorsement of those principles as the source of their validity represents his attempt to heal the rift between the roles of social self and individuated substance that is the alienation of Geist from itself in the guise of the opposition of the two social aspects of action. Without explicitly recognizing the problem of alienation, Kant tries to solve it. According to his scheme (1) principles genuinely constrain individual actions, which are what they are appraised as according to such principles; (2) performances are actions only as so constrained; and (3) there are no (nonformal) facts about what principles are valid apart from the facts about what principles people take to be valid by endorsing or appropriating them—that is, by committing themselves to their validity. These are precisely the elements required for alienation to be overcome.

But Hegel argues that, so understood, the strategy of morality is flawed and futile, fatally infected with the Verstand model of individual independence—of authority not only as not requiring, but as incompatible with a correlative responsibility—that gives rise to the very alienation it seeks to overcome. For in spite of its intentions, morality does not succeed in establishing the consilience of the justification of action and its appraisal. The universality of principle by means of which such consilience is to be secured is undermined, so far as this function is concerned, by the account of individual commitment as the source of applicability of such principles. Although the justifying agent and appraising audience are each committed to treating their principles as universally valid, nothing in the specification of the structure of morality ensures that the same principles appealed to by the agent in justification will be recognized and appropriated by the appraiser, and vice versa. Nothing guarantees the identity of the contents of the norms of deliberation by one agent and the norms of assessment by another agent. Each individual appeals to the same norms in deliberating and assessing. But that is not enough to ensure the interpersonal identity of content of the norms applied when the deliberator and the assessor are not identical. The basis of those norms in particular commitments by independent individuals instead institutionalizes the endorsement of conflicting principles governing the two social perspectives that together make performances into actions, and thereby fails to overcome the mutual independence of those aspects of justification and appraisal in which the alienated structure of action consists.

The strategy of morality reconciles justification and appraisal only for each agent, but not in itself or for all in their interaction. Universality of principle means that each agent is committed to justifying his performances only by appeal to principles that are appropriately appealed to by anyone in justification, and appropriately applied to anyone, the agent himself included, in appraisal. From the agent’s point of view, then, justification and appraisal appeal to just the same principles, and do not stand in any wholesale opposition or conflict of principle. But securing this lack of opposition for each agent-appraiser is not enough. In actual social practice those individual points of view must also cohere, because justifying and appraising must in general be the actions of different individuals. This social coordination is not achievable on Kantian principles, according to which universality is a matter purely of form, while normative content is a matter entirely of individual commitment, with respect to which the content of one individual’s commitments are independent of the content of another’s. Morality thus shows itself as a form of still-alienated Spirit in the disparity between its intention and its achievement.

The successor strategy to morality, conscientious self-consciousness, also attempts to reconcile universal responsibility to norms with the constitution of those norms by their acknowledgment and appropriation by individuals, though its strategy exploits quite a different structure from that of morality. In particular, by centering both justification and appraisal on appeals to conscience, the conscientious consciousness overcomes the perspectival disparity of specific recognition that revealed morality as one more form of the practical alienation of action and self-consciousness from itself. Morality had attempted to deny the significance of differences in the content of what is taken by different agents to be duty by implicitly treating appraisal as evaluating action not according to the appraiser’s principles of appropriateness (as the requirement of universality on the part of the principles endorsed by that appraiser demands) but according to the metalevel principle that actions are morally in order if they are performed according to what the agent takes to be his or her duty. In the context of morality, this implicit expression of individual autonomy collides with the demands of universality of duty or appropriateness. At the stage of conscience, it is raised to the level of an explicit principle and explicitly embraced as a strategy.

The form of all justifications of actions is now explicitly understood to be that the action was appropriate because it was performed in accord with the conviction on the part of the agent that it was an appropriate action. That is the attitude that institutes the norm. Corresponding to this approach to justification is an approach to appraisal. The appropriateness of actions is to be evaluated solely on the basis of whether the agent acted out of a conviction of the appropriateness of the action. Acting according to duty is acting according to what one takes to be duty, both on the side of justification and on the side of appraisal. Appropriateness as it applies to an individual is constituted by what that individual takes to be appropriate. Norms consist in their recognition and appropriation by individuals. Attitudes determine both the force and the content of norms. (They institute the binding force of the norm and confer its conceptual content.) Practical self-consciousness understanding itself according to the normative metaconcept of conscientiousness is the ne plus ultra of appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. In the conscientious consciousness and its understanding of the relation between norms and attitudes we find the most explicit and extreme expression of the modern, alienated rise of subjectivity: the acknowledgment of the authority of attitudes over norms (the dependence on or responsibility to attitudes by norms) in its most one-sided, hypersubjective form. It is this general metanormative structure that is understood as universal, shared by justifying agents and appraising agents alike. Thus even if an appraiser disagrees with a justifying agent about what is in fact appropriate or required by duty in a particular situation, they can still agree that the agent acted appropriately, so long as the appraiser attributes to the agent the conviction that appropriateness demanded the action that was in fact performed or intended.

