The final movement of the long Spirit chapter is discussed in its concluding eleven paragraphs. It is here that Hegel sketches the way forward out of modernity to a more adequately self-conscious structure of recognition, and so of selves, norms, and communities. This discussion is the culmination of the substantive development of the whole book. It is true that the Spirit chapter is succeeded by two more: Religion, and Absolute Knowing, but in a real sense they comment on a development that has already been completed by the end of Spirit. Absolute Knowing is an account of where we have arrived, after our phenomenological recollection of the development of different shapes of consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason—that is, of the cognitive, recognitive, and practical dimensions of conceptual activity—and of the stages of Spirit as a whole. When Absolute Knowing begins, we are supposed to have already achieved the sort of self-consciousness it concerns itself with. And the point of the Religion chapter is that the insights we have achieved philosophically, by the end of the Spirit chapter, can be seen to be those that religion, too, seeks to express—albeit not conceptually, but in the form of sensuous immediacy. (Recall the symbolic-expressive role of what is immediately observable in revealing an underlying unobservable reality, as introduced late in Force and Understanding.) Religion is to provide a different point of view on a lesson already presented in more perspicuous form. It is to the substantive work completed in Spirit what Kant’s Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone is to the presentation of his practical philosophy in the Second Critique. The lesson we are to have learned from the rehearsal of the history of Spirit will be restated in Absolute Knowing, and again, in somewhat different terms, in the Preface. But its emergence from the ultimately incompatible structural commitments characteristic of modernity is chronicled in these few concluding paragraphs of Spirit. It is here that we are to achieve the state Hegel calls “Absolute Knowing,” the end of our spiritual journey.

The text that describes the transition to the third stage in the development of Spirit is gnomic, dark, and allegorical. It takes the form of a parable, a narrative recounting sequential stages in the relationship between an “evil consciousness” [PG 661] and a “hard-hearted judge” [PG 669–670]: evil [PG 661–662], judgment [PG 662–666], confession [PG 666], refusal of reciprocal confession [PG 667–668], the breaking of the hard heart and confession by the judge [PG 669], forgiveness [PG 669–671], and the achievement of a new kind of community. (“The reconciling Yea, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the ‘I’ which has expanded into a duality.” [PG 671]) Our task, as it has so often been, is to read the allegory—in this case, so as to understand the nature of this final form of mutual recognition as reciprocal confession and forgiveness. Unlike the earlier stories, this one outlines something that has not happened yet: a future development of Spirit, of which Hegel is the prophet: the making explicit of something already implicit, whose occurrence is to usher in the next phase in our history.

The two parties to this morality tale, the judged and the judging consciousness, personify the two social perspectives on the application of concepts in judgment and exercises of practical agency that are familiar to us from our consideration of Hegel’s theory of action. These are the first-person context of deliberation (Vorsatz-Handlung) and the third-person context of assessment (Absicht-Tat). The one judged makes himself responsible, by applying a concept, and the judge holds him responsible for that application. What we are eventually to comprehend—thereby achieving “Absolute Knowing”—is the way in which a process of negotiation involving the normative attitudes of the self-conscious individuals occupying the two perspectives is intelligible as instituting a normative status: a cognitive or practical commitment resulting from the application of a conceptual norm whose determinate content is expressed, clarified, and developed in that very process.

The adoption of normative attitudes toward one another (the attribution and acknowledgment of normative statuses) is specific recognition. So the relations between the judging and the judged individuals are recognitive ones: the relations that articulate their self-consciousness and structure their community. As our story begins, the recognitive attitudes in virtue of which the acting consciousness is denominated “evil” or “wicked” [böse], and the judge “hard-hearted,” are niederträchtig ones.

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]

What is wrong with Niederträchtigkeit is that such attitudes institute alienated recognitive structures. In a social structure of self-consciousness of this kind, an individual’s judgments and actions are not intelligible as such, to himself or to others. For what he does cannot be practically understood as the application of (the binding of himself by) determinately contentful conceptual norms. We need to be clear about the relations between

Niederträchtigkeit, as a practical attitude of identification with, hence sacrifice for, the disparity that action and consciousness involve, which produces that disparity in a distinctively alienated form;
Alienation, as a recognitive structure that is defective in making incomprehensible the normative dimension of the activities of individuals and the practices of communities that exhibit that structure (a failure of self-consciousness); and
Asymmetry of recognition as its characteristic structural defect, and as resulting from practically applying categories of immediacy or pure independence (the conception of authority and responsibility epitomized by the Master).

The first observation to make is that one way recognition can be nonreciprocal or nonsymmetrical is if the norms that are applied by the people who are deliberating about what to do and justifying what they are doing are not the same norms that are applied by the people attributing those doings and assessing those justifications. As we have seen at the end of the previous chapter, that is just the criticism that Hegel makes of the metanormative attitudes—both the theoretical ones and the recognitive ones that result from relying on those theoretical attitudes in practice—that he discusses under the heading of “Moralität” in the first two subsections of the third part of the Spirit chapter. The inevitable difference that action involves (because of the difference between the two social recognitive perspectives on it) is produced by these meta-attitudes (by being practically construed) in the form of a disparity between the norms that are available for individuals to use in the context of deliberation and acknowledgment of commitments, on the one hand, and the norms that are available for individuals to apply in the context of assessment and attribution of commitments, on the other. The successor metaconception, conscience, Hegel portrays as succeeding in getting the same norms to apply in both contexts. But that desirable result is achieved only at the cost of losing the content of the common norms. For what is right is identified by both parties, both the acting and the assessing consciousness, with whatever the agent takes to be right. And that means (as another philosopher would later point out) that on that conception there ultimately is no question of right or wrong. For there is nothing left that the agent can intelligibly be taking an application of a concept to be, when he takes it to be correct. If norms are simply identified with normative attitudes (what is correct with what is taken to be correct), the latter become unintelligible too (cf. the “fallacy of lost contrast”).

One of Hegel’s most fundamental ideas is that the notion of content is intelligible in principle only in terms of the sort of friction between normative attitudes that shows up in cognitive experience in the collision of incompatible commitments acknowledged by one knower, and which we have come to see is rooted in the social-perspectival collision of commitments acknowledged and those attributed in practical experience of the disparity of Handlung and Tat. Any attempt to remove the distinctions that consciousness and action involve by immediately identifying the two sides with one another necessarily discards raw materials essential for making sense of the notion of determinate conceptual content. The conscientious consciousness’ characteristically alienated attempt to replace norms by attitudes is merely the latest in a sequence of targets of this generic criticism that Hegel has rehearsed, beginning with the conception of immediate sense certainty, in Consciousness, including both the discussions of mastery and of stoicism and skepticism, in Self-Consciousness, and the honest consciousness (which identified doings with willings, construed as a kind of minimal doing that is immediately realizable because identical with the mere adoption of an attitude) in Reason. All are accused of putting themselves in a position from which the contents of their attitudes are incomprehensible. The niederträchtig judge does not, like the conscientious consciousness, elide the distinction that action and consciousness involves. But, as we will see, he does have the same self-defeating meta-attitude that unless the agent’s motivating attitude (purpose) and the norm according to which it is to be assessed are immediately identical, then there is no common content in play at all. And without that notion of a content that can (at the very least, in favored cases) be understood as common to what is intended and what is achieved, the notion of a normative status—of what the agent is doing as committing himself, in action and judgment, the object of both sorts of normative attitude, of a commitment as what can be both acknowledged (by oneself) and attributed (by others)—together with the notion of the norm one is binding oneself by in adopting such a status, necessarily goes missing. In order to overcome the problems that are part and parcel of the one-sided construals of the unity of action by the conscientious consciousness and of its disparity by the judge who plays the moral valet to other agents, what is needed is to move beyond the categories of immediacy they apply in their theoretical and practical understandings of normativity. Then, and only then, can the distinction that action and consciousness involve show up as two forms in which one content can appear.

Against this background, let us look at what Hegel says about how the judging consciousness applies different standards to the assessment of action than does the agent himself. “The consciousness of an act declares its specific action to be a duty.” [PG 665] This is how the agent justifies his action: by saying (here using Kantian terminology) that it falls under a norm, that it is correct or required. Doing this is exhibiting a normative attitude, portraying what is done as an acknowledgment of a norm as binding. In a certain sense, this attitude is the end of the matter for the agent. He can do only what he takes to be his duty. When he has settled that, he has settled what to do. His normative attitude, his acknowledgment of a commitment, is the form in which his normative status, what he is really committed to, shows up for him. “Conscience” [Gewissen] is Hegel’s term for the metanormative conception according to which that attitude ought also to settle things (be authoritative for) those who assess the correctness of what the agent does. As long as he did what he took to be his duty, he acted conscientiously (i.e., out of respect for duty), and that is supposed to be the only basis on which he can be assessed. Having seen the fatal structural flaw in this strategy—the way the notion of duty goes missing in it—we (the phenomenological “we,” Hegel’s readers) are moving on to consider a successor strategy that does retain a difference between the context of assessment and that of appraisal.

Now the judging consciousness does not stop short at the former aspect of duty, at the doers knowledge of it that this is his duty, and the fact that the doer knows it to be his duty, the condition and status of his reality. On the contrary, it holds to the other aspect, looks at what the action is in itself, and explains it 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].… 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.… 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]

It is from the point of view of such a judging consciousness, assessing the conformity of a performance to duty, that the performance—any actual performance—shows up as wrong, and the acting consciousness as bad. The concept of evil in play here is of actions that disregard normative considerations of what the agent ought to do, what it would be right to do, and respond only to the agent’s personal wants, desires, and other attitudes. In this case, assessing the doing as evil is taking it not to have been performed out of a pure respect for duty—that is, not being just the application of a norm, the acknowledgment of a commitment. We know enough by now to see that the problem is going to be with the “purity” required of the purpose: that the action stem from “duty for duty’s sake” alone. An insistence on those characteristics expresses an understanding of authority on the one-sided model of independence (mastery): unless only the norm is authoritative, unless it is wholly authoritative, it cannot be understood as authoritative at all.

But what, exactly, is the content of the indictment delivered by the judging consciousness and, at the next stage in the parable, confessed by the acting consciousness? I think we should understand it as comprising two related, but distinct claims. First, and most obviously, it is always possible to offer a reductive, Kammerdiener’s account of the etiology of an action in terms of attitudes rather than norms, inclinations rather than obligations, causes rather than reasons (“selfish motives,” “particularity,” “the personal aspect”). We need not accept the agent’s claim to be sensitive to norms, reasons, the standards of correctness for the application of concepts. In place of a kantian explanation in terms of what are often called “external reasons,” we can always give a humean explanation in terms of “internal reasons”: appeal to the subjective desires of the agent as motives instead of to the agent’s obligations as reasons. From this point of view the agent shows up not only as bad, in the sense of not really responsive to norms, but also as hypocritical. [PG 663–664] For it claims to be responsive to norms. But in fact—according to the niederträchtig assessment—it is responsive really only to its own inclinations and attitudes. The claim is that counterfactually, if the norms determining the content of one’s real commitments were different, but one’s attitudes and inclinations were the same, one would act in the same way. So what should one count as sensitive to? Because norms are actually efficacious only via attitudes, it is always possible to see agents as sensitive only to their own attitudes. Construing that fact as meaning that those attitudes are not properly to be understood as acknowledgments of commitments, as applications of (bindings of oneself by) conceptual norms, is Niederträchtigkeit.

