An important perspective on the concept of alienation is provided by two meta-attitudes that are in play throughout the final two-thirds of the Spirit chapter. Hegel’s terms for these attitudes is “edelmütig” and “niederträchtig.” Miller translates these as “noble” and “base” (or “ignoble”). I take it that a better way to think about the contrast is as that between “generous” and “mean-spirited,” or “magnanimous” and “pusillanimous” (literally: “great-souled” and “small-souled”). Because the rich content they are to convey goes beyond that expressed by any of these labels, however, I will generally leave these terms in the German. They are meta-attitudes because they are attitudes toward the relations between norms (or normative statuses such as commitments, responsibilities, and authority) and attitudes of acknowledging or attributing such norms as binding or applicable. As I understand it, the edelmütig meta-attitude takes it that there really are norms that attitudes are directed toward and answer to. It treats norms as genuinely efficacious, as really making a difference to what individuals do. It understands attitudes as norm-governed, in the dual sense that norms provide standards for assessments of the correctness of attitudes, and that attitudes are subjunctively sensitive to the contents of the norms. Attitudes—paradigmatically the acknowledgment or attribution of a norm as binding, taking oneself or another to be committed or responsible, practically distinguishing between performances that are appropriate and those that are not—are the way the norms are actualized, the way they become efficacious, how they make things happen in the causal order. The niederträchtig meta-attitude sees only normative attitudes. The norms are construed as at most adverbial modifications of the attitudes: a way of talking about the contents of those attitudes by assigning them virtual objects. Niederträchtigkeit is the purest expression of the alienated character of modern normativity (hence culture, self-consciousness, and community).

When Hegel introduces these notions, he does so in terms of seeing the unity or the disparity in forms of actual consciousness. So the noble consciousness

sees in public authority … its own simple essence and the factual evidence of it, and in the service of that authority its attitude towards it is one of actual obedience and respect. Similarly, in the case of wealth, it sees that this procures for it awareness of its other essential side, the consciousness of being for itself; it therefore looks upon wealth likewise as essential in relation to itself, and acknowledges the source of its enjoyment as a benefactor to whom it lies under an obligation. [PG 500]

The unity discerned here is between what each form of actual consciousness actually does and the norms to which it is beholden. State Power and Wealth are seen as genuinely actualizing their respective norms. Officials act in the service of the public good, obeying and respecting the communal norms, realizing the universal aspect of the recognitive community. In their activities, wealthy individuals express the other normative pole of the recognitive process, the essential contribution made by the actualizing activities of individuals. The ends they pursue are private rather than public (particular rather than universal), but they both really have those ends, which set norms for their activity, and their pursuit of them provides the raw materials out of which the actual community is constructed. In actualizing their respective recognitive poles of communal (universal) norms or goals and individual (particular) ones, State Power and Wealth are seen as complementary, cooperating components of a structure in which both a community and its self-conscious individual members are constituted (actualized, normatively instituted) as such.

By contrast,

The consciousness which adopts the other relation is, on the contrary, ignoble. It clings to the disparity between the two essentialities, thus sees in the sovereign power a fetter and a suppression of its own being-for-self, and therefore hates the ruler, obeys only with a secret malice, and is always on the point of revolt. It sees, too, in wealth, by which it attains to the enjoyment of its own self-centred existence, only the disparity with its permanent essence; since through wealth it becomes conscious of itself merely as an isolated individual, conscious only of a transitory enjoyment, loving yet hating wealth, and with the passing of the enjoyment, of something that is essentially evanescent, it regards its relation to the rich as also having vanished. [PG 501]

State Power and Wealth are seen as competing forms of oppression, rather than complementary constitutive aspects of the community and of self-conscious individuals. Public officials are not seen as having any actual authority over individual community members, because they are not seen as acting out of acknowledgment of communal norms. Rather than seeing the positive contribution they make to the constitution of the community, this attitude sees only the constraint the officials put on the activity of individuals. Wealthy individuals are not seen as genuinely acknowledging any responsibility to the community. Rather than seeing their practical recognitive contribution to the constitution of the community, this attitude sees wealthy individuals only as opposed to the communal norms, as perverting them for their private ends. We saw that Enlightenment adopts a corresponding ungenerous, niederträchtig attitude toward Faith, imputing disreputable self-interested motives to priests and believers: rejecting appeals to the universal essence they claim to serve. (And there is a corresponding mean-spirited account by Faith of the adolescent, self-important pride seen as motivating the avatars of Enlightenment debunking.)

Hegel opened the Introduction with a discussion of the distinction that consciousness involves, between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness. The concept of consciousness as a cognitive relation to facts requires that how things are in themselves plays the role of a norm for how things are for consciousness. How things really are exercises a normative authority over, sets a standard of correctness for, how we take them to be. That normative semantic or intentional relation is the unity that comprises the two distinguished elements. A complementary direction of fit is exhibited by intentional agency.

The “distinction that action implies,” between intention and performance (underlying that between Handlung and Tat), is also an aspect of a larger normative unity. In this case the intention—how things are for the acting consciousness—serves as a norm or standard of correctness for assessment of how things are to be in themselves—that is, for what actually occurs. In Chapter 12 we saw how the historical-recollective character of the cycle of cognition-and-action underwrites a Hegelian version of the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, in the form of an account of the relation between phenomena and noumena. The two meta-attitudes of Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are initially both manifestations of alienation because they seize one-sidedly on the unity of knowing-and-acting consciousness, in the one case, and the distinction that it involves, on the other. Because the defining flaw of modernity is its failure to get the unity and the distinction that knowing-and-acting consciousness involve in focus together in one picture, the way forward to the reachievement of unalienated Sittlichkeit is a kind of higher Edelmütigkeit. On the theoretical side, that is coming to apply metaconceptual categories of Vernunft, rather than those of Verstand. Hegel’s account of what that consists in is the core achievement of his philosophy. As we draw closer to the end of his exposition in the Phenomenology, we get a new vantage point on that structure of unalienated understanding.

II. The Kammerdiener

The clearest expression of the new piece of the puzzle comes in a famous passage about “playing the moral valet.” “Valet” is “Kammerdiener,” and I call this crucial stretch of text “the Kammerdiener passage.” It expresses a cardinal form of Niederträchtigkeit, holding fast to the disparity that action involves:

[I]t holds to the other aspect … and explains [the action] as resulting from an intention different from the action itself, and from selfish motives. Just as every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty, so too can it be considered from the point of view of the particularity [of the doer]; for, qua action, it is the actuality of the individual. This judging of the action thus takes it out of its outer existence and reflects it into its inner aspect, or into the form of its own particularity. If the action is accompanied by fame, then it knows this inner aspect to be a desire for fame. If it is altogether in keeping with the station of the individual, without going beyond this station, and of such a nature that the individuality does not possess its station as a character externally attached to it, but through its own self gives filling to this universality, thereby showing itself capable of a higher station, then the inner aspect of the action is judged to be ambition, and so on. Since, in the action as such, the doer attains to a vision of himself in objectivity, or to a feeling of self in his existence, and thus to enjoyment, the inner aspect is judged to be an urge to secure his own happiness, even though this were to consist merely in an inner moral conceit, in the enjoyment of being conscious of his own superiority and in the foretaste of a hope of future happiness. No action can escape such judgement, for duty for duty’s sake, this pure purpose, is an unreality; it becomes a reality in the deed of an individuality, and the action is thereby charged with the aspect of particularity. No man is a hero to his valet; not, however, because the man is not a hero, but because the valet—is a valet, whose dealings are with the man, not as a hero, but as one who eats, drinks, and wears clothes, in general, with his individual wants and fancies. Thus, for the judging consciousness, there is no action in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality, and play the part of the moral valet towards the agent. [PG 665; emphasis added]

This is a rich and important passage.¹ I see its significance as unfolding in a series of concentric, widening ripples, and I want to follow them as they broaden out from their center. To be a hero in the sense in play here is to act out of regard for one’s duty. That is to have one’s actions proceed from respect for or acknowledgment of the authority of norms. The hero is the one who acknowledges a norm as binding by actualizing it, who does what he ought, because he ought. To play the valet to such a hero is to impute only selfish, particular motives, to trace every action back to some perceived personal advantage, be it only a reputation for virtue, or, where even that is not available, the satisfaction of thinking well of oneself. In any case, only particular attitudes are acknowledged, not governing norms.

