The previous chapter told a story about how essentially normative Geist can be understood to be rooted in the sort of primitive awareness afforded already to organic creatures in virtue of their nature as desiring beings. It describes how elements of the orectic protoconsciousness with which Hegel begins, when suitably recruited and assembled into social constellations of practical attitudes of desirers toward one another (erotic consciousness), can institute normative statuses of the deontic kind that will serve as the medium of genuine discursive self-consciousness. The result of that discussion is a crude basic model of the normative status of being the subject of both normative statuses and normative attitudes—being a self-conscious self in the normative sense—as instituted by attitudes of robust recognition, when such recognition is reciprocal.

In its broadest outlines, the account Hegel endorses is the result of a progressive trajectory that begins with traditional models of normativity based on asymmetrical social relations of subordination, developing into Kant’s individual autonomy model based on reflexive relations of self-command, and culminating in Hegel’s recognition model based on symmetrical social recognitive attitudes. The traditional subordination-obedience model starts from nonnormatively instituted normative statuses of superiority and subordination. These can be thought of in traditional objective ontological terms, as derived from the metaphysical nature of things (the “Great Chain of Being”), or, digging deeper as Hegel does, as instituted by social power relations rooted ultimately in threats to biological life. In either case, all authority (“independence”) is taken to be on the side of the superior, and all responsibility or obligation (“dependence”) is taken to be on the side of the subordinate. The attitudes appropriate to these statuses are responsibility-instituting commands on the part of the superior and responsibility-acknowledging obedience on the part of the subordinate.

The idea that normative statuses such as responsibility and authority cannot be understood apart from consideration of practical attitudes of taking or treating subjects as responsible and authoritative originates in Pufendorf’s talk of the “imposition” of moral entities by normative attitudes, flowers in the social contract theories of political obligation of Hobbes and Locke, and comes to full fruition in Rousseau and Kant. For Hegel, coming to see the geistig, normative world in which we live and move and have our being as itself the product of our own social practical activity is the defining core of distinctively modern self-consciousness. Though in this respect the founding idea of modernity is decisively progressive, Hegel will insist that in an adequate account, appreciation of the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses must be balanced by appreciation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes.

Another strand of the early modern tradition that Hegel takes up and develops is the disenchanting naturalism about norms that was part and parcel of the idea of their attitude-dependence when that idea took the form of thinking of normative statuses as instituted by normative attitudes. This aspect was perhaps most evident in the British sentimentalists, most prominently Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Butler, and Hume, who give explanatory pride of place to practical attitudes of normative assessment, of reflective approval or disapproval by a distinctive moral faculty, which they see as in turn rooted in a characteristic sentiment, typically of benevolence. Because such attitudes are part of nature, in the form of the natural history of social creatures such as ourselves, so are the normative statuses they institute or project. Crucially for Hegel’s version, a less aggressively modern subjectivist version of this view would have the sentiment-derived practical attitudes as giving us epistemic access to norms, rather than as—or in Hegel’s case, in addition to—serving to bring them into existence.

Hegel’s story begins, as we have seen, in desire. It then passes through matter-of-factual power relations instituting asymmetrical statuses of superior and subordinate (Masters and Servants), and ends with the sort of symmetrical balance of authority and responsibility Kant’s autonomy model aimed at—but transposed into a social key, in the form of normative statuses understood as the products of recognitive practices and the practical attitudes they make possible. Like the later Wittgenstein’s, Hegel’s is a form of what Huw Price calls “subject naturalism,” as opposed to “object naturalism.”¹ That is, it is naturalism about the practices of acknowledging and attributing normative statuses, not an attempt to find such statuses among the furniture of the world describable in the language of Naturwissenschaften rather than Geisteswissenschaften. If we can fully understand in broadly naturalistic terms practices of taking or treating each other as responsible and authoritative, practices of adopting normative attitudes, the view is, there is nothing left to be mystified about regarding the normative statuses we thereby attribute and acknowledge. This theme will be with us throughout the rest of this book, culminating in the discussion of naturalism in Part Three. In the end, Hegel’s account of the social and historical structure of recognition permits him to reconcile the sense in which we (all) make the norms we bequeath and the sense in which we (each) are made by the norms we inherit.

In this social, historical form, the “we” in question is a historically extended community that is both the author and the product of discursive norms. Those norms both are instituted by the attitudes we have actually adopted and transcend those attitudes, providing a standard to which they are answerable. It is in this way that Hegel picks up a further strand of the early modern tradition of theorizing about normativity. This is the perfectionist self-government tradition, running from Montaigne through Descartes and Leibniz, through the Cambridge Platonists and some of their British sentimentalist heirs, culminating in the idea of normativity in terms of autonomy that Kant develops out of Rousseau’s notion of freedom. This is the idea that “[o]bedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”² Kant endorses this thought about freedom, and puts it to a new use: distinguishing normative constraint, characterized by freedom, from nonnormative compulsion. According to this line of thought, one is genuinely normatively bound only by norms one has oneself acknowledged as normatively binding. That makes the status of being a normative subject, being liable to assessment according to norms, an essentially self-conscious achievement. For taking oneself to be normatively bound (adopting such a normative attitude) shows up as an essential component of being normatively bound (having a normative status). And Kant takes over from Rousseau the idea of such self-conscious self-binding by norms as the very form of positive freedom. To be free in Kant’s sense of autonomous is to have the authority to bind oneself, constitutively to make oneself responsible just by taking oneself to be responsible. This coincidence of normativity, self-consciousness, and freedom is the beating heart of German Idealism—what Heidegger meant when he referred to “the dignity and spiritual greatness of German Idealism.” It is of the essence of Hegel’s development of Kant that he takes it that free self-conscious normative subjectivity in this sense is a social achievement, something intelligible in principle only by focusing on the “we” and not just the “I.”