Second, Hegel characterizes the niederträchtig judge as holding to the moment of disparity that action necessarily involves, looking “at what the action is in itself,” what is actually achieved, rather than what it is for the agent, “and explains it as resulting from an intention different from the action itself.” It is part of the basic metaphysics of agency that one can never merely fulfill a purpose. Whatever one does admits of an indefinite number of specifications.¹ The niederträchtig assessor and attributor of the doing rejects the authoritativeness of the agent’s privileging of one of these (indeed, often, as we have seen, one that is not even true of what was done, but stands to those that are true only in a much weaker, retrospectively discerned, broadly anaphoric relation) as what he was trying to do. The judge exercises his own authority, attributing and holding the agent responsible for the action under a different kind of description, seeing it not as the acknowledgment of a norm but only as the evincing of an attitude of desire or inclination. By acting this way, the judge in fact adopts an asymmetrical recognitive stance toward the agent. For he insists on his own authority over action-specifications, while not acknowledging any corresponding authority on the part of the agent. And that asymmetry is the direct result of understanding authority and responsibility on the model of independence: as precluding any kind of reciprocal dependence (taking authority to be incompatible with any correlative responsibility).

The Kammerdiener’s sort of assessment is always possible, and in the expressively progressive parable of confession and forgiveness, the agent himself eventually comes to assess his own actions this way. He confesses to being evil—confesses that his apparent respect for the norms (universals) is a guise for the pursuit of personal (particular) ends. Adopting this reductive naturalistic characterization of his own doings is the ne plus ultra of alienation. For the self-consciousness that makes this confession (recognizing itself in niederträchtig terms) becomes unintelligible to itself as a creature and creator of norms, hence as a knower and agent at all. The reductive stance acknowledges only attitudes. It is not just that the indefinite multiplicity of unique circumstances accompanying every particular candidate for application of a conceptual norm makes it impossible to be sure whether it is correct to apply the universal to that particular, what one’s use of that term commits one to do, and so what attitude one would be justified or entitled to adopt by the norms in play. It is rather that the very idea of a norm that settles the question one way or another for novel cases (the idea of normative “rails laid out to infinity”) seems unintelligible—a metaphysical, rather than an epistemic problem. Instead of genuine conceptual norms, which, when applied by adopting an attitude toward them, institute genuine normative statuses, paradigmatically commitments, there are just cases where a term has been applied in the past (by oneself and by others), cases where such application has been withheld, and the inclinations and dispositions that various practitioners have as a matter of fact acquired in response to those prior uses, in the context of how they are all wired up and trained. Using a term in some cases and not others is expressing a practical attitude. But on this reductive conception, it is not a normative attitude. There are no norms in play that could determine what one was really committing oneself to by doing so (what normative status one had undertaken by adopting that attitude).

Again, the counterfactuals also point to the reality and explanatory sufficiency of attitudes rather than norms. Had individual practitioners, as a result of their own particular, contingent motivations, applied terms differently in the past, their heirs would be disposed to apply them differently now. Current attitudes (uses) are sensitive to past attitudes (uses). No notion of normative necessity (what one has reason) to do emerges from this picture of massive contingency, in which current applications are explicable in terms of “what the judge had for breakfast.” In this sense it is attitudes “all the way down.” This reductive naturalism is the culmination of modern alienation. In it, what was all along the dark side of the implicit core of modernity—its discovery of the constitutive significance of individual attitudes—comes into the explicit light of day.

As Hegel tells the story, the acting consciousness, which “declares its specific action to be duty,” and both the judging and the confessing consciousnesses, which explain actions in terms of nonnormatively characterized motives (attitudes), see the issue about which they disagree as a cognitive one: a matter of who is right about an objective fact. Is the agent in fact acknowledging the bindingness of a norm (being sensitive to a normative necessity), or merely responding to other attitudes (so the performance belongs in a box with other phenomena explicable by appeal to contingent matters of fact)? Is naturalism about motives true? If it is, then it applies in the context of assessment just as much as in the context of deliberation, and so to the judge who assesses and attributes actions as much as to the agent who produces them. If the agent cannot intelligibly be supposed to be undertaking commitments, acknowledging norms as binding, binding himself by norms, trying to do what is right, then neither can the judge. Or again, if the fact that one can adopt the Kammerdiener stance means that one must (that that is the right way to think of things) in the case of the consciousness being assessed, why does not the same thing apply to the consciousness doing the assessing? But at this stage in the parable, the judging consciousness “is hypocrisy, because it passes off such judging, not as another manner of being wicked, but as the correct consciousness of the action.” [PG 666] The judge takes it that though the acting consciousness is evil, responding to the particular rather than the universal, the contingencies of his subjective situation and dispositions rather than acknowledging what is normatively necessary, he himself is responsive to the universal, to norms. What the judge says is correct, the right way to describe what is going on, the way one is obliged to think about it. The judge still takes it that he can “oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality,” because he still perceives that universal aspect. So the assessor and attributor of actions applies quite different standards to his own activities than he does to those of the ones he assesses. This is an asymmetrical recognitive relation.

II. Confession

The first step toward a symmetrical, genuinely reciprocal interpersonal recognitive relation is taken by the individual who is judged, who confesses his particularity and the contingency of its attitudes. [PG 666] Confessing is acknowledging and accepting the correctness of the indictment of the niederträchtig judge. It is a speech act, because “language as the existence of Spirit … is self-consciousness existing for others,” [PG 652] “it is the self which as such is actual in language, which declares itself to be the truth, and just by so doing acknowledges all other selves and is acknowledged by them.” [PG 654] The content of the confession is accordingly something like this:

“I confess that my judgments and actions have not been just what I was obliged or permitted (committed or entitled) to do by the norms implicit in the concepts applied therein; they were not simply responses acknowledging the normative necessity embodied in those concepts. They also express, reflect, and are sensitive to my subjective attitudes—the doxastic and practical commitments, the particular contingent course of experience I have undergone, the beliefs that I have contingently acquired and rejected or retained during this historical-experiential process of development, my contingent practical ends, projects, and plans and their evolution—everything that makes me the distinctive individual I am. They are, in the end, my commitments, my attitudes, shot through and through with particularity that is not a mere reflection of the universals I took myself to be applying.”

To say that is to express the structural distinction and disparity that cognition and action involve. That is the distinction between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves. What is confessed is that what things are for consciousness is not just whatever they are in themselves. What things are for me is influenced not only by what they are in themselves, but also by considerations particular to my actual, embodied subjectivity: the residual effects of the contingent trajectory of my training and experience, collateral attitudes, inclinations, concerns, and emphases of attention. Indeed, my decision to apply or not apply a given concept in some actual circumstances can be explained by appeal to such contingencies concerning prior applications of concepts, quite apart from consideration of the true content of the conceptual norm being applied, the norm I in fact bound myself by in the sense that makes it relevant to assessments of correctness and success. On the cognitive side, this is the structural distinction between the Hegelian versions of sense and referent, phenomena and noumena, conception and concept. On the practical side, it is the structural distinction between purpose and achievement.

Making such a confession is identifying with that structural disparity that knowing and acting consciousness involves. For it is sacrificing the claim to entitlement for or justification of the judgment or action by appeal to the content of the conceptual norm being applied. It is identification with one’s own attitudes (particularity), rather than with the normative statuses (individuality) that are adopted in virtue of applying concepts, binding oneself by norms (universals). That universal dimension is no longer acknowledged as being in play—only attitudes. So the confessor, too, adopts a niederträchtig attitude, now toward his own commitments. Like the judge, he “opposes to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality.” Doing that is a step toward the achievement of mutual, symmetrical recognition, because the confession consists in adopting the standards of assessment deployed by the judging consciousness, ceasing to insist on his own. And that means that the same standards are brought to bear by the agent as by the assessor—even though they are niederträchtig ones, basely identifying with the disparity of form that cognition and action involve, rather than nobly identifying with their identity of content.

But there is a residual asymmetry. For if the Kammerdiener’s reductive naturalism is correct, then it applies to the judge too.

Perceiving this identity and giving utterance to it, he confesses this to the other, and equally expects that the other, having in fact put himself on the same level, will also respond in words in which he will give utterance to this identity with him, and expects that this mutual recognition will now exist in fact. [PG 666]

Yet the judge need not (though he ought) acknowledge this identity. He can persist in applying different standards to the concrete actions of others than he does to his own assessments: understanding what they do genealogically, as the result of peculiarities of their particular cognitive-practical experiential trajectory, while understanding his own judgments just as correct applications of universals, whose determinate contents necessitate those applications. The details of his own breakfast, he insists, are irrelevant to his assessment.

The confession of the one who is wicked, “I am so,” is not followed by a reciprocal similar confession. This was not what the judging consciousness meant: quite the contrary. It repels this community of nature, and is the hard heart that is for itself, and which rejects any continuity with the other. [PG 667]

At this stage, the judge in the allegory does not appear as impartially applying universals, simply responding appropriately to their normative demands. What he is doing shows up as adopting a stance, rather than just cognitively apprehending how things objectively are. For he decides to adopt a different stance toward his own sayings and doings than he does to those of others. This is an optional attitude on his part. Further, in “rejecting any continuity with the other” he is adopting a recognitive stance: rejecting an offer of reciprocal recognition. That is a further kind of doing, for which he is responsible. So as the allegorical narrative develops, Hegel is describing a sequence of shifts in ways of understanding what is going on that follows the four meta-metanormative attitudes discussed in the previous section. It follows a trajectory whose endpoints are the two attitudes attributed by James Hogg in his celebrated aphorism: “To the wicked, all things are wicked; but to the just, all things are just and right.”

Hegel says:

As a result, the situation is reversed. The one who made the confession sees himself repulsed, and sees the other to be in the wrong when he refuses to let his own inner being come forth into the outer existence of speech, when the other contrasts the beauty of his own soul with the penitent’s wickedness, yet confronts the confession of the penitent with his own stiff-necked unrepentant character, mutely keeping himself to himself and refusing to throw himself away for someone else. [PG 667]

The hard-hearted judge is doing what he originally indicted the other for. He is letting particularity affect his application of universals: applying different normative standards to doings just because they happen to be his doings. And in doing so, he is producing a recognitive disparity, allowing his particular being-for-self (attachment to his own attitudes) to disrupt the achievement of a community (universal) by reciprocal recognition.

It is thus its own self which hinders that other’s return from the deed into the spiritual existence of speech and into the identity of Spirit, and by this hardness of heart produces the disparity which still exists. [PG 667]

What is normatively called for—in the sense that it would be the explicit acknowledgment (what things are for the judge) of what is implicitly (in itself) going on—is a reciprocal confession. That would be the judge’s recognition of himself in the one who confessed. (As the Firesign Theatre puts it: “We’re all bozos on this bus.”) For “[t]he breaking of the hard heart, and the raising of it to universality, is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness that made confession of itself.” [PG 669] The judge’s acknowledgment that his judgments, too, can be explained as resulting from contingent features of his experience, that everybody is in the same boat in this regard, would be a sacrifice of his particularity—his attachment to his own prior attitude of privileging himself over others in the standards of assessment he applies—that is an identification with and production of a symmetrical recognitive unity or identity, rather than a recognitive disparity. That sacrifice need not be thought of as “throwing himself away for someone else,” but as identification with the universal, rather than the particular aspect of his individuality (the recognized instead of the recognizing aspect).

Reciprocal confession is not yet the achievement of absolute Spirit, [PG 670] “the true, i.e. the self-conscious and existent, equalization of the two sides,” [PG 669] however, so long as what is achieved is just reciprocal Niederträchtigkeit. Having a whole community of knowers and agents symmetrically and even-handedly playing the moral valet to each other—reciprocally confessing the justice of assessments of the sort originally made by the hard-hearted judge—does not yet abolish alienation, but only raises it to the level of universality. For norms are still invisible. And because they are, so are attitudes as normative attitudes. What people are doing is not intelligible as acknowledging and attributing commitments, binding oneself and taking others to be bound by norms. So the reciprocal niederträchtig recognitive attitudes are not intelligible as normative attitudes either, but only as natural states of individuals (inclinations, dispositions), causally brought about by and bringing about other such states. From this point of view, the performances individuals produce cannot properly be seen as intentional doings or claims to knowledge, nor the individuals as agents or knowers, hence not really as self-conscious selves. What they are for themselves is accordingly not yet what they are in themselves.