Consider the official who exercises state power. He has committed himself to act purely according to universal interests or norms. That is, he commits himself to doing only what acknowledgment of the norms requires. But every actual performance is a particular doing, and incorporates contingency. It is always more than just the acknowledgment of a norm, and may well also be less than that. (I can never just turn on the light or feed the poor—I am always also doing other things, such as alerting the burglar, or cutting the education budget or raising taxes.) Contingent motives and interests will always also be in play. Thus it will always be possible for the niederträchtig consciousness to point out the moment of disparity, the particularity and contingency that infects each action. It is never just an instance of the universal. The Kammerdiener can always explain what the hero of service did in terms of self-interested (hence particular, contingent) motives and interests, rather than as a response to an acknowledged normative necessity. There is no action at all that is not amenable to this sort of reductive, ignoble description.

Broadening our horizons a little bit, I think we can see an issue being raised concerning the relations between norms and attitudes quite generally. The Kammerdiener does not appeal to norms in his explanations of behavior. The attitudes of individuals are enough. The public official says that he acted as he did because it was his duty. The Kammerdiener offers a competing explanation that appeals only to his desires. What his duty actually is, what he ought to do, plays no role in this account. Thought of at this level of generality, the moral-psychological valet stands for a kind of nihilism about norms that has more recently been championed by Gilbert Harman for the special case of moral norms.² According to this view, invoking moral norms or values is explanatorily otiose. For we can offer explanations of everything that actually happens in terms of people’s views about what is right and wrong, what they take to be permissible or obligatory. It is those attitudes that are causally efficacious. And those attitudes—believing that it is wrong to steal, for instance—would have just the same causal consequences whether or not there were facts to which they corresponded, whether or not it is in fact wrong to steal. Nor is the case any different if we look upstream, to the antecedents of moral attitudes, rather than downstream at the consequences. My belief that it is wrong to steal was brought about by other beliefs (along with other attitudes, such as desires): some my own, some held by my parents and teachers. The truth of the belief need not be invoked to explain why I have the belief, or why anyone else has it. In this way moral beliefs (normative attitudes) contrast with the perceptual beliefs expressed by noninferential reports, for which the frequent truth of such beliefs must be appealed to both in explaining why we have those beliefs and in explaining why having those beliefs has the consequences it does. Acts of applying concepts in judgment and intentional action, and acts of assessing such applications form a complete explanatory structure, one that is capable of accounting for what people do without needing to be supplemented by reference to the conceptual norms or standards that are supposedly being applied and with respect to which applications are supposedly being assessed. Because we do not need to appeal to norms, the best explanation of our actions and attitudes appeals only to attitudes. So we should conclude that there are no norms, only attitudes. This approach sees a massive error standing behind our ordinary ways of talking about norms.

Another way to look at the issue is to ask what sort of theory of practical reasoning the Kammerdiener’s meta-attitude depends on. It is one that eschews what are sometimes called “external reasons.” A broadly kantian form of practical reasoning and explanation appeals to inferences such as the following:

It is wrong to steal.

Taking that newspaper would be stealing.

So I shall not take that newspaper.

Here the norm, the wrongness of stealing, serves as a premise in a piece of practical reasoning that can be appealed to in deliberation about what to do, assessment of what has been done, prediction of what will be done, and explanation of what was done. That is the sort of practical reasoning to which the edelmütig meta-attitude appeals when it sees the official and the counselor acting out of respect for and obedience to communal norms. A broadly humean approach to practical reasoning, of the sort endorsed by Davidson, insists that the kantian radically misrepresents the reasons that actually motivate intentional action. Even if the first premise states a fact, even if it is wrong to steal, that fact would not by itself engage with my motivational machinery. To do that, I must know about or at least believe in the fact. The real reason in the vicinity is that I believe that it is wrong to steal. Apart from that belief, the wrongness of stealing is nothing to me, and cannot affect what I go on to do or try to do. Once we have added that belief as a premise, the original invocation of a norm can drop out. The humean principle is that only beliefs and desires (that is, individual attitudes) can serve as motivating reasons. Norms cannot. The idea is that what serve as reasons for action must also be causes, and only attitudes such as beliefs and desires can do that.

III. The Authority of Normative Attitudes and Statuses

The issue here concerns the practical conception of the pragmatic notion of normative force. How should norms (what is or is not appropriate, correct, obligatory, or permissible) or normative statuses (responsibility, authority, commitment, or entitlement), on the one hand, be understood as related to normative attitudes (taking performances to be appropriate, correct, obligatory, or permissible, acknowledging or attributing responsibility, authority, commitment, or entitlement), on the other? The traditional, premodern view saw norms as independent and attitudes as dependent. The objective norms have authority over the subjective attitudes of individuals, which are supposed merely to reflect them, acknowledge their authority, apply them in deliberation and assessment, judgment and action. The modern view sees attitudes as independent, and norms as dependent. The subjective attitudes individuals adopt institute norms. That is why when the commitments characteristic of modernity are made explicit, they can take the metalevel form of utility. For usefulness comprises properties that simply reflect the relation of an object to particular human purposes. Of course in our discussion of Self-Consciousness we have seen something of the sophisticated story Hegel wants to tell about the relations between normative statuses and recognitive attitudes.

The selfish particular motives that are all the Kammerdiener attributes are independently authoritative attitudes that can be reflected only in statuses such as usefulness to private purposes, not in statuses such as duty, or being unconditionally obligatory—in the sense that the obligatoriness is authoritative for attitudes, rather than conditioned on them, as in the hypothetical, instrumental imperatives arising from prudent pursuit of privately endorsed ends. The Kammerdiener banishes talk of values that are not immediate products of individual valuings. The rise of subjectivity is the practical realization that values are not independent of valuings. Quintessential alienated later modern thinkers such as Nietzsche and the British utilitarians conclude that only valuings are real.

Taking it that the dependence of values on valuings implies that valuings are independent of values is a strategy of independence—which understands everything Humpty Dumpty’s way, as just a matter of who is to be Master. If norms are not immediately authoritative over attitudes, then attitudes must be immediately authoritative over norms. Practically applying categories of immediacy (mastery) in this way, epitomized in the Kammerdiener’s niederträchtig meta-attitude, is a pure form of alienation because it makes unintelligible the very acculturating, conceptual norms subjection to which makes even the Kammerdiener a discursive, geistig being: a knower, agent, and self. Kammerdiener explanations, which admit only normative attitudes, not only cannot make sense of normative force, but also in the end make the notion of conceptual content unintelligible. The relation between these is the topic of the last part of the Spirit section of the Phenomenology.

Moving from the practically alienating standpoint of Verstand to the practically sittlich standpoint of Vernunft requires breaking out of the seeming inevitability of this restricted pair of alternatives—either norms are immediately, hence totally, authoritative over attitudes, or vice versa—by making intelligible the possibility of reciprocal dependence between norm and attitude. To do that, it is not enough, of course, simply to mouth the phrase “reciprocal dependence between norm and attitude.” To make good on that phrase, Hegel offers a richly articulated metaconceptual apparatus laying out the nature of the complex interdependence of the authority of actual applications of concepts over the contents of those concepts and the responsibility of actual applications of concepts to the contents of those concepts. It requires reconceiving the relations between normative force and conceptual content in terms of a process of experience (a cycle of perception-and-action) that is at once the institution and the application of conceptual norms, both a making and a finding of conceptual contents. His account of how that is possible requires the interaction of a social-recognitive dimension and a historical-recollective dimension, on the side of normative pragmatics, and an incompatibility-inferential and representational-referential dimension, on the side of semantics.

There is a third, still more general issue being raised by the Kammerdiener’s meta-attitude, beyond treating attitudes as purely independent of norms (which remain in the picture only in an adverbial capacity, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to individuate the contents of the attitudes). That concerns the relation between reasons and causes generally, or, still more abstractly, the place of norms in nature. For the Kammerdiener essentially treats the hero of duty as a merely natural being. The only way of making the hero’s actions intelligible that the Kammerdiener admits are of the sort that are available in principle for unacculturated creatures, those merely “immersed in the expanse of life.” Though the wants attributed to the hero (for instance, the “inner moral conceit” that consists in “the enjoyment of being conscious of his own superiority and in the foretaste of a hope of future happiness”) go beyond the biologically dictated desires of mere animals, the Kammerdiener’s view of the hero is as one who “eats, drinks, and wears clothes”—that is, at base, as a being driven by creaturely comforts and discomforts. The most general issue Hegel is addressing in his discussion of the Kammerdiener is that of reductive naturalism about normativity.