The aim of this chapter is to develop a regimented idiom to explore the normative pragmatics (the theory of what corresponds to Fregean “force”) that the investigation of semantics (the theory of what corresponds to Fregean “content”) in Part One has led us to. In the next chapter this vocabulary is used to read the various allegories of Mastery that Hegel recounts in Self-Consciousness. At the base of the regimented idiom employed here is the distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes. In the idiom of the regimentation, this distinction corresponds to Hegel’s distinction between what consciousness is in itself and what consciousness is for consciousness. Where in the Consciousness chapters we were concerned with conceptions of the objects of consciousness, and so the distinction to consciousness between what things are in themselves and what things are for consciousness, our topic here becomes the subject of consciousness, consciousness itself. And here, too, the “distinction that consciousness essentially involves” is a distinction not only for us (Hegel’s readers, the phenomenological consciousness) but also to consciousness itself.³ It is this distinction between what consciousness is in itself and what it is for consciousness that I will model in terms of the regimented distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes.⁴

Hegel also distinguishes, within the domain of what consciousness is for consciousness, between what a consciousness is for another consciousness and what a consciousness is for itself. So, for instance, what the Master is for the Servant (a different consciousness) can at various points in Hegel’s story be distinguished from what the Master is for himself, and vice versa. This distinction is rendered in the model by distinguishing two sorts of normative attitudes, in terms of the different social perspectives they embody: attributing a normative status (to another) and acknowledging or claiming a normative status (oneself). This additional distinction within the category of normative attitudes is matched in the model by a distinction within the category of normative statuses. This is the distinction between authority and responsibility. It corresponds, according to the interpretation being presented here, to Hegel’s use of the terms “independence” and “dependence” (“Unabhängigkeit” / “Abhängigkeit”) when they are applied to the subjects of consciousness rather than the objects of consciousness.

The structure envisaged is shown in Figure 9.1 (elements of the model are in bold; modeled Hegelian phrases are in quotation marks). So, in the regimented idiom of the model, the paradigmatic normative statuses are identified as responsibility and authority, or commitment and entitlement. The attitudes in question include attributing these statuses to another, and acknowledging or claiming them oneself. This is the idiom, more or less, that I deployed in Making It Explicit, which, while in many ways inspired and informed by Kant’s and Hegel’s views, sought to make a case for the utility of these particular expressive tools without relying on those thinkers’ authority as entitling the use of those concepts. I find this vocabulary equally helpful in articulating their philosophical theories as it is in talking about the fundamental discursive phenomena they were addressing—though some readers will no doubt be reminded of the old saying that to one who has only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

I am claiming that the vocabulary of this regimentation is not far from that Hegel himself uses, however. Although his usage is broader, I understand Hegel’s distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness, when applied to the domain of normativity that is first addressed in the Self-Consciousness chapter, just to be the distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes. And though again his terms have uses outside the realm of normativity, I understand Hegel’s distinction between independence and dependence, when applied to the normative realm, to be essentially that between the normative statuses of authority and responsibility. Thus in the allegory of primitive subordination and obedience, the Master, who exercises authority (over the Servant) without correlative responsibility, is denominated the “independent consciousness” and the Servant, who exhibits responsibility (to the Master) without correlative authority is denominated the “dependent consciousness.” One of the questions at issue in the discussion of their relations is the extent to which the Master’s authority and the Servant’s responsibility, their normative independence and dependence, are features of what they are in themselves or whether they are merely what they are for themselves and each other. That is, a central question is whether their attitudes succeed in instituting genuine normative statuses, or whether the whole story is to be understood at the level of attitudes of attributing and acknowledging such statuses. Hegel’s use of the terms “in itself” and “for another,” and “independence” and “dependence” is broader because besides this deontic normative species of use, pertaining to (self-)conscious subjects, there is also the alethic species of use, pertaining to the objective world. We explored those uses in discussing the chapters on Consciousness. Hegel’s logical use of these terms is both generic across the deontic / alethic distinction between subjective and objective, and is used to discuss the relations between them.

Though the concern of the Self-Consciousness chapter is ultimately with the subjects of normative attitudes and statuses, those attitudes and statuses also have objects. On the side of attitudes, what is attributed or acknowledged is just statuses of authority and responsibility. One normative subject, X, can attribute authority or responsibility to another, Y. X is then the subject of the attitude, the normative status attributed is the object of the attitude, and the subject to whom the status is attributed is the indirect object or target of the attribution. So, for instance, in Hegel’s terminology one consciousness can be independent or dependent not only in itself, but also for itself or for another consciousness. In the case of acknowledgments, the subject and the target are the same—not just de facto, but de jure, as part of what it means for the attitude in question to be acknowledgment. Acknowledgments are to be distinguished from self-attributions, in just the way that essentially indexical uses of first-person pronouns express (they are what David Lewis calls “de se” attitudes), by contrast to forms of contingent self-reference. So attitudes of acknowledging practical commitments can, in the central case, be intentional doings.5 When the object of an acknowledgment is a status of authority rather than responsibility, I will sometimes say that the subject claims the authority, to avoid the awkward appearance that one can make oneself authoritative merely by taking oneself to be—though the corresponding constellation of attitudes and statuses for acknowledgments of responsibility is basically Kant’s autonomy model of the institution of statuses by attitudes.

Normative statuses of authority and responsibility also have both subjects and objects. The subject of the status is the normative subject who is authoritative or responsible. The objects are what the subject has authority over or responsibility for. The topic of the Reason chapter is the central case where it is intentional doings that one has authority or responsibility to perform. Our concern here is rather with the equally fundamental case where what one has the authority or responsibility to do (what one is entitled or committed to do) is adopt normative attitudes of attributing or acknowledging further normative statuses. The fact that the objects of normative attitudes can be normative statuses, and the objects of normative statuses can be normative attitudes, means that complex constellations of basic attitudes and statuses are possible. It is in these terms that I suggest we can understand both the Kantian individualistic autonomy model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes and the Hegelian social recognition model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes, as well as the way in which the latter elaborates and develops the former (the sort of Aufhebung it is).

II. The Kantian Autonomy Model of the Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes

If we start with two basic normative statuses, normative independence and dependence as authority and responsibility, and two basic normative attitudes, attributing responsibility or authority to another and acknowledging or claiming responsibility or authority for oneself, and think about them in the context of the idea that normative statuses might be not just dependent on normative attitudes but instituted by them, then an important compound of statuses and attitudes becomes visible. Kant’s construal of normativity in terms of autonomy is at base the idea that rational beings can make themselves responsible (institute a normative status) just by taking themselves to be responsible (adopting an attitude). His idea (developing Rousseau’s) is that so long as the attribution of responsibility is self-consciously self-directed—that is, so long as it takes the form of acknowledgment of oneself as responsible—it is constitutive, in the sense that adopting that attitude is sufficient, all by itself, to institute the status. To say that it must be “self-consciously self-directed” is to say that it must not only be the case that the attitude is directed toward oneself, but one must know that it is oneself to whom it is directed, for it to be constitutive. What is being excluded here is the case where I attribute a responsibility to myself without knowing that it is myself to whom I am attributing it. Thus I might say “Whoever let the dog get out is responsible for finding him,” without realizing that I am in fact the one who let the dog get out. Using a terminological regimentation suggested by Castañeda, we can say that Kant takes self*-directed attributions of responsibility to be immediately constitutive.⁶

What is it for an attitude of claiming or acknowledging responsibility to be constitutive of the status of responsibility it claims or acknowledges—to institute immediately (that is, all by itself, apart from any other attitudes) that status? As the object of an attitude, as what is acknowledged or attributed, a normative status such as responsibility or authority has a kind of virtual existence. There need not in general be an actual status corresponding to the attitude. One subject might wrongly attribute a responsibility to another, or claim an authority she herself does not in fact possess. There is in principle as big a difference between the standing of statuses that are merely attributed or claimed by normative subjects and those that are actual statuses of the subjects to whom they are attributed or by whom they are claimed as there is between the standing of the objects of propositional attitudes and corresponding facts—between S’s belief or claim that the Cathedral of Learning is 535 feet tall and the fact that the Cathedral of Learning is 535 feet tall. The actuality of the attitude does not by itself guarantee the actuality of the fact (or vice versa).