III. Forgiveness

The stage is set for the transition to the next and final stage in the development of self-conscious Spirit by the judge traversing the four meta-meta-attitudes laid out in the previous chapter:

First, the judge acknowledges that he is adopting a stance, rather than simply acknowledging a fact.
Second, the judge acknowledges that the stance is a recognitive one.
So the judge acknowledges that which stance he adopts produces a community of a certain kind.
Next, the judge must acknowledge that acting and judging (acknowledging and attributing, deliberating and assessing) implicitly presuppose (are intelligible only in the context of) edelmütig recognitive stances.
Finally, the judge must explicitly adopt such a recognitive stance and institute an edelmütig recognitive community.

Edelmütigkeit, generosity or magnanimity, the noble recognitive stance that contrasts with mean-spiritedness or pusillanimity, Niederträchtigkeit, the base recognitive stance, consists in treating oneself and others in practice as adopting normative statuses, rather than just changing natural states. Achieving the kind of self-consciousness that overcomes the alienation distinctive of modernity and moves us decisively into the postmodern phase in the development of Spirit requires first realizing that in taking or treating ourselves and each other as selves, as able to make claims expressing beliefs and pursue plans expressing intentions, we are implicitly adopting edelmütig recognitive attitudes. Then we have to adopt such attitudes explicitly, acknowledging those commitments as governing norms in practice. That requires more than confession, even reciprocal confession. In Hegel’s allegory, what it requires is forgiveness. Hegel introduces this notion in the penultimate paragraph of Spirit:

The forgiveness which it extends to the other is the renunciation of itself, of its unreal essential being which it put on a level with that other which was a real action, and acknowledges that what thought characterized as bad, viz. action, is good; or rather it abandons this distinction of the specific thought and its subjectively determined judgement, just as the other abandons its subjective characterization of action. The word of reconciliation is the objectively existent Spirit, which beholds the pure knowledge of itself qua universal essence, in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself qua absolutely self-contained and exclusive individuality—a reciprocal recognition which is absolute Spirit. [PG 670]

Forgiveness [Verzeihung] is a recognitive attitude that practically acknowledges the complementary contributions of particularity and universality to individuality—both the way the application of the universal raises the particular to the level of the individual and the way application to particulars actualizes the universal in an individual. It is a practical, community-instituting form of self-consciousness that is structured by the metaconceptual categories of Vernunft, rather than Verstand. It is sittlich, rather than alienated, in understanding the complex interdependence of norms (universals, on the side of content; necessity, on the side of force) and attitudes and the process by which together they institute and articulate normative statuses (commitments). It is, in short, what ushers in the form of community Hegel calls “absolute Spirit,” and the form of self-consciousness he calls “Absolute Knowing.” Understanding this is what the whole Phenomenology has been aiming at: “that one far-off divine event, toward which the whole creation moves.”

So what is forgiveness? Forgiving, like confessing, is a speech act, something done in language. It is doing something by saying something. That is why Hegel talks about it in terms of the “word of reconciliation [Versöhnung].” [PG 670] Indeed, all the recognitive relations discussed in the last part of Spirit are linguistic performances—from the distinctive language by which the lacerated consciousness gives utterance to its disrupted state to the warrant of sincerity and conviction that is the core of the conscientious consciousness’s claim to justification for what it does. “Here again, then, we see language as the existence of Spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others.” [PG 652] That forgiveness necessarily takes a linguistic form can tempt one to suppose that it is an easy speech act to perform: that it consists just in saying “I forgive you,” uttering the word of reconciliation. But that cannot be right, given what is at stake here, the weight this concept must bear in Hegel’s project. The form of reciprocal recognition that consists of confession, forgiveness by the judge of the confessor for what is confessed, and confession on the part of the judge is the final form of recognition Hegel envisages. On the practical side it is to be the overcoming of modern alienation, reachieving Sittlichkeit in a higher, self-conscious form. On the cognitive side, it is the social and institutional framework for bringing to bear the metaconceptual categories of Vernunft, and so for achieving the final, adequate form of understanding of the relation between the normative and the natural that Hegel calls “Absolute Knowing.” For a form of words to accomplish that simply by being pronounced, it would have to be a magic formula.

If the speech act of forgiving is not to be construed in this way as the casting of a spell, what one does by producing it must be hard—at least in the sense that one can try to do it and fail. By way of comparison, consider the speech act of demonstrating that some mathematical proposition is true—that is, exhibiting or producing a proof of it. That is doing something (proving a claim) by saying something, but the question of whether the words produced succeed in performing the speech act in question is the topic of serious assessment. Proving something in this sense is hard, even though pronouncing the words is not. We want to know what standards of assessment are appropriate to determine whether the speech act someone performs in response to a confession succeeds in qualifying it as expressing forgiveness for what is confessed.

We can also be confident that the answer is not that what is required is that the words of reconciliation not just be pronounced, but be uttered sincerely, or with the intent of forgiving. That would be applying the metanormative conception of the conscientious consciousness to the present case. As such, it suffers from the same defect. It makes sense only in the context of some independent notion of what forgiveness consists in—what one is intending to be doing by one’s words, what effect is sincerely aimed at. So, for example, if one wants to impose a sincerity condition on what counts as a speech act of assertion, one must couch it in terms of antecedent notions of belief and intention to express one’s belief, rather than in terms of intent to assert (intent to do what, exactly?). What we are looking for is an answer to the question: What is it that one is intending to do in intending to forgive, and what counts as succeeding in carrying out that intention?

The key question we must ask in order to extract the point of the allegory then is: What is it one must do in order to qualify as forgiving an individual for an action—the application of a concept? As a way of thinking about what could count as an answer to this question, think by analogy of the corresponding question asked about another key concept, that of identification. What, we asked, must one do in order to count as identifying with some aspect of what one is for oneself, rather than with something one actually is, in oneself (paradigmatically, with something normative rather than natural, oneself as authoritative and responsible, rather than as alive)? And the answer was: One must be willing to risk and if need be sacrifice the one for the other. Appealing to this model, a more specific way of putting the question before us now is: What is to forgiving as sacrificing for is to identifying with?

Hegel says surprisingly little explicitly about it at this crucial point in the text. After the long passage quoted previously, in which forgiveness is introduced, there is only a single concluding paragraph by way of explanation, and it is the final paragraph of the Spirit chapter. Given the momentous significance of the lesson we are to learn from the parable of confession and judgment, and the breaking of the hard heart in forgiveness and reciprocal confession, the only conclusion to draw from the extreme brevity and concision of Hegel’s discussion of it is that he understands it as having to serve the function only of a template, as providing a framework on which to assemble lessons we have already learned from the developments expounded in the body of the book. All the elements of the resolution of the cognitive, recognitive, and practical problems of modernity that have been expounded in the account of the stages of development of Spirit in this chapter must have been provided in his previous chapters, requiring only to be properly deployed according to the model presented in these final, concluding paragraphs.

IV. Recollection

The most important clues concerning the nature of forgiveness are contained in a few gnomic, aphoristic sentences:

Spirit, in the absolute certainty of itself, is lord and master over every deed and actuality, and can cast them off, and make them as if they had never happened. [PG 667]

The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind. The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes. [PG 669]

The invocation of mastery indicates that the forgiving that accomplishes this healing is the exercise of some sort of constitutive authority: the capacity of making something so by taking it to be so. The “wounds” are the contingent particular attitudes (“the aspect of individuality”) and the errors and failures they bring about (“existent negativity and limitation”), which are confessed. The question is what one must do in order to “cast them off and make them as if they had never happened,” to heal the wounds, “leaving no scars behind,” what the forgiving individual must do in order to count as having successfully exercised that constitutive healing authority.

I think the answer is that forgiveness is a kind of recollection (Erinnerung—cf. [PG 808]). What one must do in order to forgive the confessor for what is confessed is to offer a rational reconstruction of a tradition to which the concept-application (theoretically in judgment or practically in intention) in question belongs, in which it figures as an expressively progressive episode. Telling such a story is a substantive undertaking, one that the magnanimous (edelmütig) would-be forgiving assessor may well not be able to accomplish. Indeed, what the assessor confesses, in his turn, is his subjective inability successfully to forgive everything he is committed to forgiving.

By way of a model, think once again of the situation of the judge at common law, which has been invoked at many points along the way as helpful for understanding Hegel’s views about the development of concepts. The judge is charged with deciding whether a novel set of facts warrants the application of a concept, according to the norm implicit in the tradition of prior applications of it and its inferential relatives that he inherits from previous judges. What a judge who makes such a decision confesses is that his decision could be explained by what he had for breakfast—or, less figuratively, by attitudes of his that are extraneous to the facts at hand and the law he is applying: by features of his training, reading, or mood, by the cases he happens to have adjudicated recently, the political climate, and so on. More generally, he confesses that the Kammerdiener would not be wrong about him, in that his decision to apply or not to apply the universal (concept) to these particulars can be explained by appeal just to factors that are contingent in the sense that they are not acknowledgments of the necessity that is the normative force articulated by the actual content of the concept. He confesses that one need not see his decision as suitably responsive to the content of the norm he is supposed to supply, which is what would justify the decision. For one can instead see it as caused by various extraneous circumstances. The decision is infected with “the aspect of individuality.” (“Particularity” would be a better expression of what Hegel is after here, but he is not as careful in his diction on this point in the Phenomenology as he later will be in the Science of Logic.) For collateral attitudes that just happen to be acknowledgments of commitments by the same individual affect his decision as to whether to apply the concept in each new case. In making such a confession the judge need not admit (and for the confession to be in order it need not be true) that he was not in the new case trying or intending correctly to apply the norm (universal, concept) he inherited. Rather, what is confessed is that the result of doing that expressed what the content of the concept was for him, rather than just what it was in itself, an appearance to him of the reality, rather than the reality itself. What drives a wedge between the two is precisely that his decisions are always in part responsive to contingencies of his particular subjective attitudes, circumstances, and prior experience. It follows that the confession is also an acknowledgment of the necessity and ubiquity of the distinction that consciousness and action involve, the “negativity” that shows up when one finds oneself with incompatible commitments, an acknowledgment that concept application necessarily has the shape of the experience of error and failure (“limitation”).

For a later judge concretely to forgive the earlier judge is to incorporate the decision that was the subject of confession into a retrospective rational reconstruction of the tradition of applying the concept in question, as having precedential significance. Doing that is recharacterizing and re-presenting the content of the concept (what it really is, what it is in itself) as gradually emerging into the daylight of explicitness through a sequence of applications of it to novel cases, each of which reveals some hitherto hidden feature of it, and exhibiting the forgiven judge’s decision as having played that role. From the point of view of such a reconstructive recollection, though the decision might have been caused by contingent subjective attitudes and justificatorily irrelevant circumstances, what was so caused was an application that was both correct and expressively progressive. That is, it was just what was needed for us to find out more about the real content of the concept. The experience of incompatibility is exhibited in its capacity as the engine of conceptual, cognitive, and practical progress, rather than in its capacity as the mark of error and failure.

To say that the forgiving recollection reconstructs the tradition so that the forgiven concept application shows up as a correct application of the concept that is then seen as all along setting the normative standard for such applications does not mean that there is not and can be no residual disparity, according to the forgiving judge, between what things are for the one forgiven and what they are in themselves. Rather, the rational reconstruction focuses on the identity of (Hegelian) reference—the underlying conceptual norm—that is shown to tie the tradition together, rather than the disparity between the elements of the sequence of (Hegelian) senses by which, according to the forgiving Erinnerung, what the concept is in itself is gradually unveiled. This forgiving recognitive (individual-constituting) attitude is not simply the complement of the Kammerdiener’s one-sided, niederträchtig focus on the disparity between the particular and the universal. For the identity of noumenon that is recollectively found to lie behind the sequence of disparate phenomena is not a simple, immediate unity. As was foreshadowed already in the Introduction and emerged in fuller detail by the end of Reason, the very idea of objective reality, what things are in themselves, cannot be understood apart from consideration of the relations between subjective appearances of it, what things are for consciousness, recollectively selected and arranged so as to be visible as phenomena gradually expressing more and more adequately and explicitly the underlying, initially merely implicit noumena. That Hegelian reference is intelligible only in terms of the two-phase process of experience—prospectively in terms of the sequential development of senses, driven by acknowledged incompatibilities of commitments, and retrospectively in terms of the recollective rational reconstruction of that development as expressively progressive—and ensures that the kind of identity that unifies the disparate senses is complex and thoroughly mediated by the relations of incompatibility among them that drive the prospective phase of the process and by the relations of monotonically increasing explicitness that must be found to structure the retrospective phase. The unity of the conception of Ansichsein that emerges from a forgiving recollection of the experience of partial errors and failures is one that incorporates and is articulated by the determinate differences between (what that recollection exhibits as) ways it can show up for consciousness.