This sort of naturalism is the most fundamental possible challenge to the Kantian picture of us as normative creatures, as distinguished from the merely natural precisely by our subjection to norms, by the fact that we can bind ourselves by (make ourselves responsible to) norms, by applying concepts, whose contents settle what we have made ourselves responsible for and to. Is there really any such thing as authority or responsibility, as commitment or entitlement? Or is that sort of normative talk wholly optional and dispensable, indeed, a positively misleading mystification: a fundamental error of the sort of which Enlightenment accuses Faith? For the Kammerdiener utilitarian, the work of Enlightenment is only half done when superstitious belief in a magical, invisible, supernatural objective Authority has been banished, so long as human behavior is still described in any terms that invoke norms not immediately derivable from the sensuous inclinations of desiring beings.

The question of how the mind should be understood as fitting into the natural world arose as a direct result of the new mathematized scientific picture of that natural world. Raised clearly and distinctly by Descartes, that question formed one of the characteristic axes around which philosophy turned in the early modern period. The rise of science and the rise of subjectivity are two sides of one coin. Kant’s normative turn transposed the issue into a new key. If mindedness is at base concept use (the application of concepts in judgment and intentional action), bringing in its train a transformation of sensibility, and if what one is doing in applying concepts, the practical significance of those acts, is adopting a distinctively normative status (at once exercising authority and undertaking responsibility, committing oneself), then the issue of the mind’s place in nature becomes the issue of how norms fit into nature. This issue had been addressed in a restricted form by practical philosophers worried about specifically moral norms. But the Kantian synthesis of the principal concern of theoretical metaphysics of mind with this concern of moral philosophy meant that the two issues had for the first time to be addressed together, as aspects of a single question about normativity. (This was the central lesson he learned from Hume. For Kant saw one deep problem showing up in two forms, theoretical and practical, in the way in which lawful necessity outruns matter-of-factual regularity and the way what ought to be outruns what merely is.) Hegel understands Kant as offering a two-world picture, in which the ultimate source of the norms that structure the phenomenal world of experience is to be found in a noumenal one lying somehow beyond or behind it. That picture he rejects, in favor of one that brings the noumena back down to earth. As we have seen, Hegel’s recollective semantics of representation makes sense of how the way things are in themselves (what we are really talking and thinking about) serves as a normative standard of correctness for how things are for knowers and agents (what we say and think about those things) as aspects of the process of experience: the social-practical activity of adopting, assessing, and revising possibly materially incompatible commitments.

The Kammerdiener stands for a niederträchtig, relentlessly naturalistic alternative to this edelmütig, normative description of concept use. In place of the picture of “heroic” practical sensitivity to norms—trying, in deliberation and assessment, to determine what is really correct, what one ought to do, what one is obliged to do (what “duty” consists in), acknowledging genuine normative constraint on one’s attitudes—this meta-attitude appeals only to attitudes, which are not construed as the acknowledgment of any normative constraint on or authority over those attitudes. Reasons are traded for causes. It is this large-scale, fundamental disagreement between the reductive naturalist and the rational-normativist that Hegel is committed to resolving in his discussion of what the Kammerdiener gets right, what he gets wrong, and what lessons we should learn from him. This project, broadly construed, is to provide a response to Kant’s Third Antinomy—the challenge to integrate reasons and causes. A significant proportion of Hegel’s claim to contemporary philosophical attention, I think, should be seen as deriving from his response to this issue of normative naturalism. So the stakes are very high.

Hegel takes it that he shares with Kant at least the aspiration for an account that manages to acknowledge both the attitude-dependence of norms and their genuine authority over attitudes. That is why the Kantian structure of Moralität opens the third section of the Spirit chapter. Kant’s view is transitional between the alienated modernity epitomized by the moral valet and a new kind of Sittlichkeit compatible with the rise of subjectivity. For Hegel, Kant opens the door to the third structural stage in the development of self-conscious Spirit, even though he does not succeed in helping us through it. For Kant’s conception of us as creatures who are bound not just by rules (the laws that govern the realm of nature) but by conceptions (or representations, Vorstellungen) of rules (the norms that govern the realm of freedom), together with the tight conceptual connection he insists on between autonomy and normativity express an attempt to reconcile the attitude-dependence of norms with their genuine bindingness. All genuinely normative binding (authority) is self-binding. In the end, each of us is committed only to what we have committed ourselves to. Our real commitments are just those that we have (at least implicitly) acknowledged. In this sense, it is our attitudes that bring norms into force. We apply the concepts that only then bind us, by determining what we have thereby authorized and made ourselves responsible to and for. This is what I have called the “Kant-Rousseau demarcation of the normative in terms of autonomy.” This approach offers a structural solution to the reconciliation of the attitude-dependence of norms and the norm-dependence of attitudes that appeals to a distinction between the force of conceptual norms and their content. It is up to us, as knowers and agents, what norms we bring into force. For it is up to us what concepts we apply. But it is not then up to us what the content of those norms is—the details of what we have committed ourselves to by applying the concepts we did, rather than some others.

We have seen that Hegel does not think Kant has entitled himself to a notion of conceptual content adequate to carry through an account with this structure. Hegel expresses his diagnosis in terms of the “formality” of Kant’s conception of reason. That is a way of talking about the perceived inadequacy of Kant’s notion of conceptual content. In particular, from Hegel’s point of view, Kant has not explained how the contents of the concepts we have available to apply in judgment and intentional action are determined by our actual applications of them—the cognitive and practical commitments we have actually made. At the core of Hegel’s thought is the idea that in order to make the Kantian strategy work—to make intelligible the idea of the knower-and-agent as responsible for bringing a norm into force (the authority of attitudes over norms), while still seeing the norm as genuinely constraining the knower-and-agent (the authority of norms over attitudes), by insisting that the knower-and-agent is not responsible for (authoritative over) the content of the conceptually articulated commitment—one must acknowledge both a social and a historical division of labor. Along the social dimension, I deliberate and decide about what claims to make and what practical projects to undertake, but then others administer the conceptual norms by which I have thereby bound myself, assessing the truth of what I have said and the success of what I have done by the standards I have subjected myself to. Along the historical dimension, the contents of the concepts I apply derive from previous actual applications of those concepts in judgment and action. Together these claims can be summed up in the slogan that we (by our attitudes and activities) make the norms that I then find available to bind myself by. One of Hegel’s principal theoretical innovations is the recognitive social structure of reciprocal authority and responsibility in terms of which he understands both of these dimensions, in their interaction with each other and with the third recognitive dimension of reciprocal authority and responsibility: that relating the particular and universal aspects of individuals. The final form of reciprocal recognition discussed in the Phenomenology, the structure of trust that comprises confession and forgiveness, is Hegel’s way of working out the Kantian strategy of Edelmütigkeit so as to provide a satisfactory response to the challenge posed by niederträchtig attitude-naturalism of the Kammerdiener. Another innovation at the same level is Hegel’s historical conception of recollective rationality, and the sense in which and the process whereby conceptual content is determined by the incorporation into conceptual norms of contingent immediacy. The story of how appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes can be reconciled with appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses requires both the social and the historical dimensions.

IV. Naturalism and Genealogy

A basic criterion of adequacy of the practical conception of normativity embodied in the recognitive practices of a hypothetical future third age of Spirit is that it be sittlich. It must retain the practical insight about the significance of the actual attitudes and activities of individual practitioners that is at the core of the modern rise of subjectivity, while overcoming the alienation that was its unwelcome concomitant. The institutions and practices in which norms are implicit are sittlich insofar as those norms are practically acknowledged as real, authoritative, and efficacious. Recognitive institutions and practices are alienated insofar as the practical attitude of individuals to the conceptually contentful norms that acculturate them is one of ironic distance. That alienated ironic detachment may take the form of regarding the norms merely as useful fictions. Or it may treat normative discourse as a positively mistaken and misleading way of talking about deliberation and assessment as not in fact the result of applying or acknowledging the applicability of governing norms, but rather the expression of particular, private attitudes, interests, and inclinations.