Kant’s conception of normative subjects as autonomous, as I am reading it, is a conception of them as able to bind themselves normatively by their attitudes, to make themselves responsible (acquire an actual normative status) by taking themselves to be responsible (adopting a normative attitude). In the favored cases, adopting the attitude actualizes the virtual status that is the object of the attitude. The resulting status is not just attitude-dependent (no attitude implies no status) but immediately instituted by the attitudes (attitude implies status). That is what it is to understand the attitude as constitutive. Here we can think of the old story of the stances of the three baseball umpires to the strikes and balls they call in scoring pitches:

First umpire: “I calls ’em like I sees ’em.”

Second umpire: “I calls ’em like they is.”

Third umpire: “Till I calls ’em, they ain’t.”

The first umpire is avowing his aim at correctness, conscientiously matching his attitudes to the actual status of the pitches. The second umpire avows his reliability at so matching attitudes to statuses. The third umpire asserts the authority of his attitudes to institute the statuses that are their objects. He takes his calls to be constitutive of whether the pitches they classify actually are strikes or balls.

Further, being able to adopt such immediately constitutive self*-attributions is itself a normative status. For Kant thinks that rational knowers-and-agents have the authority to adopt immediately constitutive self*-attributions or acknowledgments. To be a discursive being is to have the authority to commit oneself, epistemically in judgment and practically in intention (“adopting a practical maxim”). Both of these are undertakings or acknowledgings of responsibility: committing oneself to how things are or how they shall be. This authority to make oneself responsible just by taking oneself* to be responsible might be called the “basic Kantian normative status” (BKNS). Being a normative subject, for him, is being an autonomous agent-and-knower: one that can be the subject of normative statuses such as responsibility and authority. Furthermore, one is in the end committed to (responsible for) only what one explicitly acknowledges as one’s commitments (responsibilities)—and for commitments that turn out to be implicit in those acknowledgments as consequences or presuppositions of them. It is that authority to make oneself responsible that, according to Kant, other rational beings are obliged to recognize (he says “respect”), as the fundamental dignity of rational knowers-and-agents.

The basic Kantian normative status is a complex, attitude-involving status. For it is the authority (the complex status) to adopt a certain kind of attitude: an immediately status-instituting attitude, what I am calling an “immediately constitutive” attitude. This sort of attitude is an attributing of a status (in the case of the BKNS, exclusively to oneself*) such that adoption of that attitude is sufficient all by itself for the status to be exhibited by the one to whom it is attributed (in the case of the BKNS, so long as that is also the one by whom it is attributed). In Hegel’s terminology, it is a way consciousness can be for a consciousness that is sufficient to determine that that is the way consciousness is in itself. For one’s consciousness to be that way for one’s own consciousness is to be that way in oneself (see Figure 9.2). (It is worth recalling that that is one of the defining features of sensory appearings according to empirical consciousness understanding itself in terms of the categories of sense certainty, as discussed in Chapter 4.)

The bulk of the Self-Consciousness chapter consists of an investigation of the conception of this kind of immediately status-constituting attitude. For the idea of individual attitudes of attributing statuses that suffice, all by themselves, just in virtue of the kinds of attitudes they are, to institute the statuses they attribute, is the idea of Mastery, or pure independence. (What it is purified of is all hint of dependence—that is, responsibility correlative with that authority.) And that is the topic of all the dystopian allegories of kinds of self-consciousness recounted in Self-Consciousness. It is the topic of the Master and the Servant story in all its complexities, including the struggle unto death, the uneasy equilibrium of subordination and obedience, the metaphysical irony of the self-defeating character of the compelling superior, and the symmetrical metaphysical irony of the self-transcending character of the compelled subordinate. And it is also the topic of the allegorical discussions of stoicism, skepticism, and what Hegel calls the “unhappy consciousness.”

The concept of immediately status-constitutive attitudes is an extreme version of what I have claimed Hegel thinks of as the basic idea of modernity. On this rendering of the transition from traditional to modern, traditional forms of life revolved around an appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. This is the authority of norms over attitudes: how what obligations and authorities there are determine what responsibilities and authority normative subjects should acknowledge and attribute. By contrast, modern forms of life are characterized by an appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. This is the authority of attitudes over norms, the way in which what obligations and authorities there are, and what they are, is responsible to the attributions and acknowledgments of normative subjects. The idea that some attitudes can immediately institute the normative statuses that are their objects, that in their case taking someone to be authoritative or responsible can by itself make them have that authority or responsibility, is, on Hegel’s view, a characteristic deformation of the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. It is the idea allegorized as Mastery. Hegel sees modernity as shot through with this conception of the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses, and it is precisely this aspect of modernity that he thinks eventually needs to be overcome. In the end, he thinks even Kant’s symmetrical, reflexive, self*-directed version of the idea in the form of the autonomy model of normativity is a form of Mastery. In Hegel’s rationally reconstructed recollection of the tradition, which identifies and highlights an expressively progressive trajectory through it, Kant’s is the final, most enlightened modern form, the one that shows the way forward. But it is nonetheless still a form of the structural misunderstanding of normativity in terms of Mastery.

I have offered the phrase “attitude-dependence of normative statuses” as epitomizing the normative structure Hegel takes to be distinctive of the modern form of Geist. There are a number of different things one could mean by it. To begin with, the dependence in question can pertain to the order of understanding, or to the order of being. In the first case, the claim is that normative statuses are sense-dependent upon normative attitudes. One cannot understand what a normative status such as responsibility or authority is without understanding what it is to attribute, acknowledge, or claim responsibility or authority. In the second case, a stronger claim is made: that normative statuses are reference-dependent on normative attitudes. There could not be a world in which there were normative statuses of authority and responsibility but no normative attitudes of taking or treating people as authoritative or responsible. It would follow that until and unless people engaged in the practices of attributing, acknowledging, and claiming responsibility and authority, taking or treating others and themselves* as exhibiting such statuses, there were and could be no such statuses. I take it that Hegel endorses both the sense- and the reference-dependence of statuses on attitudes. (Chapter 12 offers a Hegelian reconstruction of a version of the Fregean distinction between sense and reference.)