The combination of incorrectness and correctness in every judgment, of failure and success in every action is the same one discussed in the treatment of Reason, which was ultimately explicated in terms of Hegelian notions of sense and reference. The disparities of sense, made obtrusive and urgent by the experience of acknowledging incompatible commitments, are what are confessed. The identity of reference underlying those various developing senses is revealed by doing the recollective-reconstructive work that is forgiveness. Consider an example. When Aristotle says that a hand detached from a human is not (is no longer) a human hand, and G. E. Moore says that he has two hands, their conceptions of what a hand is are incorrect. Aristotle thinks that the hand is not controlled by the brain via nerves, because he thinks that the function of the brain is to cool the blood. Moore thinks that his hand is made of Rutherford atoms: tiny solar systems in which spherical electrons with definite boundaries orbit nuclei that are clumps of spherical protons and neutrons. They are both wrong about these things, and so have false conceptions of hands. What hands are for them is not what hands are in themselves. Nothing is or could literally be a hand in the senses they give to the term. (In Aristotle’s case, of course, not “hand,” but “χείρ.”) Their subjective conceptions are not correct expressions of the objective concept, for they do not express what is really incompatible with what, and so what really follows from what. There is a genuine and important sense in which one cannot express truths by applying such defective concept(ion)s. This is the sense in which when Aristotle and Moore say that they have two hands, what they say is false. They do not have two of what they mean by “hand,” nor does or could anyone else. Similarly, on the practical side, one cannot really intend to raise one’s hand, in the senses in which they mean “hand.” This is the (einseitig) sense in which all claims are false and all actions are failures, the sense in which what things are for consciousness is never what they are in themselves. In this sense, every conception will eventually turn out to be inadequate, as evidenced by its correct application (according to the norm determined by the content of the conception) leading to incompatible commitments. Having a conception that, because of contingent causes and particular subjective attitudes of the concept-user, is in this sense false is what the niederträchtig judge correctly accuses agents and knowers of (recognizes them as), and what correctly they confess.

But we have also seen that there is another genuine and important sense in which all claims are true and all actions successful. (Because this sense is compatible with the possibility of “vulgar” error and failure, it would be less misleading given our ordinary usage to say “potentially true and successful.”) For if we focus on what they are talking and thinking about, rather than what they say and think about them—about the referents, rather than the meanings of their terms—then Aristotle and Moore are right that they have two of those, and they were quite capable for most of their lives of raising them. This is the sense of concept, referent, or content that persists through changes in conception, sense, or form. Aristotle and Moore not only succeeded in making true claims and forming successful intentions regarding their hands, in doing so they genuinely were responsive to the underlying concept (which we have a much better handle on—conception expressing—than they do). The distinction between sense and reference equips us to see how that is compatible with their nonetheless systematically misapplying the concept—by, for instance, accepting incorrect inferences to and from it—with having a faulty conception, a conception that we can see retrospectively as infected with the subjective contingency of the experiential trajectory of particular self-conscious individuals and of their times.

We saw that one of the central theses developed in the Consciousness chapters of the Phenomenology concerns the essentially holistic character of the determinate conceptual contents of our cognitive attitudes. Quine, 150 years later—and substantially influenced by the holistic metaphysics of the British Idealists inspired by Hegel, which saw all relations as internal (think of Quine’s remark in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”: “Meaning is what essence becomes when it is detached from the thing and attached to the word”)—similarly espoused a holistic theory of meaning. Wrestling with some of the same issues and difficulties that Hegel had, Quine concludes that talk of truth, or even of content shared sufficiently for agreement and disagreement to be intelligible, requires staying at the level of reference rather than meaning. Of course, where Quine was working with roughly Fregean notions of meaning (sense) and reference, Hegel, as we saw in discussing Reason, is working with his own distinctive notions corresponding to sense and reference. We saw there, too, how the two one-sided views of action and cognition—one seeing all actions as failures and all cognitions as false, the other seeing them all as successes and truths—are partial expressions of, legitimate but incomplete perspectives on, one process.

Forgiving is the recollective labor of finding a concept that is being expressed (now less, now more fully and faithfully) by the conceptions endorsed by those whose judgments and actions are being forgiven. For it to be fully successful, a forgiving recollection must not only exhibit Aristotle and Moore as succeeding in making claims and forming intentions concerning their hands (securing a reference, a noumenon showing up in the phenomena as they grasp them), but also show that in doing so they were doing things that furthered the cause of our finding out more about what hands really are, something that expressively developed our conception of hands, something that moved that subjective conception in the direction of the objective concept (a matter of what really follows from what and what is really incompatible with what). For that is what is required for them to count not only as having subjected themselves to (bound themselves by) the norm, which determines under what circumstances what they say is true and what they do is successful, but also as showing themselves to be sensitive and responsive to that norm, to have been acknowledging its force (necessity).

One might wonder: What sense does it make to talk about “the concept,” or “what really follows from (or is incompatible with) what,” when it is also claimed that no set of determinate concepts (conceptions) can be finally adequate, permanent, or ultimately coherent, in the sense that correct applications of them in empirical / practical situations will never lead to incompatible commitments? The answer is that this is just what the story of the recollective reappropriation of past conceptions, arranging and organizing them into an expressively progressive tradition of applications of a concept that is seen as having been all along already in play as the norm users of that concept were binding themselves by in making judgments and endorsing purposes is meant to explain. This forgiving, retrospective phase of experience is the practical doing that makes sense of the notion of there being some way things are in themselves, of noumena being revealed darkly by the phenomena. It is the making that is a finding. It is the activity that makes intelligible the relation of representation, by exhibiting the evolution of defective senses as the gradual revelation of underlying referents, hence as representings of something represented. Having started with an account of “that”-intentionality (the conceptual contents grasped and applied in judging and acting intentionally) in terms of material incompatibility and inference (determinate negation and mediation), Hegel uses the notion of recollection to extract from the way conceptions change in response to the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments an account of the representational dimension implicit in those conceptual contents—that is, of “of”-intentionality.

Within each necessarily triumphalist forgiving recollective story, some late-coming sense or conception plays the role of the reference or concept: a way things can be for consciousness that is also the way they are in themselves. But no such story is final. None anoints as concepts conceptions whose correct (according to the norms they are taken to embody by their users, including the ones producing the retrospective rational reconstruction) application will not lead to incompatible commitments, the experience of error and failure showing the disparity between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, which must be confessed and forgiven anew. Each such story will itself eventually turn out to have crowned a defective conception with the label: what things are in themselves, the real concepts. The sense in which there is and can be no finally adequate set of determinate concepts (or conceptions) is visible prospectively, in the space between recollections, in the need of each forgiving judge himself to be forgiven in turn. It is this difference of perspective—retrospective and prospective, within recollections and between them—that makes it possible to say both of the concept application of the one who confesses that he did not get things right, that what things were for him is not what they are in themselves and that from a complementary, equally valid point of view, there is no such thing as getting things (stably, permanently, finally) right. The process of experience is making judgments and performing actions, finding oneself with incompatible commitments, and recollectively making sense of that by finding a new, better candidate for the concept that has all along been implicitly governing one’s judging and acting. All these phases and aspects are equally essential and ultimately intelligible only in terms of one another.

The unity that the imputation of a referent (a concept articulating the content of a belief or intention) brings to a sequence of senses is a higher unity, in Hegel’s sense, because it incorporates and is built out of the determinate differences and material incompatibilities between the senses that it exhibits as different forms in which that content is expressed. Recollection is from one perspective the production and from another the revelation of that unity. Forgiving presupposes something to forgive, something confessed: the disparity of sense and reference, conception and concept. Forgiving is, in Hegel’s image, the healing of a wound. So there must be a wound first, which is only afterward, through successful recollective rational reconstruction, made as if it had never occurred. Forgiving overcomes the disparity that is confessed, achieving a new unity that includes and presupposes the disparity, as part of its internal structure—revealing what is confessed as a retrospectively necessary phase of the process of more adequately expressing the concept now seen to have been all along setting the standard for assessing the correctness and success of cognitive and practical commitments.

Characterizing recollecting as forgiving emphasizes that it is not only a cognitive and practical enterprise—reconstruing judgments and actions—but also the adoption of a recognitive stance toward the ones whose judgments and actions are so construed. As a recognitive relation, the edelmütig stance is an identification with that higher unity. By contrast, the niederträchtig stance is identification with the moment of disparity that consciousness and agency necessarily involve: the collision of incompatible commitments that eventually shows the inadequacy of each set of cognitive and practical commitments and the conceptions that articulate them. Speaking of the relation between the individual who confesses and the individual who forgives, Hegel says:

But just as the former has to surrender its one-sided, unacknowledged existence of its particular being-for-self, so too must this other set aside its one-sided, unacknowledged judgement. And just as the former exhibits the power of Spirit over its actual existence, so does this other exhibit the power of Spirit over its determinate concept [seinen bestimmten Begriff].² [PG 669]

What is “surrendered” or “set aside” is sacrificed. What the one who confesses gives up is his “particular being for self,” his “actual existence.” That is to say that he ceases to assert the authority of his actual attitudes, acknowledging that he has bound himself by an objective conceptual norm that differs from his subjective conception of it. For that authority was not recognized or acknowledged [nicht annerkanntes]. What the judge relinquishes is his insistence on the authority of his hard-hearted assessment, which, as a one-sided assertion of disparity was also not reciprocally acknowledged. Sacrificing the authority of these one-sided, subjective attitudes—what things are for one—is identifying with what one has sacrificed for: what things are in themselves, the content that unifies the disparate forms in which it was expressed (showed up for individual consciousnesses). Both sides acknowledge that what recollectively shows up as what was really being talked or thought about (the objective concept) has authority over their attitudes and applications of the concept (subjective conceptions). Unlike the attitudes that each sacrifices, this authority is acknowledged by both. Recognition as confession and forgiveness is reciprocal.

The one who confesses “exhibits the power of Spirit over its actual existence” by acknowledging that in adopting particular attitudes—contingent and explicable by causes or nonnormatively characterizable impulses and motives though they may be—he has nonetheless succeeded in binding himself by (making himself responsible to) objective conceptual norms, and so instituted normative statuses (undertaken commitments, both cognitive and practical, by applying those norms) whose content outruns his subjective conceptions of them. The forgiving judge “exhibits the power of Spirit over its determinate concept” by recollectively reconstruing the content of that concept, so as to show it as authoritative over subjective conceptions and attitudes. Magnanimous forgiving recollection is the exercise of the power of Spirit over the determinate concept. Hegel summarizes, in the penultimate paragraph of Spirit:

The forgiveness which it extends to the other is the renunciation of itself, of its unreal essential being which it put on a level with that other which was a real action, and acknowledges that what thought characterized as bad, viz. action, is good; or rather it abandons this distinction of the specific thought and its subjectively determined judgement, just as the other abandons its subjective characterization of action. The word of reconciliation is the objectively existent Spirit, which beholds the pure knowledge of itself qua universal essence, in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself qua absolutely self-contained and exclusive individuality—a reciprocal recognition which is absolute Spirit. [PG 670]

Forgiveness is a “renunciation” of the previous identification of the hard-hearted judge with the disparity between his “subjectively determined judgment” [fürsichseiendes bestimmendes Urteil] and the “determinate thought [bestimmten Gedanken]—that is, of the distinction between what things are for the judge and what they are in themselves, the subjective conception or attitude and the objective concept or thought. Through forgiveness—the “word of reconciliation,” which is not just saying that the other is forgiven, but actually going through the recollective labor of making it so—the judge brings about the unity that he identifies with. On the cognitive and practical dimensions of activity it is the unity of actual particularity (the causally explicable and efficacious attitudes and behavior of subjects) and universal essence (the conceptual norms whose application in attitude and act institute normative statuses) visible when what is said and done by subjects is understood as applying, binding themselves by, making themselves responsible to determinately contentful concepts or conceptual norms. On the recognitive dimension, it is the unity of particular, acting subjects and the normative community they synthesize by reciprocal recognition. Explaining forgiveness as recollection displays the fine structure underlying the general claim that recognition serves both as the model of and as the context within which the application of conceptual universals to actual particulars is to be understood.