I have suggested that the figure of the Kammerdiener epitomizes for Hegel the reductive naturalism that makes explicit one defining current of modernity. But there is another specific form that the alienated displacement of reasons in favor of causes (the normative in favor of the natural) can take. Throughout this work I have emphasized Hegel’s concern to offer an account of the nature of conceptual content—not just in the Science of Logic, where that concern is most manifest, but already as an organizing and animating theme of the Phenomenology. At critical junctures in the book, from the opening of Consciousness, in the discussion of Stoicism and Skepticism in the Self-Consciousness chapter, through the treatment of the Honest Consciousness at the end of Reason, to the dissection of the Conscientious Consciousness late in Spirit (as well as many other places), Hegel’s diagnosis of what goes wrong with the shapes of consciousness that most explicitly express the alienation that accompanied the modern rise of subjectivity is that they cannot fund an intelligible notion of determinate conceptual content. His overarching indictment turns on the claim that cognitive, practical, and recognitive practices whose theoretical expression exhibits the atomistic form of Verstand (the model of pure independence) cannot achieve an adequate conception of conceptual content. That must await postmodern practices whose theoretical expression exhibits the holistic form of Vernunft (the model of freedom). And that requires the cognitive, practical, and recognitive epiphany that he calls the advent of “Absolute Knowing.” This semantic concern with the content of the conceptual norms that infuse and inform, and thereby constitute the self-conscious individual selves whose practices incorporate them, signals Hegel’s implicit concern with another strand of argument in the vicinity of the Kammerdiener’s reductionism. Where we have considered so far some alienated ways of understanding the relations between two dimensions of normative force—specifically, how the attitude-dependence of norms may be seen to undercut the authority they claim over attitudes—this further argument concerns the effect that certain insights into the nature of conceptual content has on how one can understand the nature of the normative force or bindingness of conceptual norms.

The general thought is that the possibility of offering a certain kind of genealogical account of the process by which a conceptual content developed or was determined can seem to undercut the rational bindingness of the norms that have that content. This is a form of argument that was deployed to devastating effect by the great unmaskers of the later nineteenth century. Suppose that the correct answer to the question of why we draw the distinction between right and wrong as we do in some area of discourse is a causal explanation in terms of economic class structure, or a quasi-biological account in terms of the limited number of ways the will to power can manifest itself in the weak, or a description of how early traumas incurred while acting out the Family Romance reliably recathect libido into standard repressed adult forms. If any such genealogy can causally explain why our normative attitudes have the contents that they do—why we make the judgments we do instead of some others—then the issue of the rational justifiability of those attitudes lapses. We appear to have reasons for our deliberations and assessments, and it may be comforting to ourselves to think that is why they have the contents they do. But talk about what reasons there are for adopting one attitude rather than another is unmasked by a convincing genealogy of the process as a mere appearance. The genealogy tells us what is really going on, by presenting the underlying mechanism actually responsible for our taking this rather than that as appropriate, fitting, or correct. Seeing ourselves as creatures who are genuinely sensitive to reasons, who are trying to figure out what is in fact appropriate, fitting, or correct—what we really have reason to do—then comes to seem naïve and old-fashioned: the result of applying an exploded explanatory framework couched in a fanciful vocabulary, whose adoption can itself be explained away genealogically as the result of a process quite different from the reasoning to which it pretends.

A great deal of the later Wittgenstein’s writing can be read as pointing out genealogical antecedents of our reason-giving and reason-assessing practices. Again and again he is concerned to point out the ways in which the content of a norm reflects underlying matter-of-factual regularities. How it would be correct to go on in some practice—counting, measuring, applying color-terms, even pointing—depends on how practitioners in fact are able and disposed to go on. Not only our general capacity to institute implicit practical norms (and hence to speak, to make anything at all explicit), but the specific contents of those norms (how they sort novel candidates into those that do and those that do not accord with the norm) have to be understood in terms of contingent facts about practitioners. Those facts do not provide reasons for doing things one way rather than another, but can be appealed to in explaining why the boundary between correct and incorrect is drawn where it is. For we can see that had the regularity been different, the content of the norm would have been different. The norms implicit in our most basic discursive practices accordingly show up as deeply parochial, in that their specific content depends on contingent features of our embodiment and natural history, and of antecedently established practices and institutions. That is why he thinks that if the lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.

One response one might have to the revelation of the contingent, parochial character of the contents of the norms in virtue of which we are discursive beings at all is to see it as undercutting the intelligibility of their normative force. In what sense can we still understand ourselves as bound by the norms, once we realize that had various contingent matters of fact about us been different, the content of what they enjoin would have been different?

The strategy of the genealogical argument is to find some fact that is not evidentially related to the content of the belief—there are no true or plausible auxiliary hypotheses that when conjoined to that fact yield an argument for the truth of what is believed. For the Kammerdiener in Hegel’s allegory, that fact concerns the other attitudes of the candidate hero. Genealogical explanations more generally might appeal to the attitudes of others: parents, teachers, or others in positions of power over the believer. If one can then show that the believer’s attitude of believing is subjunctively sensitive to the obtaining of those other attitudes—ideally, that the fact of those attitudes obtaining provides a sufficient explanation for the attitude of believing whose rational credentials are being assessed—then one can argue that the belief is not rational. For it does not show the requisite sensitivity to the truth of its content, via evidence for it. The believer cannot claim to have been acting according to the norm, to have her belief governed by the norm, to be acknowledging the norm (even though her belief may well be correct, and so be as the norm would dictate)—she cannot claim to be applying or assessing according to the norm, to be sensitive to the norm—if she can be shown to be sensitive to nonevidential attitudes. The genealogical (etiological) realization saps the rational credibility or credence of the belief in question. The authority it would otherwise have as an application of a conceptual norm is thrown into doubt. The belief is supposed to be sensitive to its semantic content (and its inferential involvements), not to pragmatic features having to do with the believing rather than what is believed. And it is natural to try to address that issue by excluding commitments with similar suspect genealogies—it being no help with the general problem to appeal as reasons to other commitments one contingently acquired due to causes not sensitive to their truth. But if the parochial character of the contents of beliefs in the vicinity is sufficiently ubiquitous, the attempt at such bracketing may leave one empty-handed.

Of course not every way in which the content of a concept or belief can be dependent on contingent matters of fact bears on the intelligibility of the norm as binding or the attitude as authoritative. If the melting point of copper had been different, what it is correct to say about the melting point of copper, and so the content of the concept, would have been different. If there were not a cat in my study, the content of my current belief about the question of whether there is a cat in my study would be different. If I had not read the right book, or looked in the right direction, I would not know the melting point of copper, or that there is a cat in my study. Had our eyes been constructed so as to be sensitive only to portions of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond the ultraviolet, we would not be able to deploy the observational concept red as we do. All of these are contingent matters of fact, and had they been different, the contents of our concepts or attitudes would have been different. But they concern what contents would be true, or what we would have reason to believe. The last case is the closest, but it, too, can be thought of as a contingent epistemological constraint: a constraint on what beliefs we can acquire in the form of a constraint on what concepts we can deploy. The worry about genealogy undercutting justification is of a different sort.

A clear illustration of how a genealogy of content can undercut normative force is found in the principal model I have suggested throughout for Hegel’s account of conceptual content: the way concepts of common law develop through the decisions of judges to apply them or withhold application of them in particular cases. I originally invoked this example as a model of the way in which a process of applying conceptual norms in making judgments and practical decisions can also serve to institute conceptual norms and determine their contents. The key point in the present context is that there is nothing outside the previous judges’ decisions to determine the contents of the concepts each judge must apply in a new case. Those prior cases are the only source of reasons for the current judge to apply or not apply the concepts in question to the new set of facts. Here, too, a genealogical characterization of the process is possible. For in each of the prior cases appealed to in justifying a contemporary judgment it may be possible to explain the earlier decision by appealing to what caused the judgment, rather than what reasons there were for it. One may be able to account for the precedential decision by looking at, in the slogan of jurisprudential theory, “what the judge had for breakfast.” Less fancifully, such a genealogical explanation might invoke the nature of the judge’s training, the prejudices of his teachers, the opinions of his culture circle, his career ambitions, the political emphases, issues, and pressures of the day, and so on. Playing the moral valet to the judge is offering such a genealogical account of a judgment: revealing it as not a response to reasons properly provided by precedent and principle, not a matter of acknowledging as binding the content of an antecedent norm, but as the product of extrajudicial, rationally extraneous motives and considerations.