Both of these senses of “attitude-dependence of normative statuses” treat normative attitudes as necessary conditions of normative statuses: in the realm of sense or understanding and in the realm of reference or existence, respectively. A stronger claim, suggested already by the last formulation, the third umpire’s, is that sufficient conditions for normative statuses can also be formulated in terms of normative attitudes. Here it is less clear that we can distinguish weaker and stronger versions of such a sufficiency thesis corresponding to claims about the order of understanding and claims about the order of being. The first would be a kind of reductionism. Talk about normative statuses can be understood, without remainder, in terms of talk about normative attitudes. What we mean by saying that someone is responsible, or has authority, can be made sense of entirely in terms of people attributing, acknowledging, or claiming such statuses. Such a claim need not be understood as entailing the nonexistence of normative statuses. I take it we can understand an economic notion of value (roughly, Marx’s “exchange value”) entirely in terms of the practical attitudes of taking or treating something as having such a value—namely, in terms of what uncompelled exchanges they would be willing to engage in under various circumstances. That is not to say that there is no such thing as exchange value. It is rather to say something like that such values are instituted by the practice of market exchange and the practical attitudes such practices make possible. That seems like a claim about the order of being: that exchange values are brought into existence by social practices and practical attitudes, by taking or treating things as exchange-equivalent commodities in a market. Just so, to claim that normative statuses can be understood wholly in terms of normative attitudes seems naturally put by saying that normative attitudes institute normative statuses, in the sense of producing or bringing them into existence. Again, to say this is not yet to say that there are no such things, that only normative attitudes and not the statuses they attribute and acknowledge really exist. To characterize something as the product of a process is not to say that it is not real. It is to say something about how it came to be. So the most important distinction within the domain of sufficiency-of-attitudes-for-statuses claims seems not to correspond to that between the order of understanding and the order of being. It seems rather to be whether the sufficiency being claimed is understood in an eliminative way: as saying that normative statuses are nothing but suitable constellations of normative attitudes, or that they do not really exist at all, but correspond to more or less misleading ways of talking about constellations of attitudes. A certain kind of naturalistic reductionism takes a line like this about moral norms or values: all there really is, is moral attitudes, in the sense that any explanation that appeals to moral norms is to be replaced by a better explanation that appeals only to moral attitudes.

So the claim that normative attitudes institute normative statuses goes beyond the mere claim of attitude-dependence of normative statuses (in both its sense-dependence and its reference-dependence forms). Still stronger is the claim that at least some normative attitudes are immediately constitutive of normative statuses. This sort of taking someone to be committed is sufficient for making that one be committed. Self-consciousness that understands itself in terms of the categories of Mastery construes normativity in terms of immediately status-constitutive attitudes. Hegel clearly thinks that such a conception takes the insight of modernity concerning the attitude-dependence of normative statuses too far. As we shall see, the form of his objection to all forms of self-conceptions that have the characteristic shape of Mastery—and that is essentially all the forms of self-consciousness discussed in the rest of the book, not just in the chapter on Self-Consciousness—is the same. We can think of Hegel’s diagnosis of the metaphysical error that manifests itself as forms of self-consciousness understanding itself in the way characteristic of Mastery as having three levels, proceeding from the more to the less abstract.

First, it is characteristic of self-consciousness with the structure of Mastery to understand itself as being, in itself, “pure independence.” That is, it conceives itself as exercising authority unmixed with and unmediated by any correlative responsibility, which is normative “dependence.” This, Hegel claims, is an ultimately incoherent conception. It is something the Master can be at most for himself, not in himself. As so conceived, the Master would in fact be unable to commit himself. For a determinately contentful commitment involves being responsible to the content to which one has committed oneself—in the sense that one makes oneself liable to assessment of one’s success in fulfilling that commitment (a judgment’s being true or an intention successful) according to the normative standard set by the content of one’s status. The Master cannot acknowledge that moment of dependence-as-responsibility.

Second, conceiving of himself as “pure independence,” the Master cannot acknowledge the responsibility of his attitudes to normative statuses: the status-dependence of normative attitudes. Appreciating the norm-governedness of attitudes was, Hegel thinks, a genuine insight of traditional forms of normativity (Geist), albeit one that was expressed in deformed, because one-sided, practical conceptions of normativity in terms of the model of subordination and obedience. The question of whether the normative status the Master acknowledges or claims—what he is for himself*—is what he really is, in himself, cannot arise within the conception of Mastery. For to acknowledge facts about what someone is really committed or entitled to, what responsibility or authority they really have, what they are in themselves, is to acknowledge something that serves as a normative standard for the evaluation of the correctness of normative attitudes of attributing, acknowledging, or claiming those statuses. That is something one is obliged to make one’s attitudes subjunctively sensitive to. It is something exercising authority, to which one’s attitudes are responsible. By contrast, it is of the essence of Mastery to acknowledge no authority, to understand there to be nothing that one’s attitudes are dependent upon in the sense of responsible to.

Finally, as already indicated, the Master has a conception of normative force—in Frege’s sense of the pragmatic significance of statuses and attitudes, what one is doing in becoming authoritative or responsible, and in attributing and exercising authority or attributing and acknowledging responsibility—that leaves no room for the contrast and division of labor between such force and the determinate conceptual content of either normative states or attitudes. This, I will claim, is the form of complaint that binds together the treatment of all the forms of self-consciousness conceiving itself according to categories of Mastery. There is no intelligible semantics (account of content) that is compatible with the pragmatics (account of normative force, status, and attitude) to which they are committed. A key to this line of thought is that Hegel understands the relations between Fregean force and content, between statuses and attitudes, on the one hand, and content on the other, in normative terms of authority and responsibility (independence and dependence). Developing a lesson he learned from Kant, Hegel takes the notion of content itself to be something that must be understood in terms of the way in which to understand statuses and attitudes as contentful is to understand them as responsible to, and so normatively dependent on, something determined by that content—something it is about.