V. The Conditions of Determinate Contentfulness

What is confessed is that applications of concepts respond to contingent features of subjective conceptions and attitudes, rather than just to the normative necessity determined by the content of the objective concepts. Necessity is infected with contingency. The result of the recollective labor of the recognitively generous forgiver is to give contingency the form of necessity. For the forgiving rational reconstruction is successful just insofar as it exhibits the judgments and actions that resulted from particular contingent circumstances, conceptions, motivations, and attitudes as correct applications of the concepts that were applied, according to the account of the contents of those conceptual norms that the forgiving consciousness supplies. Generously reconstruing the conceptual contents so as to make it the case that, for instance, Aristotle generally succeeded in his intention to raise his hands and knew that lightning could cause fires, and Moore truthfully observed that he had two hands and correctly inferred that they contained electrons, is building some of the contingencies of the actual use of terms into the norms understood as governing their correct use. Hegel’s account of the two phases of experience—the passive finding of oneself with incompatible cognitive or practical commitments, which is the experience of error and failure, of the disparity that consciousness and action involve, and the active remaking of conceptual contents so as to unify a course of experience by recasting it as expressively progressive—specifies a mechanism by which the actual application of terms and the institution of conceptual norms governing such applications reciprocally interact (mediate one another) as aspects of one process, thereby filling in the details in the broadly Quinean framework. In doing that, the story about how generous recollective reconstruals of the content of a concept respond to and incorporate contingent details of actual applications of concepts responds to the worry sketched earlier concerning the threat that the parochiality of conceptual contents (their responsiveness to the vagaries of an individual’s use of terms expressing them) can seem to offer to their normative force: the threat that genealogy offers to justification construed in terms of the semantic categories of Verstand. For from the perspective provided by Hegel’s account of semantic contents as derived not just from the ground-level use of expressions, but also and equally from the recollective reconstruals of that use, far from undercutting the rational, normative force of conceptual norms, the incorporation of contingencies of use in the contents of concepts is of the essence of their determinateness, which is in turn a necessary condition of the intelligibility of that force (the possibility of subjects’ being bound by those norms).

That same model of cognitive and practical experience as a two-stroke engine—in which confession of error or failure is followed by forgiveness through recollective reconstrual, the achievement of an always only temporary conceptual equilibrium that will prove itself, too, to be unstable, to lead to error and failure, repeating the cycle—describes the process, the activity by subjects, that makes intelligible the way the determinate contentfulness of concepts is to be understood according to the categories of Vernunft, which supersedes the Enlightenment’s Verstand conception that Kant still deploys, and which is continued later by Frege. The Verstand version understands empirical and practical concepts as having to be determinate in the sense of having static, stable boundaries, and as standing in fixed, unchangeable inferential and incompatibility relations to other similarly determinate concepts. We saw that Hegel thinks Kant is uncharacteristically uncritical about the presuppositions (conditions of the intelligibility) of taking concepts to be determinate in this sense. This is recognizably a relative of Wittgenstein’s later concerns about common ways of misconstruing what we are doing in using linguistic expressions that make it seem mysterious that prior uses of terms could “lay out rails to infinity” determining the correctness or incorrectness of all possible future applications—for instance, in the way required for notions of mathematical proof to have the normative force we attribute to them. The two-stroke model of experience provides the larger context in which Hegel thinks these traditional conceptions are intelligible. For it is the job of each Whiggish retrospective story to find concepts with contents that are determinate in the Verstand sense. But determinate content in that sense must also be understood as the product of the activity of forgiveness, by which contingencies of the actual application of concepts are incorporated into the contents of our conceptions, so given the form of necessity. Each experience of error or failure, each acknowledgment of commitments incompatible by our own lights, teaches us something about how things really are, about what really follows from and is incompatible with what. Successful recollection incorporates those lessons into the contents of our conceptions: what things are for us, a new candidate for how things are in themselves. Verstand determinateness is a constitutive ideal of cognition and agency. Commitment to finding conceptual contents that are determinate in this sense is an essential element of concept use, so of the intelligibility of consciousness in both its theoretical and practical dimensions. But it is only one aspect of the process of determining conceptual contents, which is incorporating the contingent particularity of actual episodes of concept application into the contents of the universals whose application has the normative force of necessity—the authority by which we bind ourselves, make ourselves responsible to, by applying them.

Forgiveness is the process by which immediacy is mediated, by which the stubborn recalcitrance of reality is given conceptual shape, acknowledged in what things are for consciousness. The semantic holism consequent upon understanding conceptual content in the first place in terms of relations of material incompatibility (determinate negation), and hence material inference (mediation) among such contents means that getting one determinate concept right requires getting them all right. And the interdependence of what follows from and is incompatible with what, on the one hand, and what we take to be true, how we take things to be, in themselves, on the other, means that rectifying our concepts and rectifying our beliefs and judgments are complementary aspects of one enterprise, neither completable apart from the other. In the conceptual setting provided by those overarching semantic commitments, the inexhaustibility of immediacy entails the ultimate instability of any set of Verstand-determinate empirically-and-practically contentful concepts. No matter how much we have studied the matter, there will always be a course of possible experience that would result in someone’s being in the same position with respect to our concept of hands that we are with respect to Aristotle’s or Moore’s. But the notion of there being a way things determinately are, in themselves—that is, independently of what they are for us, indeed, in which how things are for us is on the contrary dependent on how they are in themselves, in the sense that the latter is authoritative for, sets normative standards for, the former—is, Hegel thinks, an essential structural element of the concept of theoretical and practical consciousness. Apart from the idea that our conceptually articulated attitudes are about something (represent something) in the normative sense of having made ourselves responsible to it, that it settles what we have made ourselves responsible for, the actual content of the normative status we have undertaken, what we have bound ourselves by, we cannot make the concepts of consciousness and action intelligible. Any adequate account of the determinate contentfulness of thought must make sense of the realistic, representational dimension of intentionality. The two-phase model of finding referents retrospectively, within each recollective story, and making new senses prospectively by coming up with such stories in response to the felt and acknowledged inadequacy of the previous ones, is Hegel’s account of how these two demands on the notion of determinate conceptual content can both be satisfied. The Verstand conception of determinate conceptual contentfulness is important, and it is right as far as it goes. But it is one-sided and incomplete, leaving out elements of the larger context that are essential to its intelligibility.

What the Verstand version of the determinateness of concepts leaves out is the crucial contribution made by the cycle of confession (the acknowledgment of error and failure, of the distinction that cognition and agency involve, between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness), forgiveness (recasting the previous actual applications of concepts so as to exhibit them as a cumulative, expressively progressive revelation of the contents of Verstand-determinate concepts that show up as having been always already all along the ones knowers and agents were binding themselves by), and confession of the ultimate inadequacy of that forgiveness (the residual difference between what things are for that forgiving consciousness and what they will turn out to be in themselves). On Hegel’s picture, then, a proper understanding of the nature and origin of the determinateness of thought—of the conditions of both its intelligibility and its actuality—requires acknowledging the crucial role played by edelmütig attitudes of confession and forgiveness. Adequate semantic self-consciousness, articulated by the holistic, pragmatic metaconcepts of Vernunft rather than the one-sided metaconcepts of Verstand, is accordingly intimately bound up with the final form of reciprocal recognition described at the end of Spirit. (Of course, that there are intimate connections between forms of self-consciousness and forms of recognition is a central Hegelian theme, which has been with us since it was introduced in Self-Consciousness. So the only surprise here lies in the details of these culminating forms of each.) In particular, once one understands what it is for thought to be determinately contentful, one sees that in taking or treating one’s judgments and intentions as having such contents one is implicitly committed to adopting generous, forgiving, edelmütig attitudes toward one’s own and others’ commitments. For only such attitudes can make or find (we now see that these are not exclusive alternatives, but different perspectives on one activity, seen now from the point of view of senses, now from the point of view of referents) determinate conceptual contents.

Recall the four meta-meta-attitudes to the two normative meta-attitudes of Niederträchtigkeit and Edelmütigkeit discussed at the end of the previous chapter. The first way of understanding them was objectivist and cognitivist: there is a fact of the matter about whether or not there really are norms over and above the causes of behavior, the impulses and attitudes of individuals, and one or the other parties is right about that matter of fact and the other is wrong. The second approach saw them as optional, equally available and potentially valid, still broadly cognitive, stances or vocabularies one could choose to adopt or employ. The third takes them to be practical recognitive attitudes, which institute different kinds of communities and self-conscious individual selves, but which are still both in principle available, with no attitude-independent facts forcing one choice over the other. We are now in a position to put meat on the bones of the fourth alternative. It acknowledges that the attitudes are recognitive ones, hence practical in the sense of making something be so, not just taking it to be so. But it recaptures, at a higher level, versions of the objectivism and cognitivism of the first attitude. There is a kind of fact involved, which one would be ignoring if one adopted the niederträchtig, reductive attitude. That fact is the conceptual fact that determinate conceptual content and Edelmütigkeit in the form of confession and forgiveness are reciprocally sense-dependent concepts. Becoming explicitly aware of this fact is achieving the kind of self-consciousness characterized by sittlich Vernunft rather than alienated Verstand. Realizing it is realizing that in treating one’s own thoughts and intentions as being determinately contentful, as binding one, making oneself representationally responsible to objective things in the sense that only certain ways the world could be would count as making one’s beliefs true and one’s intentions successful, is implicitly committing oneself to understanding oneself in terms of a community whose constitutive recognitive structure is that of reciprocal confession and forgiveness. Commitment to Edelmütigkeit is implicit in being a discursive being. Alienation is having one’s explicitly acknowledged commitments be incompatible with this implicit structural commitment of consciousness and agency.

I take it that this point is the punchline of the Phenomenology, the final lesson he has organized the whole book to teach us: semantic self-consciousness, awareness of the transcendental conditions of the intelligibility of determinately contentful attitudes, of thinking, believing, meaning, or intending anything, consists in explicitly acknowledging an always-already implicit commitment to adopt generous recognitive attitudes of reciprocal confession and recollective forgiveness. For that recognitive structure is the background for cognition and action, the context in which alone they can be made sense of. The two-phase account of experience in terms of error and recollection explains what it is we must do in order thereby to make objective conceptual norms available to bind ourselves by in judgment and action, so as to make the way the world is in itself available as something for our consciousness. Responding to the acknowledgment of error by undertaking the labor of forgiveness of those errors, both others’ and our own, is making conceptual norms have been efficacious with respect to attitudes, which show up in such recollections as both sensitive to and expressive of them. The answer to the challenge of the pusillanimous Kammerdiener—both in the narrower form that eschews explanation in terms of norms and the normative statuses that result from binding ourselves by them in favor of mere attitudes and in the wider, more stringently reductive form that finds no explanatory work for norms to do in a natural world of causes—comes in three parts. The first part is the account of recollective forgiveness as the practical-recognitive process that reveals (and in terms of which alone we can make sense of the very idea of) both objective conceptual norms and (thereby) what things are in themselves, and shows why and in what sense these two notions form an indissoluble package. The second part is the presentation of a new conception (articulated by the holistic, developmental categories of Vernunft rather than the atomistic, static ones of Verstand) of what the determinateness of conceptual contents consists in. According to it, it is the exercise of generous recollection that at each stage incorporates more of how things are in themselves into how they are for consciousness (because such rational reconstructions must be expressively progressive), gives contingent features of attitudes actually adopted the form of necessity in that the contents of the norms discerned are sensitive to the details of the circumstances under which terms expressing them are actually used, and mediates (making explicit as features of conceptual contents) the immediacies whose stubborn eruption in noninferential observation reports is what ultimately obliges knowers and agents to acknowledge their error and failure (the confession that calls for forgiveness). The third part is then the observation that because it is only insofar as we adopt generous recollective recognitive attitudes (part one) that our thought has determinate conceptual content (part two), therefore in treating ourselves in practice as undertaking determinately contentful cognitive and practical commitments (having beliefs and intentions that are true or fulfilled in some potential novel circumstances, and not others), we are implicitly committing ourselves to adopt that sort of recognitive attitude, to take part in that sort of recognitive community, to be the sort of individual self whose self-consciousness is articulated by that kind of social recognitive relation.