Such genealogical accounts reveal the contingency of the conceptual content a later judge inherits from the tradition. For they make clear that had various judges happened to have had different “breakfasts” (had the contingencies the Kammerdiener appeals to as causes been different), the current content of the concept would have been different. Different decisions would have been made in the past, and would accordingly have provided a different field of possible precedents. In fact, it is a commonplace of jurisprudential genealogy that another sort of contingency infects the process. For it is often clear that the order in which various difficult cases arose crucially affects the contents that emerge from the process. In such situations, the present state of the law would be very different had the case that happened to arise for adjudication later had to be decided before the one that in fact came up first. Similar contingencies affecting the content of concepts handed down as precedents derive from the happenstance of what particular jurisdiction a particular set of facts arises in. The issue I am focusing on is how the availability of such a contingency-riddled genealogical explanation for why the concept currently has the content that it does affects the intelligibility of the norm embodied in that concept as rationally binding, as providing genuine reasons for the current decision to go one way or the other. This is the issue of the relation between genealogy and justification. There is a temptation, indulged and fostered by the genealogical tradition that stretches from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in the nineteenth century through Foucault at the end of the twentieth, to take it that explanations in terms of causes trump explanations in terms of reasons, showing the latter to be illusory. Exhibiting the contingent features of things, not addressed by a conceptual content or commitment, that caused it to be as it is, unmasks talk of reasons as irrelevant mystification. Niederträchtig explanations take precedence over edelmütig ones.

Why should that be? The answer lies in ways of thinking about reason that are deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition. Both the ancients and the moderns defined reason in part by what it excludes. The Greeks introduce the notion of reason in terms of the contrast between rational persuasion and sophistical ways of producing attitudes: the distinction between what ought to convince and what merely in fact does convince. One explains the advent of the first sort of attitude by rehearsing an argument. One explains the advent of the second sort of attitude by producing a genealogy. The Enlightenment notion of reason is similarly structured by the contrast between the rational authority of argument, and the merely habitual influence of tradition: between what we ought to believe and what we merely as a matter of fact have believed. When Enlightenment offers a genealogy of religious belief in terms of interests of priests and despots, or describes the contingent processes by which scripture was transmitted, it understands itself as undercutting the rational authority of Faith. Both the ancient and the modern conceptions of reason motivate a project of purifying reason, by extruding the alien, extraneous influence of what is merely in fact efficacious in bringing about beliefs. On their conceptions, what merely as a matter of fact is or has been believed—the judgments (applications of concepts) that have in fact been endorsed—should be granted no rational weight or force—that is, authority. Kant is only making fully explicit a way of thinking that is already fully in play in Descartes’ Meditations when he decisively separates causal from justificatory grounding, criticizing Locke for producing, in effect, a mere genealogy of empirical beliefs rather than an account of how they are rationally warranted. Hegel thinks that reason as so purified is reduced to something empty, contentless, purely formal—and so inevitably set on a road that leads to skepticism. Hegel’s notion of reason is not opposed to the authority of tradition; it is an aspect of it. What merely is does have rational (defeasible) authority. (“The actual [wirklich] is the rational; the rational is the actual.”) How we have in the past actually applied a concept—from one point of view, contingently, because not necessitated by the norm antecedently in play—helps determine how it is correct to apply it. Conceptual norms incorporate contingency, and only so can they be determinately contentful. This is how they come to be about what there actually is, to represent it, not in an external sense, but in a sense that involves incorporating into the representing the reference to what is represented.

I think the later Wittgenstein worried about this issue. I think he saw the temptation to see a demonstration of the parochiality of the content of a norm—its dependence on or reflection of certain kinds of contingent features of the practitioners and their practices—as undercutting the intelligibility of that norm as genuinely binding, as being a real norm, as having normative force. Wittgenstein does not, as Hegel does, take it that to be determinately contentful at all a norm must have a conceptual content (though he does take the considerations about the dependence of the content of norms on contingent matters of fact to apply also to the case of the conceptual norms expressed by terms such as “rigid”). The effect of the contingency of their content on the rational bindingness of our norms is accordingly not exactly the way to put Wittgenstein’s problem. But he does worry about the thought that showing, for instance, that what counts as the right way to go on depends on a reproducible consilience in how practitioners actually would go on, makes mysterious the sense in which there is a right way to go on, a difference between doing so correctly and incorrectly. And I take it that he is concerned both to reject that inference and to diagnose it as the consequence of a traditional, but ultimately magical notion of normative force. The effect of the demonstration of the parochiality and contingency of the practices in which our norms are implicit is not meant to be normative nihilism. Rather, space is to be opened up for new ways of construing the relations between genealogy and justification.

My concern here is not with expounding Wittgenstein, so I will not try to fill in these all-too-sketchy remarks. (I have more to say about it in the Conclusion.) My concern is with the way in which I see Hegel’s theory as directly (if less than explicitly) addressing a philosophical issue whose importance is perhaps underscored by thinking of it in the way Wittgenstein brought it (more or less) to light. The issue arises for Wittgenstein because he sees both that there is nothing but the prior use of an expression that can be understood as determining the meaning that it has (the content it expresses) and that any such use is shot through and through by contingencies of all sorts that affect that content, while not providing reasons for it to be one way rather than another. One consequence of that conjunction of a pragmatist insight with a genealogical insight is the concern with how any course of actual applications of a concept could suffice to give it a determinate content: the concern that motivates Saul Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein.³ (A central thread in my story in this work has been that Hegel’s project is driven by his appreciation of the need to develop a new metaconceptual framework that articulates a new sense in which conceptual content can be understood as determinate: the categories of Vernunft, supplanting those of Verstand.) The other substantial consequence is the concern I have been sketching: how to understand normative force as compatible with the contingency of content. It is not easy to say what Wittgenstein’s response is to this challenge presented by the content-dependence of norms on the contingent history of their actual application. Hegel’s response is the final form of reciprocal recognition, the structure of confession and forgiveness Hegel elaborates in response to the Kammerdiener (that one far-off divine event toward which this whole creation—his and mine—has been moving).

The issue of how to recover a sense in which conceptual norms can be understood as genuinely binding in the face of the revelation of the contingency of their content by a genealogical account of their origin and development is particularly pressing for Hegel because his response to what he takes to be Kant’s uncritical attitude toward determinate conceptual contents is to offer a conception of experience as a single process that is at once the application and the institution of conceptual norms. (That is what the common-law model is a model of.) The slogan I suggested there was that in this regard, Hegel is to Kant as Quine is to Carnap. Each replaces a two-phase story—according to which first meanings are specified, and then they are applied to make judgments (language first, then theory)—by a one-phase story in which the two functions are intermingled. Kammerdiener genealogies pose a threat to pragmatists of this sort. The possibility of a norm-free, niederträchtig account threatens the justifiability and even the intelligibility of norm-acknowledging, edelmütig ones. And for Hegel, the issue concerns the rational force of conceptual norms: their capacity to provide real reasons for saying or doing one thing rather than another. In situating edelmütig characterizations of our discursive practice with respect to niederträchtig ones, Hegel will be explaining how we should understand what the normative force of a reason consists in. To repeat the earlier observation: the stakes are high.

This challenge encompasses the one Hegel raised at the very beginning of his Introduction in connection with Kant’s problematic: How can one understand us as getting a cognitive grip on—understand our experience as genuinely revelatory of—how things objectively are (how they are in themselves) once one has seen how our faculties make unavoidable contributions to how things appear to us (how they are for us)? This question is enforced by Kant’s commitment to apportion responsibility for various features of our experience between the subject and the object—to say what in our knowledge the world as it is apart from our interactions with it is responsible for, and what we are responsible for (a project that is radically transformed if one construes authority and responsibility according to the categories of Vernunft rather than those of Verstand). For Hegel, the question of how to see conceptual norms as rationally binding, and as presenting an objective (attitude-independent) world are two sides of one coin. He offers one answer to both. And we have already considered most of the pieces of his answer as it bears on the issue of objectivity. For it is a question about how to get together the Hegelian notions of sense and reference, phenomena and noumena. It is senses that—according to each successive Whiggish, rationalist, representational-realist retrospective story—develop by (Fregean) determination, which is the development-by-expression of the referents (those referents becoming expressed more and more explicitly by senses). And it is their referents that objectively bind and set standards for the normative assessment of the objective correctness of the whole process. So the question of objectivity is the question of how the Hegelian biperspectival semantics can be understood as hanging together. Laying out the final, transformative form of reciprocal recognition will permit us to understand the rational force of the norms that develop through this process, and to understand the nature of the expressively progressive recollection that is reason’s march through the world.