III. A Model of General Recognition

Hegel thinks that there is something fundamentally defective about the idea of normative attitudes that are immediately constitutive of normative statuses, which lies at the core of the Kantian understanding of normativity in terms of individual autonomy. Though there is also something deeply right about the Kant-Rousseau development of the self-government tradition in the modern metaphysics of normativity, the insight it affords about normative statuses as not only attitude-dependent but as instituted by attitudes must be reconciled with the insight that normative statuses are at base social statuses. Hegel’s recognition model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes articulates the idea that other-regarding attitudes of attributing responsibility and authority (holding other normative subjects responsible, taking them to be authoritative) are equally essential to individuals really being responsible or authoritative (having the statuses of being committed or entitled) as are self-regarding attitudes of acknowledging those statuses.

The social dimension provided by normative attitudes of attribution is not simply absent from Kant’s picture, however. It is true that for him having the authority to make oneself responsible (institute that kind of normative status) by adopting a purely self-regarding attitude of acknowledging that responsibility (committing oneself) owes nothing to its attribution by others. It is a status that is constitutive of being an autonomous discursive being, a subject of normative attitudes and statuses. And that basic constitutive normative status is not itself instituted by normative attitudes. In this respect, Kant acknowledges not only the attitude-dependence of ground-level responsibilities, but also the dependence of the status-instituting capacity of those attitudes on the normative status that is the authority to institute responsibilities by acknowledging them: the authority to commit oneself. But that status as an autonomous normative subject—being the subject of commitments just insofar as one is able (has the authority) to commit oneself, to bind oneself by norms that are binding just insofar as the one bound acknowledges them as binding—is a constitutive kind of dignity. As such, it unconditionally deserves the respect of other autonomous normative subjects. They have a duty—an obligation, a responsibility—to respect the dignity that consists in the authority to make oneself responsible by taking oneself to be responsible. So Kant’s picture does have a social dimension, in which attribution as well as acknowledgment plays a role (see Figure 9.3). This is a complex interpersonal constellation of basic normative attitudes and normative statuses, in which relations of statuses as objects of attitudes and attitudes as objects of statuses are piled on one another five levels deep. As rational beings we have a standing formal obligation or responsibility (a status—at level 5) to respect, in the sense of attributing (an attitude—at level 4) to each rational being as a rational being, the dignity, in the sense of having the authority (a status—at level 3) (which we attribute at level 4) constitutively to acknowledge (a status-instituting attitude—at level 2) both doxastic and practical responsibilities or commitments (statuses—at level 1).

All of these elements Hegel can applaud, and they are the basis for him to say that Kant was almost right. He puts in place all the crucial conceptual elements, but does not see properly how they fit together.

For Kant has the idea that it is a necessary condition of being responsible that one acknowledges that responsibility. That is autonomy. And he does leave room for a distinction between explicitly acknowledging the responsibility and acknowledging it only implicitly—for instance, just by being a knower and agent, thinking, talking, and acting intentionally. But one might think—I think Hegel does think—that this is not yet a full-blooded sense of being responsible. It might well be laid alongside of another important complementary sense of being responsible that consists in merely being held responsible—a matter of one-sidedly attributing, rather than one-sidedly acknowledging the status.⁷ Hegel claims that genuine responsibility requires both of these attitudes, arranged as reciprocal recognition (dual attitudes of acknowledging and attributing) of the status. His view is what one gets by accepting this Kantian picture, but treating both attitudes, the attribution of authority as well as its exercise in acknowledging responsibility, as individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the institution of normative statuses.

Looking at the diagram of the complex constellation of basic attitudes and statuses that make up the basic Kantian normative status makes clear that although the determinate responsibilities at the bottom of the diagram (cognitive commitments to claims and practical commitments to doings) are instituted by immediately constitutive attitudes, the authority to do that, which is autonomy, is not conceived as itself instituted by attitudes. And looking at the diagram of the social extension of the BKNS likewise makes clear that the duty to respect the autonomy of others is also a status that is not itself instituted by attitudes. Being autonomous and having the responsibility to respect autonomy by attributing the authority to commit oneself are both statuses that are not instituted by attitudes. But they are for Kant constitutive of the status of being a rational, discursive being. That is why Kant has to tell a special story about how they are two sides of one coin, two necessarily intertwined aspects of one conception of such beings.

Suppose one accepted the motivations that lead Kant to the conception of the complex of basic attitudes and statuses that is the socially extended BKNS, but thought both that all normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes and that such institution requires not only the acknowledging attitude of the subject of the status but also the attitude of some other who attributes it—that it is not only a matter of what the normative subject is for herself, but also of what she is for others. This is the idea that the attitudes of any one individual normative subject can institute normative statuses only when they are suitably complemented by the attitudes of others. According to this line of thought, the respect others owe to autonomous normative subjects is not something added to the authority those subjects have, as autonomous, to institute responsibilities by acknowledging them (to make themselves responsible by taking themselves to be responsible). On the Hegelian line, recognition—the recognitive attitude of attributing the authority distinctive of autonomy (the successor-notion to Kant’s “respecting the dignity” of other subjects)—is an essential component required to institute that very authority. These are the thoughts that lead from the Kantian model of individual autonomous normative subjects as immediately instituting their determinate responsibilities by their attitudes of acknowledging them, to the Hegelian model of the social institution of normative statuses by attitudes of normative subjects that must be mediated by each other’s suitably complementary attitudes of acknowledgment and attribution.

What results from modifying the socially extended complex of basic attitudes and statuses that comprises both autonomy and the duty to respect it is a complex of attitudes and statuses that has a different, symmetrical, essentially social structure (see Figure 9.4). This is a very basic constellation of normative attitudes and statuses. I am understanding Hegel as taking this to be the underlying metaphysical structure of (genuine, nondefective) normativity.

All that is shown here of the complex constellation of attitudes and statuses exhibited by the two normative subjects is what corresponds to the top two-thirds of the BKNS. It does not represent the specific responsibilities and other statuses that each is recognized as having the authority to acknowledge. What is represented is a structure of general recognition, not specific recognition. It represents recognition in the sense of recognizing as, taking to be, a general recognizer: a subject of normative statuses and attitudes. It is what in Chapter 8 I called “robust recognition.” This is attributing the authority to adopt attitudes that are constitutive of statuses, not immediately, but in the sense that they institute statuses if suitably socially complemented. In order to institute the authority to institute statuses by one’s attitudes (here, attributions), one must oneself be taken to have (be recognized as having) that authority by another, whom one in turn recognizes as having that very same authority. The idea is that recognitive attitudes can institute recognitive authority just in case those attitudes are “suitably (socially) complemented” in the sense of being reciprocated. Recognitive authority—the authority that corresponds to autonomy in the BKNS, the authority to institute statuses by one’s attitudes—is itself instituted by suitably complemented recognitive attitudes. It is only when those attitudes are suitably complemented that they have the authority to institute normative statuses. Hegelian recognition is what Kantian respect (for the authority to institute statuses by one’s attitudes) becomes when that attribution of authority by another is understood as essential to the institution of the authority to institute responsibility (making oneself responsible) by one’s attitudes.