The seeds of the paradox of the conscientious consciousness are already apparent in this formulation. An appeal to conscience as the justification of an action presupposes the existence of duties or appropriatenesses that are constituted independently of the appeal to conscience. The attempt to generate the duties or appropriatenesses themselves entirely on the basis of the legitimacy of such appeals is incoherent. Martin Luther’s famous “Ich kann nicht anders” justification appealed to conscience—that is, to his personal conviction that his duty demanded his actions and not others. But he did not represent the conscientious consciousness as Hegel here discusses it. For his understanding of the duty he was convinced required his actions was not of a duty constituted by his or others’ recognition of it. Duty for this agent of Faith consisted rather in acting according to God’s will. The primary form of justification of any action, and that in terms of which it should be evaluated, he took to be the claim that the action in fact expressed or furthered the divine intent. Against the background of this independently constituted notion of duty, a secondary and parasitic form of justification and appraisal then became possible—one that provisionally puts aside the question of whether one’s action was actually in accord with duty (the normative status, what the norm is in itself), and inquires as to whether it at least was performed according to what one was convinced was that duty (the normative attitude, what the norm is for self-consciousness). Appeals to conscience of this sort provide a way of dealing with the occasional epistemic inaccessibility of duty in the primary sense. Action that does not accord with duty is excused as falling short only on the side of knowledge of that duty, not on the side of the will or intent to perform that duty. Allowing secondary appeals to conscience as an excuse for failure to do one’s duty, to fulfill one’s actual obligations, is a way of acknowledging the rights of intention and knowledge without making those rights fully definitive of duty.

The essential point is that appeals to conscience of this sort presuppose an independently constituted notion of duty or appropriateness that can transcend the individual agent’s capacity to know what is appropriate in a particular case. Only against the background of the possibility of the failure of the individual to grasp correctly what is in fact appropriate, independently of what he takes to be appropriate, does this form of appeal to conscience have a coherent content. So appeals to conscience are in principle parasitic on practices of appealing to duties that are not constituted by appeals to conscience (that one tried to do one’s duty, or did what seemed to one to be one’s duty). Conscience-talk presupposes an antecedent stratum of appropriateness-talk, in the same sense in which seems-talk presupposes is-talk and tries-talk presupposes does-talk, and for just the same reason. So the mistake of the conscientious consciousness is structurally the same as that of the honest consciousness and of consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty. It is in each case a mistake to take an idiom that qualifies or withholds a commitment, as to whether something really is one’s duty, whether things are as they are taken to be, whether what is accomplished was what was intended, and elevate it into an autonomous stratum of discourse in which the only commitments possible are the hedged or minimal ones. For those hedged, minimal commitments are in fact possible and intelligible as determinately contentful only in a framework that includes their more robust antecedents.

The conscientious consciousness seeks to preserve the form of appeals to conscience, but without the content they presuppose and acquire from a prior conception of duty. The only notion of appropriateness that is in play is that of acting in a way that one takes to be appropriate. The difficulty is that if what one means by “A’s action is appropriate (or according to duty)” is “A takes his action to be appropriate (or according to duty),” then by plugging the definition of appropriateness into the latter formula we arrive at the result that for A to take an action to be appropriate is for him to take it to be what he would take to be appropriate. But A is incorrigible about how he takes things to be. That is, there is no difference between how A takes things to be and how he takes himself to take them to be. It follows then that A is incorrigible about what really is appropriate for him. (Indeed, the constitution of duty by its conscientious recognition treats the constitutive takings as both cognitions and volitions, a foreshadowing in alienated form of an important insight about duty.) Conscientious consciousness knows

its own self, in which what is actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty. It is itself in its contingency completely valid in its own sight, and knows its immediate individuality to be pure knowing and doing, to be the true reality and harmony. [PG 632]

Conscience is in a certain sense right about normative force, and it is in a certain sense right about conceptual content. But to understand the sense in which it is right, one must look at the way the distinction between normative force and normative content interacts with and is mediated by that between norms and attitudes, and vice versa. And that requires looking at the interaction of all three dimensions of recognitive articulation: social, historical, and inferential.

Chapter 14