V. Four Meta-meta-attitudes

In order to see what the Hegelian account of the relation between normative pragmatic force (articulated by the distinction between norm and attitude) and semantic content adds to the story about the Hegelian version of the Fregean semantic distinction between sense and reference discussed in Chapter 12, it is important to be clear about the nature of the distinction between the two meta-attitudes toward the relations between norms and attitudes: Niederträchtigkeit and Edelmütigkeit. There are four different ways of thinking about that distinction—four different statuses it can be taken to have. They are progressively more insightful and sophisticated, representing an expressive progression—the cumulative emergence into explicitness of implicit features of the relations between norms and attitudes—that corresponds to the stages by which Hegel sees Spirit as a whole developing its self-consciousness.

The first way of understanding the relation between the edelmütig normativist and the niederträchtig naturalist is as a cognitive disagreement about a matter of objective fact. They disagree about the correct answer to the question: Are there norms, or not? If one makes an exhaustive catalog of the furniture of the universe, will one find norms on it, or only normative attitudes? On this way of construing it, the issue is put in a box with the question of whether there are leprechauns, and whether there is a bird in the bush. One or the other party to the dispute is wrong. Who is right and who is wrong is settled by an attitude-independent matter of fact—in the sense that whether there are norms or not is not reference-dependent on the meta-attitudes of the normativist or the naturalist. (For the normativist could be correct if it turned out that there are norms, but they are reference-dependent on normative attitudes.) On the side of epistemology, rather than ontology, the normativist takes it that normative attitudes are themselves cognitive attitudes, and that at least when things go right, they involve knowledge of norms. The hero may in fact know what his duty is and do it because it is his duty. The objectivist meta-meta-attitude to the issue takes it additionally that both the normative and the naturalist attitudes are themselves cognitive attitudes, only one of which can be right about what there really is.

This objectivist, cognitivist way of understanding the status of the two meta-attitudes toward norms and normative attitudes is not the only one available, however. It is possible to adopt instead an almost diametrically opposed subjectivist meta-meta-attitude. According to this way of thinking, the normativist and the naturalist employ different vocabularies in describing the world. Using one rather than the other is adopting a stance. The two stances are incompatible; one cannot adopt them both. One either uses normative vocabulary or one does not. But both of them are available, and both of them are legitimate.

Just as every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty, so too can it be considered from the point of view of the particularity [of the doer]. [PG 665]

As for the legitimacy of the reductive, niederträchtig attitude, Hegel acknowledges that the Kammerdiener is not wrong.

No action can escape such judgement … there is no action in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality, and play the part of the moral valet towards the agent. [PG 665]

Every intentional action is “charged with the aspect of particularity,” in that the agent must have had some motive for performing it, some attitude that was efficacious in bringing it about. Norms are efficacious only through attitudes toward them, so one can always short-circuit explanations that appeal to the norms the attitudes are directed toward (what the agent ought to do, her duty), appealing only to the attitudes themselves. In the broader reading, I take it that Hegel is acknowledging the possibility of purely naturalistic descriptions of the world, including human actions.

Now, to admit only that it is possible to offer a description of things in some particular, restricted vocabulary is not much of a concession. For it is only to admit that one can say some true things using that vocabulary, while being noncommittal on what gets left out—what truths cannot be expressed in the impoverished vocabulary. Thus one can describe the world using only the predicates “has a mass of greater than ten ounces” and “does not have a mass greater than ten grams.” To be substantial in this context (the context, recall, of a response to Kant’s Third Antinomy), the concession must allow further that the vocabulary in question permits an account that is explanatorily complete in its own terms. In this case, that means that all naturalistically specifiable events and features of things can be causally accounted for by appealing only to other naturalistically specifiable events and features of things. This is the sense in which, as Kant puts it, “everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.”

A vocabulary can be explanatorily complete in this sense without being expressively complete, however. The behavior of a Turing machine is completely predictable and explicable in a very restricted vocabulary that suffices to specify the finite number of token types it can read and write, the types of the tokens that appear in every square of the tape, the expression triplets that appear in every cell in its two-dimensional state table, and the current position of the read-write head. This remains true for a realization of (a finite-tape version of) the Turing machine, so long as it is working properly. But it will have many properties that are not specifiable in the restricted vocabulary used to specify Turing machines: a mass, a location, a shape, a physical constitution, and so on. There remain lots of truths about the device that can be expressed only in other vocabularies.

Just so, “every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty”—that is, in the edelmütig normative vocabulary. What shows up in the causal-psychological vocabulary of the Kammerdiener is nature, natural beings, and natural processes: the world of desire. What shows up in the normative vocabulary of the hero is Spirit, geistig beings, and discursive practices: the world of recognition. The realm of Spirit comprises experience and agency. It is a structure articulated by relations of authority and responsibility, of commitment and entitlement, of reasons and concepts with the obligations and permissions that they involve and articulate. This normative, discursive realm of Spirit is Hegel’s topic. (The book is titled Phänomenologie des Geistes, after all.) It, too, is real. According to the stance stance (meta-meta-attitude), the reductive naturalist is wrong to take it that the explanatory completeness of the naturalistic-causal vocabulary in its own terms indicates its expressive completeness—so that any claims it cannot express cannot be true. For it must leave out concept-use as such (and hence the whole geistig dimension of human activity), even though every application of concepts in judgment and action can be explained in naturalistic terms, if it is described in naturalistic terms of noises and motions. But the normative vocabulary is also sovereign and comprehensive within its domain, and can achieve a corresponding explanatory equilibrium. For it is a vocabulary for describing the use of vocabularies—including the vocabulary of natural science. Everything the scientist does, no less than the activities and practices of other discursive beings, can be described in the language of judgment, intentional action, and recognition. The Kammerdiener’s attitude, too, is a discursive attitude.

One of the great questions of modernity—transposed into a new key by Kant’s normative reconceptualization—concerns the relation between Spirit and Nature. As Hegel says at the end of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: “Nature and the world or history of spirit are the two realities.… The ultimate aim and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the Notion with reality.”⁴ One strategy for doing that is to see the naturalistic and normative vocabularies as incommensurable, but as each providing a legitimate, valid, in some sense comprehensive perspective on things. They are understood as just expressing different features of things. The choice of which to employ in any particular case can then be understood to be pragmatic in the classical sense: a matter of what best conduces to securing the ends and interests motivating the subject making the choice of vocabulary at the time. Rather than disagreeing about an objective matter of fact, the naturalist and the normativist are seen as expressing different subjective preferences, adopting different attitudes, which reflect different interests. Whichever vocabulary one adopts makes possible genuine knowledge of some aspect of how things really are.

There is something right about this pragmatic, perspectival way of construing the relations between what is expressed by normative and naturalistic vocabularies. But the conception of Niederträchtigkeit and Edelmütigkeit as still basically cognitive stances misses something essential to Hegel’s approach. When he introduces it, Hegel said that the niederträchtig meta-attitude “clings to the disparity between the two essentialities” [PG 501]—the distinction that action and (actual) consciousness involve. This is a partial, one-sided attitude. The edelmütig meta-attitude seizes one-sidedly instead on the complementary moment of unity or identity. We have seen various ways of conceptualizing these formal aspects of discursive activity, corresponding to different ways of thinking of what is distinguished or united. Judging and acting are species of concept-application. So they involve a distinction between a universal and a particular to which it is applied, and their unity in an individual: a particular as characterized by a universal. The universal is the concept being applied, what sets the standard of correctness of the judgment or action. On the broad construal, the niederträchtig attitude does not admit that there are standards of correctness (norms) in play at all. The particulars are actual and real, the universals are illusory. There are no genuine individuals that really unite universals and particulars. The issue comes up explicitly for intentional action; the Kammerdiener does not admit that what is done can be an acknowledgment of the bindingness of a norm, can be simply an application of it to a particular. There are just particular performances, but no question of them genuinely falling under norms according to which they can be assessed. Judgments and actions as such are visible only from the edelmütig point of view, which discerns the unity, and hence the content, of consciousness and action.