As autonomous, Kantian normative subjects can, in a certain sense, lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. For they can actualize normative statuses that are merely virtual—that is, that exist only as the objects of their normative attitudes. But the authority to do that, the authority in which their autonomy consists, is not for Kant itself the product of their own attitudes, or of the attitudes of other normative subjects who are obliged to respect their autonomy by attributing that authority. Their possession of that authority is just a fact about them—as is everyone else’s responsibility to respect it. By contrast, the recognitive authority of Hegelian normative subjects is instituted entirely by recognitive attitudes that correspond to Kantian respect for the autonomy of others. The recognitive status that is virtual as the mere object of recognitive attitudes (attributions of authority) is actualized, according to the recognitive model, when and only when the recognizing subject is recognized (as a recognizing subject) by another recognizing subject whom the first subject recognizes in turn. They do not individually lift themselves up into the normative status of having recognitive authority by the bootstraps of their own recognitive attitudes (attributions of authority). But the recognitive unit they form when their recognition is mutual does lift the attitudes of both; it does promote their statuses (recognitive authority) that are merely virtual as the objects of their attitudes up to the level of actual normative statuses. The recognitive statuses are not immediately instituted by recognitive attitudes. But they are instituted by suitably socially complemented recognitive attitudes.

This, I claim, is the basic constellation of attitudes and statuses that Hegel invokes under the rubric of “the process of the pure Notion [Begriff] of recognition, of the duplicating of self-consciousness in its oneness.” [PG 185] He introduces the topic by saying:

Self-consciousness exists in and for itself, because and by virtue of its existing in and for itself for an other; which is to say, it exists only as recognized. [PG 178]

What a normative subject is in itself is its normative statuses. What it is for itself is its normative attitudes. Being a subject of normative statuses and attitudes depends on being recognized as such by another normative subject. “A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness.” [PG 177] This is the step that sees recognition, the successor attitude to Kantian respect as an essential constitutive element of the status of normative self-conscious selfhood that is the successor status to Kantian autonomy.

Furthermore, instituting a self in the sense of something with the status of a normative subject requires recognitive attitudes that are symmetrical, reciprocal, or mutual.

Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. [PG 184; emphasis added]

Here we see the move from Kantian immediate institution of statuses by individual attitudes to the Hegelian recognitive institution of statuses by attitudes that are socially mediated by the attitudes of others.

Thus the movement is simply the double movement of the two self-consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both. [PG 182]

It is this symmetrical recognitive constellation of basic normative attitudes and statuses that he refers to in the very next sentence as “the pure Notion of recognition, of the duplicating of self-consciousness in its oneness.” It is the basic structure of robust general recognition, in which suitably socially complemented recognitive attitudes institute statuses of recognitive authority, the subjects of normative statuses, and the community defined by dyadic recognitive relations, which consists of normative subjects who actually reciprocally recognize and are recognized by each other. “The elaboration of the concept of this spiritual unity within its doubling presents us with the movement of recognition.” [PG 178]

Recognizing another is taking or treating that other in practice as a normative self: as the subject of normative attitudes and statuses. More specifically, in the model, it is the attitude of attributing the status of authority to institute statuses by one’s attitudes, when those attitudes are suitably complemented. This is a version of the sort of authority that is Kantian autonomy, differing in the understanding of the constellation of attitudes that can institute (that is, actualize otherwise virtual) statuses. In the Hegelian version, the authority in question is socially mediated rather than individually immediate. Adopting recognitive attitudes in this sense is applying to the one recognized an articulated normative concept of a self. It is consciousness of a self as a self. The recognizing consciousness also has that concept applied to it; it is a recognizing self for a recognizing self. But the self it is a self for, the one that is conscious of it as a self is not itself, but the recognized-recognizing other self. The self-consciousness that is instituted and actualized for the recognizing-and-recognized individuals making up the recognitive dyad is a property they have as a recognitive dyad. It is only secondarily and as a result that it is a property of each individual. Hegel refers to the recognitive community of recognizing-and-recognized individual normative subjects as “Spirit” [Geist]:

[T]his 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]

“Independence” is in the model authority: the authority of the several recognitive subjects. It is not immediate authority (pure independence), but authority that is socially mediated by the attitudes of others, who attribute it in recognizing the independent normative subject as authoritative. “Freedom” is Hegel’s term for the symmetrical recognitive constellation that integrates immediacy, as the actuality of attitudes, with their social mediation, through the requirement of suitable complementation of attitudes for their institutional authority.

IV. A Model of Specific Recognition

The preceding figure represents only the most general outlines of the complex constellation of basic normative attitudes and statuses that is the model of Hegelian recognition being proposed as a successor to the model of Kantian autonomy. For it characterizes only the structure of robust general recognition, the recognitive attitudes that institute the recognitive status of having recognitive authority (which requires being recognized as having such authority). What is left out of that diagram are the specific (nonrecognitive) statuses of responsibility and authority (paradigmatically for claimings or judgings, and intentional doings) that Kant took autonomous normative subjects to have the authority to institute by their attitudes of acknowledgment. Focusing on conditions on possession of specific normative statuses, we can start with the one Kantian autonomy emphasizes: responsibility. Hegel does not want to relinquish Kant’s insight that one is responsible only for what one acknowledges responsibility for. He wants to supplement it with the thought that it is nugatory to acknowledge a commitment unless one has licensed someone to hold you responsible. (Ultimately, this will be a matter of conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the commitment. Unless administered, the commitment is not determinately contentful.) The recognition model requires suitable social complementation of attitudes for the actualization of the statuses that are virtual as the objects of those attitudes.