The basic form of this argument is both simple and familiar. Against the background of an understanding of discursivity and intentionality that sees it as consisting in the capacity to bind oneself by conceptual norms (which Hegel adapts from Kant by transposing the operative notion of normativity into a social key via his account of recognition), any subject holding a theory that denies the existence or intelligibility of conceptual norms and normative statuses, of discursive authority and responsibility, whether in favor of the inclinations and attitudes of individuals, or of some other range of natural causes, must stand condemned of being unable in the end to make sense of his own cognitive and practical activity, including what he is doing in putting forward such a theory. He is enacting what Karl-Otto Apel would call a “pragmatic contradiction”—what Hegel thinks of as a failure of self-consciousness, in that what he is in himself, what he is actually doing, is not expressed in what he is for himself. What he implicitly commits himself to by what he does is not what he explicitly acknowledges. The contents of the status and of the attitude are incompatible with one another. Their structure ensures that arguments of this form will be only as good as the understanding of conceptually articulated activity on which they are premised. (After all, according to a theory that takes the capacity of intentional states to represent states of affairs outside themselves to presuppose the existence of God—a venerable line of thought, which appears in various forms in various places in the work of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Berkeley—so much as entertaining atheistic hypotheses entangles one in this sort of difficulty.) Hegel’s distinctive philosophical contribution seems to me to lie precisely in the details of his pragmatist semantic theory: in his account of the nature of normativity, of conceptual content, and of their relation to the activities of individuals and the kinds of recognitive relations that structure their communities.

Determinately contentful concepts have been in play throughout the history of Spirit, because not only the acknowledgment of error and failure but also the recollective rational reconstrual of conceptual contents that is forgiveness has been ubiquitous. Both are essential phases of our actual experience. At ground level, we really do perform the generous recollective labor on our ordinary empirical and practical concepts (including theoretical ones) that is characteristic both of the judges at common law we have taken as a model, and of the forgiving judge whose hard heart has been broken in Hegel’s own jurisprudential parable. This is an empirical, descriptive claim. And on the normative side, we have seen that Hegel thinks that as geistig beings (that is, as concept users) we are all always already implicitly committed to adopting semantically magnanimous attitudes toward each others’ uses of concepts in forming actual beliefs and intentions. The new step required to move decisively beyond the alienation that is a structural characteristic of modern individual self-consciousnesses and their recognitive communities alike is explicitly to acknowledge and embrace both the fact and the commitment by theoretically and practically structuring our recognition, and hence our cognition and action, according to the meta-metaconceptual concepts of Vernunft rather than those of Verstand. It is relatively clear what it is to understand things theoretically in terms of Vernunft: we must embrace the account of concepts, norms, and selves that Hegel has been developing throughout the book. But what of the practical side of instituting the new kind of recognition (hence normative statuses and selves)?

We can be sure on general grounds that the kind of recognition that moves us beyond alienation must be reciprocal and symmetrical. Recollection, however, is at base an asymmetrical relation, because it incorporates a temporal relation in which the recollecting comes essentially later than what is recollected. Just so, forgiveness is essentially a later phase in a sequence. In the parable, that is the sequence: crime, confession, forgiveness. Indeed, lining up these temporal-developmental dimensions is one of the motors of the reading of forgiveness as expressively progressive recollective reconstrual of the content of conceptual norms. So: whence the symmetry?

Even though the recollecting event of forgiving must, in the paradigmatic case, come later than the recollected event forgiven, forgiving as a recognitive relation between agents could still be symmetrical and reciprocal. You and I might simultaneously forgive each other’s earlier confessed transgressions. As William Blake has it: “Through all eternity, / I forgive you, and you forgive me.” But we have seen that recognition need not be synchronic in order to be symmetrical. A conceptual tradition can exhibit a symmetrical recognitive structure of reciprocal authority and responsibility diachronically too. In our model of judges determining conceptual contents by developing case law, the present judge exercises authority over past applications of a legal concept, assessing their correctness by accepting (or rejecting) them as precedential, which is acknowledging them as having genuine normative authority over future applications. Finding a way to construe the conceptual content in such a way that an earlier ruling—even one that can be explained perfectly well by what the judge had for breakfast—is displayed both as correct according to the binding norm the earlier judge inherited and as revelatory of some hitherto obscure aspect of the concept is the paradigm of a forgiving recollection and magnanimous specific recognition. But that authority of the present judge to recognize is balanced by her responsibility to the past. For her entitlement to that authority derives wholly from her claim to be not innovating (clothing contingencies of her own attitudes in the guise of necessity), but only applying the conceptual norms she has inherited. The quality of her recollective rational reconstrual of the tradition is the only warrant for the authority she claims for her own assessments and applications of the concept. And that responsibility of the present judge to the past—to the actual content of the concept in question—is administered by future judges, who will assess in turn the precedential authority of the present judge’s construal of precedent, in terms of its fidelity to the content they recollectively discern as having been all along implicitly setting the standards of correctness of applications and assessments of applications of the concept. So the recognitive authority of the present judge with respect to past judges is conditioned on its recognition in turn by future ones. This diachronic, historical structure of reciprocal recognition, I have been claiming, is the central element in Hegel’s semantic account of conceptual content, of the relations between phenomena and noumena, what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, sense and reference, representing and represented, subjective attitude and objective conceptual norm.

The reciprocal recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness is of this diachronic, historical type. When concept users have fully achieved the sort of semantic self-consciousness that Hegel gives us the metaconcepts for (the philosophical categories of Vernunft), we will each confess that our applications of concepts and assessments of such applications are no doubt influenced by contingencies of our collateral subjective attitudes and stray causal factors of which we are not aware or not in intentional control. (“No doubt,” “not aware,” and “not in … control” because any specific such influences of which we are aware and have control over we are obliged to take account of, altering our particular applications of concepts in belief and intention accordingly.) And we will each acknowledge our (edelmütig) commitment to find ways concretely and specifically to forgive in the judgments and actions of others what first shows up as the confessed disparity between what things are for those concept-users and what they are in themselves—ways to display their applications of concepts as precedential. This is acknowledging commitment to a new kind of specific recognition of others, which is what the new kind of general recognition consists in. And we will also confess that this recognitive commitment, too, exhibits the disparity that consciousness and action involve: the disparity between what we are committed to do and what we actually do. That is, we confess that we have not succeeded in fulfilling this recognitive commitment. We are not capable of retrospectively bringing about the unity of norm and actual performance in each case we are committed to forgive. Our recollective reconstrual of the contents of the concepts involved inevitably fails to exhibit every use as correct and expressively progressive. We confess that though our generous, forgiving recollective recognitive spirit is willing, our flesh is weak. We have not fully healed the wounds of the Spirit, have not made the aspect of particularity present in every actuality wholly vanish, have not made the disparity of all the deeds as if it had never happened.

Those confessions, both of residual ground-level disparity of norm and actual attitude and of the higher-level recognitive failures adequately and completely concretely to forgive the confessed failures of others, are themselves petitions for recognition in the form of forgiveness. The focus of the parable of the hard-hearted judge and the breaking of his hard heart, with which Hegel closes Spirit, is the normative expectation on the part of the one who confesses of forgiveness from those who judge him. Confession is not just a petition for recognition as forgiveness, it is the assertion of a right to recognition through forgiveness. It creates a responsibility to treat the one who confesses generously, and not meanly, not to play the moral valet. This is the responsibility to reciprocate recognition. By using forgiveness as the axis around which revolves the parable he uses to introduce the final form of reciprocal recognition, Hegel is intentionally invoking the central concept of Christianity, and depending on its epitome in the petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (That is the King James version.³ Luther’s rendering of this part of the Unservater is “vergib uns unsere Schuld, wie auch wir vergeben unseren Schuldigern.” Perhaps the sense of obligation, of what is owed, of the failure to fulfill a commitment is clearer with “Schuld.” “Schuld” is also guilt, and crime, in the sense of what is confessed—cf. Schuld und Sühne, crime and punishment in the form of sin and atonement. The proper English translation has always been a point of contention between religious confessions, with “trespasses” and “those who trespass against us,” and “sins” and “those who sin against us” being popular alternatives to “debts” and “debtors.”)

VI. Trust and Magnanimous Agency

Confession and forgiveness are both at base performances that express backward-looking attitudes. Hegel’s telling of his parable of recognition does not include an explicit term for the forward-looking attitude that is the recognitive petition for forgiveness, with its attendant institution of a corresponding recognitive obligation to forgive on the part of those to whom it is addressed. I use the term “trust” for that purpose. In confessing, one not only expresses retrospective acknowledgment of the residual disparity in one’s beliefs and actions between what things are in themselves and what they are for one, between norm and subjective attitude; one also expresses prospective trust in others to find ways of forgiving that disparity, forging / finding a unity of referent behind the disparity of sense, healing the wound. Such trust is an acknowledgment of dependence on others for recognition in the form of forgiveness. “Dependence” here is used in Hegel’s normative sense. What is acknowledged is the recognitive authority of those on whom one depends for forgiveness. And what depends on the forgiveness of those to whom one has confessed is just the authority of one’s own concept applications (about which one confessed)—just as is the case with the precedential authority of an earlier judge’s adjudications in the legal case that is our model. Trusting is both acknowledging the authority of those trusted to forgive and invoking their responsibility to do so. Prospective trust that one will be forgiven for what one confesses is the recognitive attitude complementary to forgiveness. Together these reciprocal practical attitudes produce a community with a symmetrical, edelmütig recognitive structure. The choice of the term “trust” is motivated by Hegel’s use of it [Vertrauen / vertrauen] to describe what was progressive about Faith, in spite of the cognitive errors for which it stands condemned by Enlightenment: the reciprocal recognitive structure of the religious community.

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]

I take it that this describes the recognitive ideal Hegel foreshadowed already when he first introduced the notion of reciprocal recognition in Self-Consciousness:

With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is—this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I.” [PG 177]

The kind of individual self-consciousness and community recognitively synthesized by prospective trust and recollective forgiveness are an “I” and a “we” that are identical in Hegel’s holistic, “speculative” sense: distinct, but mutually presupposing elements whose relations articulate a larger unity, and which are unintelligible apart from the role they play in that whole. This new sort of recognitive structure is unalienated, sittlich, in virtue of the division of normative labor it exhibits between the “I” and the “we.” The mistake characteristic of modernity was the practical conviction that justice could be done to the essential contribution of the actual activities and subjective attitudes of individuals to the institution of normative statuses—their authority over what they are responsible for—only if those individuals are conceived of as wholly independent: as fully and solely authoritative, as constitutively authoritative. Within the confines enforced by the atomistic metaconceptual categories of Verstand, the sense in which what I believe and do is up to me could be acknowledged only by identifying practically just with whatever is entirely up to me. For independence (authority) is so understood as to be incompatible with any and every sort of dependence (corresponding responsibility).