So far, this characterization is compatible with a purely cognitive reading of the two meta-attitudes. But immediately after the Kammerdiener passage, Hegel says of the moral valet:

The consciousness that judges in this way is itself base [niederträchtig], because it divides up the action, producing and holding fast to the disparity of the action with itself. [PG 666]

Adopting the niederträchtig meta-attitude is not only “holding fast” to the “disparity of the action with itself,” but “producing” that disparity, because it “divides up the action.” This sounds much more practical than cognitive—a matter of making something, not just finding something. But in what sense does the moral valet produce the disparity? It cannot be that what he produces is the “distinction that action implies.” [PG 400] For that distinction—between achievement and intention, between the context of assessment and the context of deliberation, between particular performance and universal conceptual norm that sets a standard for correctness for it—is a ubiquitous and essential part of the metaphysical structure of action. That distinction is not a product of modern alienation. Alienation is only one structure that a practical conception of that distinction can take. That alienated structure of agency is what the Kammerdiener produces by adopting the reductive niederträchtig attitude, which denies that knowers and agents are genuinely sensitive to conceptual norms.

The claim is that adopting the niederträchtig normative meta-attitude institutes a kind of normativity that has a distinctive, defective structure. To say that is to say that Niederträchtigkeit is in the first instance a kind of recognition, rather than of cognition. After all, recognition in general is taking someone to be a subject of normative statuses and attitudes (hence a knower and agent), and specific recognition is attributing particular normative statuses and attitudes. The magnanimous historian, who takes the hero to be genuinely sensitive to and acknowledging norms beyond his own desires, recognizes the hero in a very different sense than does the one who plays the moral valet to him. Just so, Enlightenment’s taking Faith to consist in a simple cognitive mistake is taking up a recognitive stance to Faith. It not only makes a cognitive mistake when it takes Faith’s defining commitments to be cognitive rather than recognitive (belief in the existence of a peculiar kind of thing rather than instituting a community of trust), it also commits a recognitive injustice:

Faith … receives at [Enlightenment’s] hands nothing but wrong; for Enlightenment distorts all the moments of faith, changing them into something different from what they are in it. [PG 563]

To faith, [Enlightenment] seems to be a perversion and a lie because it points out the otherness of its moments; in doing so, it seems directly to make something else out of them than they are in their separateness. [PG 564]

Its ungenerous, niederträchtig failure to recognize Faith’s recognitive achievement changes that achievement, making it less than it would be if properly acknowledged. By adopting that attitude, playing the moral valet to Faith, refusing proper recognition, Enlightenment rejects community with Faith, makes impossible the reciprocal recognition that would institute a community exhibiting the structure of trust, and pushes the corresponding sort of self-consciousness out of reach.

The moral valet does not just notice or point out the disparity that action and consciousness involve, he identifies with it. For his recognitive act is also a recognitive sacrifice. What the Kammerdiener gives up is the possibility of a certain kind of self-consciousness: consciousness of himself as genuinely bound by norms. The principled grounds he has for refusing to recognize the hero as a norm-governed creature apply to himself as well. His position is that the idea of someone practically acknowledging a norm as binding is unintelligible. This characterization may seem wrong, at least for the narrow, literal construal of the Kammerdiener story. After all, he does attribute practical reasoning, and hence concept-use to the hero—just nothing that is not immediately self-serving, the satisfaction of some actual, contingent, motivating desire. So he does in some sense recognize the hero as a discursive being. But the claim will be that this is an unstable kind of recognition. If all anyone can do is fulfill felt desires, then concept-use is not in the end intelligible as such. The argument is the one rehearsed for the conscientious consciousness. A notion of duty showing some sort of independence from attitudes is needed to give content to the idea of assessing performances accordingly as they were or were not performed out of a conviction that they were what duty demanded. (Failing to appreciate that was the flaw diagnosed in the conscientious normative self-consciousness.) Normative attitudes are not in the end intelligible as contentful apart from the norms that identify and individuate their contents. What the Kammerdiener is doing by adopting the niederträchtig recognitive stance is making his own and others’ performances and practices into something that is unintelligible as discursive.

The third construal of the niederträchtig and edelmütig meta-attitudes toward norms and normative attitudes is then that they are recognitive attitudes that have the effect of practical commitments. Adopting the edelmütig stance of Spirit is committing oneself to making what we are doing being binding ourselves by conceptual norms, so acknowledging the authority of such norms, by practically taking it that that is what we are doing—by recognitively treating ourselves and our fellows as doing that. On this view normativity (which, because the norms in question are for Hegel all conceptually contentful, is the same phenomenon as rationality) is not a feature of our practices independent of our practical meta-attitude toward it. “To him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back,” Hegel says.⁵ Normativity and rationality are products of our edelmütig meta-attitudes, of our practically taking or treating what we are doing (recognizing each other) as acknowledging rational commitments. Spirit exists insofar as we make it exist by taking it to exist: by understanding what we are doing in normative, rational terms. We make the world rational by adopting the recognitively structured constellation of commitments and responsibilities I have—following Hegel’s usage in connection with the community Faith is committed to instituting—denominated trust. As we will see, this means that Spirit is brought into existence and sustained by our recollective commitment to rationally reconstruct the tradition of experience in Whiggish terms—finding trajectories through it that are expressively progressive, that exhibit what we have been doing as the unfolding into explicitness of norms that were all along implicit.

This third understanding of the meta-attitudes of Niederträchtigkeit and Edelmütigkeit, as practical, recognitive, hence community- and self-constitutive, like the second, still presents them as options available for the subject freely to choose between. It is up to us whether to make ourselves into merely natural or genuinely normative beings. On this account, Hegel might be urging us to not to make the Kammerdiener’s choice, but he is not claiming we are compelled to do so. There is, however, a fourth way of understanding the status of these two stances. Its leading thought is that we have always already implicitly committed ourselves to adopting the edelmütig stance, to identifying with the unity that action and consciousness involve, to understanding ourselves as genuinely binding ourselves by conceptual norms that we apply in acting intentionally and making judgments. For we do judge and act, and we cannot avoid in practice taking or treating those judgments and actions as being determinately contentful—as materially incompatible with certain other judgments and actions, and as materially entailing still others. We count some judgments as reasons for or against others, and some intentions and plans as ruling out or requiring others as means. Even the Kammerdiener and his resolutely reductive naturalist generalization offer contentful accounts of our doings (performances and attitudes), accounts that aim to satisfy the distinctive standards of intelligibility, adequacy, and correctness to which they hold themselves. If the determinate contentfulness of the thoughts and intentions even of the niederträchtig is in fact intelligible only from an edelmütig perspective, then anyone who in practice treats what he is doing as judging and acting is implicitly committed thereby to Edelmütigkeit. The semantic theory that I have been extracting from the Phenomenology has as its conclusion the antecedent of that conditional.

If that is all right, then the apparent parity of the two metanormative stances is an illusion. No genuine choice between them is possible. By talking (engaging in discursive practices) at all, we have already implicitly endorsed and adopted one of them, whether we explicitly realize that or (like the Kammerdiener) not. On this reading, what Hegel is asking us to do is only to explicitly acknowledge theoretical and practical commitments we have already implicitly undertaken just by taking part in discursive practices—which is to say, by being acculturated. Explicitly adopting the edelmütig practical-recognitive attitude is accordingly just achieving a certain kind of self-consciousness: realizing something that is already true of ourselves. So the issue is, in the end, in one sense a broadly cognitive one: a matter of finding out how things in some sense already are. But the achievement of this definitive kind of self-consciousness is also, as must be so according to Hegel’s social account of what self-consciousness consists in, the adoption of a distinctive kind of recognitive relation to others and to oneself.