On the Hegelian model, as with the Kantian autonomy structure, attributing a responsibility has to be complemented by the acknowledgment of the subject of the responsibility. One is responsible (a status) only for what one acknowledges responsibility for (an attitude). The status of responsibility, which is virtual in the sense of just being the object of these paired attitudes of attribution and acknowledgment, becomes actualized—a status outside the attitudes it is an object of—only when the status attributed is also acknowledged. This is just the other side of the coin of the requirement that for acknowledging a commitment or responsibility to succeed in instituting that status (for it to be constitutive of the commitment it acknowledges, for it to be a successful undertaking of that commitment, a status) someone else must both be authorized to hold the subject responsible (attribute the commitment, an attitude) and must actually do so. Kant does not require this social complementation of attitudes. He thinks that autonomous individual subjects just come with the authority to actualize the statuses that are the objects of their attitudes—immediately, in the sense of not depending on any other actual attitudes. And according to the social recognitive model, the same paired conditions requiring social complementation of normative attitudes to institute normative statuses of responsibility hold for attributions and acknowledgments (claims) of authority. One has authority (including the authority to institute statuses by one’s attitudes) only if others take one to have that authority by attributing it. A claim of authority actually institutes the authority claimed only if others whom the authoritative subject recognizes as having the authority to do so recognize that authority by attributing it. Absent others treating one as authoritative, one’s own claim to authority is incomplete. The authority in question is merely virtual, as the object of the subject’s claiming attitude. It is a presupposition of the actualization of determinate statuses that the one who holds the first subject responsible is authorized to do so, and that that recognizing subject takes it that the first one is authorized to acknowledge the commitment. Acknowledging a status such as responsibility is suitably complemented only if some recognized recognizer also attributes it—holds one responsible. And attributing a status such as responsibility is suitably complemented only if it is also acknowledged by the recognized recognizer to whom it is attributed.

So the full constellation of basic attitudes and statuses that is the Hegelian recognitive model developed on the basis of the Kantian autonomy model (as socially extended to include the duty to respect autonomy) is more complex (see Figure 9.5). This is the fine structure of the Hegelian reciprocal recognition model of the social institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes.

The top half of this diagram shows the recognitive dyad in which the attitude of acknowledgment of specific normative statuses by normative subject X (shown as crosshatched) is suitably complemented by Y’s attitudes of attribution so as actually to institute those specific statuses. The bottom half shows the recognitive dyad in which the attitude of attributing of specific normative statuses by normative subject X to normative subject Y (shown as crosshatched) are suitably complemented by Y’s attitudes of acknowledgment so as actually to institute those specific statuses. Within each dyad, the reciprocal general recognitive attitudes of attributing authority are included at the top. They differ from those in the previous, simplified diagram of reciprocal general recognition only in that the authority that is reciprocally attributed is now articulated into authority not only to adopt attitudes of attribution of normative statuses (including specific ones), but also attitudes of acknowledgment—in each case, constitutively if suitably complemented. The specific normative statuses instituted by the suitably complemented attitudes are on the lower left of the top dyad and on the lower right of the bottom one. What one sees there is essentially the diagram of the basic Kantian normative status of autonomy. Each subject has the authority to institute normative statuses (including specific ones) by acknowledging them. The big differences are the following:

All the normative statuses are instituted by appropriate constellations of normative attitudes—constellations in which they are suitably socially complemented.
The attribution by others of the authority to adopt constitutive (status-instituting) attitudes, which corresponds to Kantian respect, is an essential element, a necessary condition, of the institution of that authority.
The whole structure of statuses and attitudes, including other-regarding ones, in which the substructure taking the place of the Kantian autonomy structure of statuses and attitudes is embedded is being taken to be the context sufficient for the institution of statuses by attitudes.

One way to think about how the Hegelian recognitive model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes differs from the Kantian autonomy model is to think of it by comparison to the conception of contract central to Anglo-American civil law. Two of the classic five elements of contracts are mutuality of obligation and the exchange of values that is consideration. These are individually necessary conditions that are part of the conditions that are jointly sufficient to institute the legal status of a contract. Mutuality of obligation requires both parties to bind themselves, to make themselves responsible to the other. The reciprocal exchange constituting consideration can “consist of a promise to perform an act that one is not legally required to do or a promise to refrain from an act one is legally entitled to do.” That is, it can consist in the acknowledging of responsibility or the attributing of authority. The contractual model of the institution of legal statuses by the adoption of mutually regarding attitudes and acts by the contracting parties is accordingly very close to that portrayed in the preceding figure of how suitably complementary recognitive attitudes can institute normative statuses. One difference is that the third contractual element of competency—which addresses the authority to adopt the other contract-instituting attitudes—is not simply settled by the attitudes of the contracting normative subjects. In this way it is less like Hegelian general recognition, which is the attribution of such authority and which institutes it if suitably complemented, and more like Kantian autonomy as the authority to institute statuses by attitudes.

The core idea of the recognitive model concerns what is required for statuses of responsibility and authority that are virtual in the sense of being the objects of attitudes of attribution and acknowledgment to be actualized. It is the idea that it is necessary and sufficient for the attitudes in question to be part of an appropriate constellation of other attitudes. A constellation of attitudes appropriate for realizing their objects is one in which the attitudes of attributing or acknowledging responsibility and authority are suitably complemented by other attitudes. When the statuses that are attributed to another subject are also acknowledged by that subject, and when the statuses that are acknowledged by one subject are attributed to that subject, and when the normative subjects of these symmetrical attitudes generally recognize each other, then genuine normative statuses are instituted. To recognize someone in the general sense is to attribute the authority to adopt attitudes that will, if suitably complemented, institute statuses—that is, actualize the statuses that are the objects of those attitudes.

V. The Recognitive Institution of Statuses, Subjects, and Communities

According to the recognitive model, the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes, the actualization of the objects of those attitudes, requires complementary attitudes: attributions of statuses and acknowledgments of those statuses must symmetrically balance each other. Corresponding to this symmetry of attitudes is a symmetry of recognitive statuses. According to the model, the authority to recognize (which is, inter alia, attributed by the attitude of recognition) and the responsibility to recognize are two sides of one coin. Attributing recognitive authority implies acknowledging recognitive responsibility. To say this is to say more than just that if X has authority over Y, then Y is responsible to X. That is indeed a fundamental principle relating these normative statuses. But one must look more closely at the concept of general recognition to discern the symmetry of general recognitive attitudes and statuses.

So far I have talked about suitable complementation of attitudes, but not about the actualization or institution of statuses that, according to the model, it brings about. What is the result of exercising the authority attributed to a subject when one recognizes that subject? What does it mean to say that the statuses that are the objects of attitudes that are suitably complemented by the attitudes of others who recognize and are recognized by the subject of those attitudes become actual? In the first instance, it means that anyone who recognizes a subject attributes to it the statuses that are the objects of its suitably complemented attitudes. Anyone who recognizes that subject takes the subject really to have the responsibilities and authority that it acknowledges (when the acknowledgment is suitably complemented by attributions), and joins the recognized subject in attributing the specific responsibilities and authority to the subject to whom the recognized subject attributes them (when the recognized subject’s attributions are suitably complemented by acknowledgments on the part of their target). If X recognizes Y, X takes Y to have the authority to institute determinate authority and responsibility by acknowledging or attributing those statuses, so long as Y’s attitudes are suitably complemented by those of another subject (including X) whom Y recognizes in turn. X attributes the statuses that are the objects of Y’s suitably complemented attitudes to Y, or to whomever Y attributes them. That is part of X’s taking the statuses Y acknowledges or attributes to be actual, when Y’s attitudes are suitably complemented.