We have followed Hegel’s rehearsal, in the body of the Phenomenology, of how the logic of this defective practical and theoretical conception of the normative statuses of authority and responsibility requires a contraction strategy culminating in the self-conceptions and conceptions of agency epitomized by the honest consciousness and the conscientious consciousness. The only doings for which the former takes responsibility are pure acts of will: what it tries to do. For these are the only ones over which it has total authority—the only things it cannot try to do and fail. And the latter asserts its right to be judged only by whether it has acted according to its conception of duty, insisting that what it is responsible for is restricted to what it takes itself to be responsible for. The alienation they express of the actual from the normative—their failure to make sense of the reciprocal effects of the norms on actual attitudes (when we bind ourselves by conceptual norms in judging and acting), and of actual attitudes on the norms (when the contents expressed by our words depend on how we use those words)—makes the ideas of knowing how things really are, acting so as to change how things really are, and so much as being able to entertain determinately contentful thoughts equally and in principle unintelligible.

By contrast, forgiveness and trust embody an expansion strategy, by which self-conscious individuals identify with actual goings-on over which they exert some real, but always only partial authority, identify themselves as the seats of responsibilities that outrun their own capacity to fulfill. Confession of the need for forgiveness and trust that it will be forthcoming both acknowledge the sense in which others are in a distinctive way also responsible for what I have done. For the eventual significance of my performance, the content of the commitment I have adopted, practically as intention or cognitively as belief, is now left in their care. In one sense, I as agent am responsible for what are in the ordinary sense my doings. For it is my adoption of an attitude, my endorsement of a purpose (Vorsatz) that opens the process that proceeds and develops therefrom to normative assessment in the first place. I must play the counter in the game for a move to have been made. But then, in another sense—visible from the point of view of Vernunft as a complementary sense—my fellow community members, those whom I recognize in the sense of trusting them to forgive my performance, are responsible for finding a way to make it have been a successful application of the concept expressed by the counter I played. That is, they are responsible for the imputation of an intention (Absicht) that can be seen retrospectively as having been carried out as the sequence of consequential specifications of the doing unfolds. That intention sets the normative standard for the success of the action and, as the content expressed by the purpose that is the actually efficacious attitude, is construed as guiding the process that is the execution of the plan. Concretely forgiving the action is finding a way to reconstrue the content of the concept applied in the Vorsatz so that the resulting Absicht turns out to be successful.

So the explicit acknowledgment of this sharing of responsibility for what is done between the confessing and trusting agent and the forgiving community expresses an expanded practical conception of how happenings qualify as doings. The unity of actions (what defines their identity) that both the agent who trusts and the community that forgives identify with and produce by adopting these reciprocal recognitive stances (relinquishing claims to merely particular subjective authority not balanced by a correlative responsibility) is a complex, internally articulated unity that comprises both aspects of the disparity that action involves. For it combines as essential, mutually presupposing aspects the action as something that qualifies as such only because it has both specifications under which it is intentional and consequential specifications in terms of actual effects that unroll unforeseeably to the infinite horizon. Both the prospective exercise of authority by the agent and the retrospective exercise of authority by the forgiving community are required to bring about this unity: to make what happens into something done.

Recall the immediate version of what by now has developed into an intricately mediated performance of concrete forgiving, introduced by Hegel in the opening movement of Spirit in the allegory in which something that naturally happens, death, is made into something done, the affirmation and development of a normative status of family membership, by burial. Up to this point, I have emphasized the cognitive, retrospective character of the exercise of authority through forgiveness: the sense in which generous recollection is a necessary condition of the intelligibility of determinately contentful, objective concepts articulating how the things that are something for us are in themselves (that is, of the idea that there is some determinate way things objectively are, which we are trying to find out). This dimension is absolutely crucial for understanding the deep conceptual connection between the intersubjective process of recognition as forgiving recollection (an exercise of authority on the part of those in whom conceptual trust is placed), on the one hand, and objectivity and actuality, on the other. But invoking the practical recollective work that is the recovery of an intention as a concept-application that unifies the purposive and consequential aspects of action points to the way in which forgiveness on the practical side can be not only retrospective, in reconstruing what is taken to be the objective content of the concept toward which a practical attitude is adopted in endorsing a purpose, but also retroactive.

For the consequential specifications of a doing are not something simply given, available only for theoretical reinterpretation. Concrete practical forgiveness involves doing things to change what the consequences of the act turn out to be. For example, one might trust one’s successors to make it the case that one’s inadvertent revelation, one’s sacrifice, or the decision to go to war was worthwhile, because of what it eventually led to—because of what we made of it by doing things differently afterward. Something I have done should not be treated as an error or a crime, as the hard-hearted niederträchtig judge does, because it is not yet settled what I have done. Subsequent actions by others can affect its consequences, and hence the content of what I have done. The hard-hearted judgment wrongly assumes that the action is a finished thing, sitting there fully formed, as a possible object of assessment independent of what is done later. The Kammerdiener’s minifying ascription of the hero’s action to low, self-interested motives rather than acknowledgment of a norm as binding in the situation depends on a defective atomistic conception of what an intention is. Recall the model of agency discussed in connection with the Reason section. Whether any particular event that occurs consequentially downstream from the adoption of a practical attitude (Vorsatz) makes an expressively progressive contribution to the fulfillment of an intention depends on its role in the development of a retrospectively imputed plan. And the role of a given event in the evolving plan depends on what else happens.

As new consequences occur, the plan is altered, and with it the status of the earlier event as aiding in the successful execution of the plan. That status can be altered by other doings, which, in the context of the earlier one, open up some new practical possibilities and close others off. The significance of one event is never fully and finally settled. It is always open to influence by later events. The magnanimous commitment to concrete practical forgiveness is a commitment to act so as to make the act forgiven have been correct as the acknowledgment of the norm that can now be imputed as the content of the governing intention. In a community with the recognitive structure of trust and forgiveness, there is a real sense in which everything is done by everyone. For everyone takes responsibility for what each one does, and each takes responsibility for what everyone does. This is what I meant by talking about an “expansion strategy” for edelmütig self-consciousness, by contrast to the “contraction strategy” of alienated self-consciousness. The conception of the agent in the sense of the doer who is responsible for what is done is expanded so that the self-conscious individual is just one element in a larger constellation including those he recognizes through trust and who recognize him through forgiveness.

The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes. The self that carries out the action, the form of its act, is only a moment of the whole. [PG 669]

In the sphere of agency, the modern rise of subjectivity takes the form of the assertion of what Hegel calls the “rights of intention and knowledge.” These are the rights of the individual self-consciousness to be held responsible for what it does only under the specifications under which it was intentional, together with consequential specifications it could foresee. This modern notion of agency contrasted with the heroic conception of agency characteristic of traditional, premodern practical self-consciousness. On that conception, the individual agent was responsible for what is done under all of its specifications, whether intended or envisaged or not. (“I do what happens.”) As we have seen, Hegel’s emblematic example is Oedipus, who is held responsible (and holds himself responsible) for committing the crimes of killing his father and marrying his mother, in spite of not having intended to do anything under those descriptions, and having no way of knowing that what he intended under other descriptions would have those consequences. Those facts do not excuse or exculpate him. They merely illustrate the tragic character of heroically taking responsibility for what one does in this extensive sense: that we do not and cannot know what we are doing, that any action opens us up to the vagaries of fate. (“The stone belongs to the devil when it leaves the hand that threw it.”)

Hegel is clear that modernity’s acknowledgment of the rights of intention and knowledge is expressively progressive. But by itself it leaves us alienated from our doings, unable satisfactorily to unify the various aspects of agency: the normative and the actual, the intentional and the consequential. Working within the categories of independence, of Verstand, the modern view can attribute genuine responsibility only where the authority of the agent is complete. The result is the contraction strategy, where our doings are contracted to mere willings. What was lost is what the heroic conception of agency had right: the kind of responsibility that extends to our doings under all their specifications, including consequential ones that were not explicitly envisaged or endorsed. The normative status one enters into by acting—what the agent makes herself responsible for, what she has committed herself to—outruns the subjective attitude in virtue of which it is her doing. The traditional view is wrong in not acknowledging the sense in which the agent’s responsibility is limited by the rights of intention and knowledge. The modern view is wrong in thinking that there is no responsibility for what was not part of the individual’s purpose or knowledge. The recognitive structure of trust and forgiveness, in virtue of its division of normative labor, its sharing of responsibility between agent and community, incorporates versions of both the individual rights of intention and knowledge characteristic of modernity and the heroic conception of agency characteristic of traditional society. The agent and the community together are responsible for the action under all its specifications. The rights of intention and knowledge mark the sense in which the doing is the agent’s doing, expressing the fact that it is the attitudes of individual agents that are the source of actualizing any norm, adopting any normative status. But what the agent has done—the content of the status entered into—is not understood as restricted by what is explicit in those attitudes.

This third view would just be the traditional heroic conception of agency, except that the fact that what the agent has done is understood not just as having made her responsible for the doing, but as having made us all responsible for it (has imposed a responsibility concretely and practically to forgive it) means that the reachievement of the heroic conception now takes a higher form. That higher form does not essentially involve the tragedy that is a confrontation with an alien destiny. Though the agent cannot know what she does, others are committed to and responsible for its not turning out to be a crime. She trusts that they will forgive, will exercise their power to heal the wounds of the Spirit inflicted by the stubborn recalcitrance of cause, contingency, actuality, immediacy, and particularity, by giving it the form of the conceptual, necessity, normativity, mediation, and universality. Heroism is the genuine bindingness of norms on actuality: the agent’s being genuinely (but not wholly independently) authoritative over and responsible for what actually happens. The sharing of responsibility between the confessing and trusting knower-and-agent and forgiving and confessing assessors of claims and deeds, which articulates the historical-perspectival (prospective / retrospective) division of normative labor within the magnanimous recognitive community, is what makes subjective attitudes intelligible as the application (binding of oneself by) objective norms, and so as the institution of normative statuses (cognitive and practical commitments) whose contents outrun the subjective conceptions of any of the participants. Through her adoption of attitudes, the application of concepts, hence the acknowledgment of objectively determinately contentful conceptual norms as governing the assessment of the resulting performances, the agent both exercises real (though incomplete) authority over what happens and makes herself (though not herself alone) responsible for what actually happens, under all its specifications, consequential as well as intentional. The sharing of responsibility that is the execution of the expansion strategy is what makes possible heroism (what no man is to his valet) without tragedy.

VII. Hegel’s Recollective Project

This is the final story about the relation of norms to nature, concepts to causes, and statuses to attitudes. Confession, forgiveness, and trust are what we must do, recognitively, in order to find objective, determinately contentful conceptual norms being applied cognitively in judgment and practically in action. Recognition as magnanimous recollection constructs a conception (sense) that purports to express the objective concept (reference) articulating the content of the commitment (normative status) being undertaken in the form of attitudes of belief and intention, so that the former is true and the latter fulfilled. The activity that is in this sense successfully forgiven is exhibited as the conceptualizing of the actual and the actualizing of the conceptual: infusing the normative into the natural so as to make what actually happens subject to normative assessment, and infusing the contingent into the necessary so as to make concepts determinately contentful. This sort of retrospective reconstrual and retroactive recontexting is reason’s march through history, the making that is the finding of reason as active in history. “On him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back,” Hegel says (his Spiegeleier conception of rationality).⁴ What one must be doing in order to be “looking at the world rationally” is recollecting as forgiving: rationally reconstructing a tradition so as to exhibit it as expressively progressive, as the becoming explicit of initially implicit concepts through the endorsement of what turn out to be true claims and successful intentions. This shows our activities to be rational and rationally governed in the sense that they consist in our binding ourselves by and so making ourselves liable to assessments according conceptual norms that set objective standards for correctness (truth and success).

Only as a rationally based succession of phenomena, themselves containing and revealing what reason is, does this history show itself as rational, as a rational event.⁵

We are obliged to see the world through rational eyes, not only because the world then looks rationally back, but because that rational world is the only mirror in which we can see ourselves.