The realization that Edelmütigkeit simply consists in doing explicitly what one has implicitly committed oneself to do by adopting discursive attitudes and engaging in discursive practices also exhibits that recognitive attitude as a moral necessity, in a sense that develops a Kantian idea. (This is part of the reason Hegel’s expository development of his novel positive account of the shape of an explicitly edelmütig reciprocal recognitive relation closes the section titled “Moralität.”) Kant seeks to ground moral imperatives in the presuppositions of rationality and discursivity, hence of normativity and the sort of positive freedom that consists in being able to bind oneself by conceptual norms. His thought is that whatever can be shown to be a necessary condition of being a knower and agent at all is thereby shown to have a grip on us that is unconditional in the sense of not being relative to any particular endorsement or commitment of ours, whether theoretical or practical. Hegel tells a different story than Kant does about the relations between treating others as one minimally must in order to be treating them as rational, discursive, norm-governed, free beings (that is, recognizing them), on the one hand, and one’s self-consciousness as oneself rational, discursive, norm-governed, and free. But he takes over the idea that recognizably moral norms are to be derived from the presuppositions of discursivity in general. Self-recognition, recognizing oneself, treating oneself as a discursive being, as able to undertake determinately contentful commitments, exercise determinately contentful authority and so on, requires recognizing others: attributing that kind of responsibility and authority to them. Any practical or theoretical presupposition of that is a structural presupposition of one’s own self-consciousness. That is the source of moral requirements on how we treat others. Transposed into the key of Hegel’s expressive idiom, edification concerning what is necessary shows up as the making explicit (für sich) of what one is already implicitly (an sich) committed to. Doing that always has both a cognitive aspect of finding out how things already really were (in themselves) and a recognitive aspect of self-transformation and constitution of oneself as a new kind of self-consciousness.

There are two places in this argument for the cognitive, practical-recognitive, and moral necessity of adopting the edelmütig metanormative attitude (the argument that doing that explicitly is just acknowledging what one has always already done implicitly) at which the convinced antinormative reductionist might object. First, of course, is to the claim, grounded in Hegel’s complex semantics, that only an edelmütig recognitive structure can make or find determinate conceptual contents. In the next chapter we look more closely at the story that backs up that claim by connecting hermeneutic magnanimity with the Hegelian process of extracting representational content from inferential content by recollection. The other locus for a possible objection is the claim that the naturalist is implicitly committed, just by speaking and acting intentionally, to the determinate contentfulness of his attitudes in some sense that brings into play a semantics at all. (The sort of naturalist who acknowledges that semantic normativity must be underwritten, but seeks to do that in wholly naturalistic terms falls under the first heading rather than this one.) This is not true of the Kammerdiener on the narrowest, most literal construal, because he attributes contentful attitudes, just exclusively self-interested ones, ones that more or less immediately express particular desires of the sort whose paradigm is bodily wants. But on the broader reading, a determined naturalist might insist that exactly what he wants to deny is that we must give intentional specifications of our performances and attitudes (that is, ones that identify or individuate them in terms of their conceptual contents) at all. If he is willing to describe even his own doings entirely in the restricted language of noises, marks, and the motions of bodies, why does not talk of “implicit commitments” just beg the question against his view? There is, of course, nothing to keep this sort of naturalist from making what he says true of himself. He is also a desiring organism, and he can make himself into nothing more than that. For he can just stop talking—though only, as Sellars remarks, at the cost of having nothing to say. But if he does keep talking, then whatever else he is doing, he is responding to reasons as reasons, drawing inferences and offering accounts. For he is performing speech acts that have the significance, regardless of his view of the matter, of claiming conceptually articulated authority and undertaking conceptually articulated responsibility. And that is enough for him also to be incurring the implicit commitments that Hegel sees as made explicit by confession, forgiveness, and trust.

VI. Looking Forward to Magnanimity

I have here deliberately been using “norm” in a loose and apparently ambiguous way. I have been doing so to mirror, more or less, Hegel’s use of “necessity.” That use is intended to combine (successor versions of) the two notions that Kant distinguished under the headings of “subjective necessity” and “objective necessity.” From Hegel’s point of view, these are “einseitig” construals of aspects of a single notion, which stand to one another in complex intimate relations. The conceptual apparatus needed to talk in a less ambiguous way has already been put on the table. The first, subjective aspect of normativity refers to social normative deontic statuses of subjects: commitments and entitlements, responsibility and authority. These are the objects of recognitive attitudes that individual subjects adopt toward other individual subjects. The second, objective aspect refers to the conceptual structure of the objective world: the alethic modal material incompatibility and (so) consequence relations that articulate that world into determinate properties-and-objects, facts, and laws. These are the objects of cognitive attitudes that individual subjects adopt toward the objective world. The existence of normative statuses is not reference-independent of the existence of subjective normative attitudes. The existence of objective conceptual norms is reference-independent of the existence of subjective normative attitudes (and hence of normative statuses). The Hegelian thesis that normative statuses and objective conceptual norms are reciprocally sense-dependent is what I have called “objective idealism.”

It is important to keep this complex structure of various kinds of dependence and independence in mind when thinking about the relation between the third and fourth construals of Niederträchtigkeit and Edelmütigkeit. According to the final one, normative statuses are made by (reference-dependent upon) normative attitudes (including the metanormative attitudes of Niederträchtigkeit and Edelmütigkeit), while conceptual norms are found (reference-independent of normative attitudes, including the metanormative ones). Because objective conceptual norms are (reciprocally) sense-dependent on the normative statuses of subjects (according to objective idealism), the niederträchtig reductive naturalist is wrong to think that he can deny the intelligibility (his reason for denying the existence) of normative statuses and still be entitled to treat the objective world as a determinate object of potential knowledge. “No cognition without recognition!” is the slogan here. Because normative attitudes and normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent, the attempt to entitle oneself to talk about determinately contentful normative attitudes while denying the intelligibility and (so) existence of normative statuses is bound to fail. We saw Hegel make arguments to the effect that normative attitudes must be thought of as contentless if normative statuses are taken out of the picture, at various places in the text, such as the discussion of skepticism, of the honest consciousness, and of the conscientious consciousness. Denying the ultimate intelligibility of normative statuses—denying that genuine authority and the bindingness of commitments can be made sense of—is alienation. Asserting the sense- and reference-dependence of normative statuses on normative attitudes—in this dual sense denying that normative statuses are independent of normative attitudes—is the core insight behind the modern rise of subjectivity. We are accordingly now in a position to begin to see how that insight can be reconciled with the overcoming of alienation.

Niederträchtigkeit is a pure expression of alienation, while Edelmütigkeit shows a way forward from the impasse of modernity. Understanding the stances and the choice between them as a matter of adopting a practical commitment, as producing the unity it discerns, hence ultimately as a recognitive matter of community- and self-constitution, corresponds to the response Hegel makes to Enlightenment’s misunderstanding of the nature of the community of trust, on Faith’s behalf. That is, these two construals correspond to the two alienated institutional forms of characteristically modern understandings of norms, statuses, and attitudes. Understanding the edelmütig attitude as a practical-recognitive commitment that has always already implicitly been undertaken as a pragmatic condition of semantically contentful cognition and agency (of determinate subjective attitudes), then, corresponds to breaking through the confines of alienated modernity into the form of self-consciousness Hegel calls “Absolute Knowing.” At the first stage, in which necessity is construed as objective necessity, the norms are found. For normative statuses (duty, propriety, what one is committed to do, what one is responsible for doing) reflect and are determined by objective (attitude- and practice-independent) norms. In the middle, modern stage, in which necessity is construed as subjective necessity, normativity and reason must be made by our attitudes and practices, rather than being found. At the projected postmodern third stage, finding and making show up as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one process, whose two phases—experience and its recollection, lived forward and comprehended backward, the inhalation and exhalation that sustain the life of Spirit—are each both makings and findings. In first phases of an episode of experience, error is found and a new phenomenon is made. In the recollective phase, a rational selection and reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory of phenomena in experience is made, and an implicit noumenon is found. Explicitating senses are made, and the implicit referents they express are found. The unity, the identity of content, that consciousness and action involve must be made, and the complementary disparity is found. Absolute Knowing is comprehending, in vernünftig form, the way in which these aspects mutually presuppose, support, complement, and complete one another.

What lies ahead is the practical transformation of self-conscious selves, their doings, their communities and institutions, to be brought about when the social and the historical dimensions of self-conscious normative selfhood come together. When recognition takes the form of recollection, it is magnanimous, edelmütig forgiveness. The result is the final form of Geist, in which normativity has the form of trust.

Chapter 15

Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit

The Kammerdiener

I. Two Meta-attitudes

II. The Kammerdiener

III. The Authority of Normative Attitudes and Statuses

IV. Naturalism and Genealogy

V. Four Meta-meta-attitudes

VI. Looking Forward to Magnanimity