Showing history as rational in this sense, by producing a forgiving recollection, is what Hegel does in his Realphilosophie. In an important sense, these applications are what the metaconcepts of his logic are for. They are the tools he uses to display an expressively progressive developmental trajectory through the vast amount of empirical material he considers in those works. So, for instance, both the Lectures on Aesthetics and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion show how these forms of self-consciousness of Geist evolve ever more adequate expressions of what Geist is in itself. Although both art and religion are doomed to fall short of the fully adequate understanding of Geist that Hegel takes philosophy to be able to achieve (because of the defining role that sensuous concepts play in each of those enterprises), they are shown nonetheless both to have a genuine grip on the truth as more adequately expressed by philosophy and to have a monotonically improving grip on it. I am impressed, too, by the pragmatic and experimental spirit in which Hegel seems to approach these undertakings. Not only do later versions of the religion lectures incorporate further historical facts, as Hegel’s study of the topic progressed, but different strategies are tried out for using the conceptual apparatus of the Logic to organize them into sequences in which what turns out to have been implicit all along is made gradually more explicit. In some versions, the largest progression is mapped onto that from Being, through Essence, to Concept, as in the Science of Logic. But elsewhere roughly the same material is understood in terms of the progression from Ansichsein, through Fürsichsein, to An-und-Fürsichsein. To be sure, there are important relations between these two large structures. But there are also important conceptual differences between them.

As I read him, Hegel was sure that his metaconcepts were the right tools with which to forge a forgiving recollection, to find a rational history, but was much less sure just how to apply them in any particular case so as best to achieve that end. The fact that he tries out different recollective strategies is evidence of just how wrong it is to see Hegel as trying to offer a priori derivations of proprieties governing the application of ground-level empirical concepts from the concepts of his logic. The job of the latter is expressive, to provide an adequate semantic and pragmatic metalanguage. The attempt to find better ways to deploy those expressive resources, so as to achieve better recollections, exhibiting a more rational, more revelatory history, incorporating more of the earlier constellations of concepts and transformations of those constellations as making a progressive expressive contribution is an implicit confession of the only partial success of each particular exercise of generous recollection. Such a confession is an invitation for us who come after him concretely to forgive him for the partial failure of his attempt to forgive, by telling a still better story. He trusts us to continue the conceptually magnanimous recollective-recognitive enterprise.

Much more central to Hegel’s project, however, is fulfilling this obligation of generous recollection to his specifically philosophical predecessors. The Lectures on the History of Philosophy culminates in what he insists is not his system but the system of philosophy that he expounds in the Science of Logic, and applies in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Each prior figure is presented from the point of view of what he understood—what his thought can retrospectively be seen to have revealed about how things actually are, which aspects of the philosophical concepts that articulate his current, adequate self-consciousness are expressed, however darkly, in his conceptions—and how the expressive inadequacies of those views can be seen to have served the progressive purpose of being necessary preconditions of the next stage, providing the experience of error and failure out of which a newer, better conception arises. As Hegel says in the conclusion of his three volumes:

At this point I bring this history of Philosophy to a close. It has been my desire that you should learn from it that the history of philosophy is not a blind collection of fanciful ideas, nor a fortuitous progression. I have rather sought to show the necessary development of the successive philosophies from one another, so that the one of necessity presupposes another preceding it. The general result of the history of Philosophy is this: in the first place, that throughout all time there has been only one Philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the necessary aspects of one principle; in the second place, that the succession of philosophic systems is not due to chance, but represents the necessary succession of stages in the development of this science; in the third place, that the final philosophy of a period is the result of this development, and is truth in the highest form which the self-consciousness of spirit affords of itself. The latest philosophy contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the different stages thereof; it is the product and the result of those that preceded it.… It is my desire that this history of Philosophy should contain for you a summons to grasp the spirit of the time, which is present in us by nature, and—each in his own place—consciously to bring it from its natural condition, i.e. from its lifeless seclusion, into the light of day.⁶

The aspiration is to offer a rational history: a recollective reconstruction in which each element makes an essential contribution to what is finally revealed as implicitly having been the topic all along. The progression is retrospectively necessary. It is not the case that a given stage could have evolved in no other way than as to produce what appears as its successor. Rather, that successor (and ultimately, the final—so far—triumphant, culminating conception) could not have arisen except as a development from the earlier ones. Necessity is always retrospective in Hegel: the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. The passage closes with Hegel’s expression of trust: his summons to the next generation to do for its time what he has done for his: to take on the forgiving recollective labor of explicitation that makes a rational history.

The Phenomenology itself is, of course, an enterprise with just this shape. It, too, takes as its task making it the case that nothing is for nothing, that all things happen for the best: Leibnizian optimism understood as a practical commitment rather than a mere statement of what would be true anyway, without our labor. Each shape of consciousness considered in the first five chapters of that book, each phase of Spirit considered in the sixth, plays an essential expressive role in the expository trajectory that takes us to the final vision of concepts, norms, and selves, each reveals some necessary aspect of how we should understand ourselves. The whole narrative is an extended act of concrete recollective forgiveness. Its target is not all acts of concept application—all judgments and intentional actions. What he is forgiving is, rather, something like all attempts to understand that ground-level discursive activity. What is being forgiven is theoretical and practical ways (both individual and institutional) of understanding ourselves as creatures who bind ourselves by conceptual norms. The meta-metaconceptual view that finally emerges—the account of how commitment to the generous recognitive structure of confession, trust, and recollective forgiveness is implicit in ordinary cognitive and practical activity, a necessary condition of the determinate contentfulness and representational directedness of beliefs and intentions—is put forward not only as the implicit content expressed genuinely but imperfectly and incompletely by each of the inadequate theoretical and practical metaconceptions that finds a place in the body of the narrative, but also, given its specific content, as the explicit articulation of a structural recognitive commitment that is implicit in ordinary, ground-level concept use. The Phenomenology is accordingly a paradigm instance of what it is a theory of: making a tradition have been about something, and have been a gradual but ultimately successful finding out about it. What happens is turned into something done, by the retrospective, retroactive, recollective imputation of what amounts to a unifying unfolding plan-structured intention that can be seen to have been implicit in the various events that are thereby recollected and forgiven.

What the Phenomenology does for our self-understanding as discursive creatures, we should do for it as a text. That forgiving work invites, obliges (“summons”), and trusts us to forgive it: to find a content becoming explicit in it, to discern a governing intention guiding the unfolding of a plan-structured narrative. As was pointed out in discussing Hegel’s conception of intention (“Absicht”), the question of whether Hegel changed his mind halfway through the writing of the Phenomenology (tacking on the long chapter on Spirit even though it was not part of the original plan), is one that should be responded to by recollectively, reconstructively finding a unified and unifying intention. Of course, we may not be able to bring off that concrete labor of forgiveness. But if not, insofar as there are bits of the text that remain indigestible, impossible to assimilate into a suitably expressively progressive recollective rational reconstruction, that is something to be confessed, trusting that those who come afterward will be able better to fulfill that responsibility.

That is what I have been aiming for in this work: to do for Hegel what he did for his predecessors. I have tried to present what I take to be Hegel’s understanding of the nature of concepts, norms, and selves, and the relations among them, to show how each of the strands in the final story emerges from the considerations introduced and developed in the different parts of the book, and how those strands are woven together into an ever richer and more intricate tapestry until the full picture emerges. In constructing and articulating that recollection, I have not hesitated to use vocabulary that is not Hegel’s. That requires forging new inferential links with vocabulary that is Hegel’s, just as he did not hesitate to use his new philosophical vocabulary in expressing and recollectively placing the views of Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. On Hegel’s own semantic views, as here reconstructed, doing that is reconstruing the contents of the concepts, in the sense of offering a new conception, a new way of expressing the very same concept that Hegel was expressing. But that sort of prospective making of a new sense is what retrospective finding of a content (referent) consists in, on his semantic account. Producing a new candidate conception (in this case, a content articulated by new inferential connections, to concepts that the text does not and could not explicitly connect the original to) is one essential aspect of the process of articulating the meaning that the text already really has—in the only sense in which a text has a determinate meaning or expresses a determinate conceptual content. This complex, two-phase account of the recollective kind of making that is the finding of meaning, the determination of content, is offered as a successor to the atomistic Verstand conception of meanings as crystalline, self-contained things (Quine’s “myth of the museum”) that stand there independent of their connection to each other, and as intelligible apart from their involvement in the processes and practices that are the evolving experience of those who use words to express them. (As another later thinker would have it, this is the impossible conception of what sort of thing one would have to add to a signpost, thought of as mere shaped wooden matter, as its significance, under the condition that that significance be intelligible apart from the practices of those to whom it is significant.)

Reasons, in the form of objective conceptual norms, show up retrospectively as acknowledged in the attitudes of practitioners, hence as setting normative standards articulating the contents of the commitments they undertake and the authority they claim, within each generous, forgiving recollection exhibiting a progressive tradition of imperfect, but cumulative, ever more explicit, and ultimately successful expressions of those concepts. Particularity, contingency, and immediacy enter during the prospective phase of experience, making themselves felt as practitioners find themselves falling into error and failure by applying their current conceptions, find themselves with theoretical and practical commitments incompatible by their own lights, which normatively call for the alteration of those conceptions and the reconstrual of that tradition. What is, when it appears, still irrational (the moment of difference), the immediate eruption of causes into the mediating realm of concepts (the exercise by particulars of authority over universals), shows up in the breaks, the ruptures, the caesuras between the Whiggish Erinnerungen. The first is the construction of concepts; the second is the incorporation into them of the initially nonconceptual immediacy and contingency in virtue of which those concepts are determinately contentful. The recognitive cycle of confession, trust, and recollective forgiveness, followed by confession of the inadequacy of that forgiveness and trust in subsequent forgiveness of that failure, is what ties these phases together, articulating the internal fine structure of the relations between the moment of rational unity and the moment of determinate disparity. Under the heading of Vernunft, Hegel is putting forward a new metaphysics of meaning and intentionality, a highly structured story about the pragmatics of semantics: about the sorts of doings that are the necessary background for saying or intending anything determinately contentful, and about the sense in which concepts can be thought of as having determinate contents. That story informs his own practice: the way he thinks about the concepts of science, religion, art, and philosophy, and the phenomena they articulate; his understanding and presentation of the views, accomplishments, and failures of his predecessors; and the shape of his own writings. The generous, forgiving recollective-recognitive hermeneutic attitudes he adopts to his predecessors are an implicit expression of his recognitive attitude of trust in us, his later interpreters. He trusts us to acknowledge and fulfill our obligation to perform the corresponding reconstructive recollective labor of producing what will show up retrospectively as more adequate expressions of the very concepts he developed and deployed.

Hegel’s story about how determinate conceptual content arises out of normative force—what it is by recollecting to take objective conceptual norms to be acknowledged as binding in the attitudes of discursive practitioners, and thereby to make those attitudes properly intelligible as the adoption of normative statuses, the undertaking of commitments and responsibilities that outrun the conceptions of those whose statuses they are—is accordingly supposed to be at once a theory and a fighting faith for the first generation of moderns for whom intellectual history came to seem a central and essential undertaking. It is, remarkably, a semantics that is morally edifying. For properly understanding the conditions of having determinate thoughts and intentions, of binding ourselves by determinately contentful conceptual norms in judgment and action, turns out to commit us to adopting to one another practical recognitive attitudes of a particular kind: forgiveness, confession, and trust. The sort of Hegelian semantic self-consciousness that consists in understanding our discursive activity according to the categories of Vernunft accordingly obliges us to be certain kinds of selves, and to institute certain kinds of communities. In particular, the sort of theoretical understanding he teaches (the explicit acknowledgment of what he shows to be implicit in our discursive practice) obliges us in practice to forgive and trust one another: to be that kind of self and institute that kind of community. Practicing the recollective recognitive hermeneutics of magnanimity is not just one option among others. A proper understanding of ourselves as discursive creatures obliges us to institute a community in which reciprocal recognition takes the form of forgiving recollection: a community bound by and built on trust.

Chapter 16