But there is more to X taking the statuses that are the objects of Y’s suitably complemented attitudes to be actual than just X attributing those statuses. X’s taking the statuses actually to have been instituted by Y’s suitably complemented attitudes also includes attributing to everyone X recognizes the responsibility to attribute those statuses. That is, part of general recognition, of attributing to one subject Y the authority to institute (actualize) normative statuses by adopting suitably complemented normative attitudes, is attributing to everyone who has the authority to institute such statuses the responsibility to attribute the statuses so instituted. What is at issue is a universal quantification in the indirect object place of an attribution of responsibility. In recognizing anyone, one is attributing not only authority, but responsibility. The authority to institute statuses by one’s suitably complemented attitudes comes with a responsibility by those one recognizes to attribute statuses so instituted. For attributing those statuses just is taking them to be actual. So the cash value of recognizing someone as having the authority to institute statuses by their attitudes (when the attitudes are suitably complemented) is that one takes everyone, not just oneself, to be obliged practically to treat those instituted statuses as actual—that is, to be responsible for attributing them. Attributing and acknowledging a responsibility of that distinctive kind—universally quantified in the indirect object position—is a necessary part of the attribution of authority that is recognition. For it is what taking the authority being attributed to be the authority to actualize the objects of the recognized subject’s attitudes—to be the authority to institute statuses by adopting attitudes (when those attitudes are suitably complemented)—consists in.

The fact that for the authority attributed by attitudes of general recognition to be the authority to institute statuses by one’s attitudes it must be accompanied by the attribution to everyone one recognizes of responsibility to take or treat those statuses in practice as actual has a number of consequences. One is that in recognizing any normative subject one thereby obliges oneself to recognize anyone that subject recognizes (as was already argued in Chapter 8). If X recognizes Y, then X takes it that Y has the authority to institute statuses by Y’s attitudes, if they are suitably complemented by the attitudes of someone Z whom Y recognizes and who recognizes Y. (X can play this role, but it need not be X who does.) In that case X takes it that everyone, including X, has the responsibility to attribute the statuses that are instituted by the suitably complemented attitudes of the recognitive dyad of Y and Z. But that means X is obliged to take Z as having the authority to adopt attitudes that can suitably complement those of Y. Attributing the authority to adopt attitudes that can suitably complement and be suitably complemented just is general recognition. So in recognizing Y, X makes himself responsible for recognizing whomever Y recognizes. Granted, Z might not actually recognize Y, even though Y recognizes Z. Or, though Z does generally recognize Y, Z might not actually adopt specific attitudes that suitably complement Y’s specific attitudes (acknowledging what Y attributes or attributing what Y acknowledges). Nonetheless, X is committed to its being the case that if Z did those things, genuine normative statuses would be instituted thereby. And that is to say that in recognizing Y, X becomes responsible for attributing to any Z whom Y recognizes the authority to do those things: to generally recognize Y and to adopt attitudes that suitably complement Y’s attitudes, so as to actualize the statuses that are the objects of those attitudes. And to attribute that authority to Z just is to generally recognize Z.

In this sense, then, general recognition is transitive. It need not be the case that if X actually recognizes Y and Y actually recognizes Z, that X actually recognizes Z. X might not in fact adopt the relevant attitude, might not actually attribute to Z the authority to adopt attitudes that can institute statuses when suitably complemented and that can suitably complement the attitudes of others. But if X actually recognizes Y and Y actually recognizes Z, it is the case that in virtue of his recognition of Y, X is and acknowledges being responsible for, committed to, recognizing Z.

At this point one might worry that the recognitive responsibilities that go with recognitive authority are not actual responsibilities, but merely virtual as the objects of recognizing subjects’ attributions and acknowledgments. Granted, as the model has been described, when a normative subject recognizes another, the recognizing subject both acknowledges and attributes to everyone it recognizes the responsibility to attribute the statuses that the recognized one acknowledges or attributes, when they are suitably complemented. But the recognizer’s acknowledgment and the recognizer’s attributions, as attitudes of the same subject, are not such as can suitably socially complement one another. So although the recognizer acknowledges a responsibility, and attributes that responsibility to everyone it recognizes, it seems that the responsibility in question, the responsibility to attribute statuses that are the objects of suitably complemented attitudes of the one recognized, remains merely virtual, merely acknowledged or attributed.

But we have seen that these acknowledgments and attributions of responsibility imply that everyone is obliged to recognize everyone recognized by anyone they recognize. That responsibility is both acknowledged by each and attributed to each. Those attitudes do stand in the proper relations to count as suitably socially complementing one another. Each recognitive subject attributes to every other one that subject recognizes a conditional responsibility with the content: you are responsible for recognizing anyone recognized by anyone you recognize. And each recognitive subject acknowledges a conditional responsibility with the content: I am responsible for recognizing anyone recognized by anyone I recognize. But these quantified “you” attributions and “I” acknowledgments on the part of subjects who reciprocally generally recognize one another suitably socially complement one another. What is attributed by the one is acknowledged by the other. So they institute genuine normative statuses, actualize the virtual responsibilities. The actuality of the normative statuses so instituted is relative to the recognitive community, in the sense that those statuses are actual to those who recognize the normative subjects of the suitably complemented attitudes that do the instituting. It is members of the recognitive community that distinguish, in their practical behavior, between statuses that are merely virtual, as objects of attitudes, and those that are actual statuses.

To be a self in the full normative sense is to have not only actual normative attitudes, but also actual normative statuses. It is not only to take oneself or others to have authority or be responsible, but actually to have authority or be responsible. To achieve such a status, a normative subject must participate in a general recognitive dyad: must actually be recognized by someone that subject actually recognizes. For only suitably socially complemented attitudes institute actual statuses. It follows that normative statuses, normative subjects of such statuses, and recognitive communities of normative subjects are all synthesized simultaneously by recognitive processes that have an appropriate structure: the structure of reciprocal recognition, Hegel’s “gegenseitig Anerkennung.” The basic normative statuses in this model are responsibility and authority, corresponding to Hegel’s “Abhängigkeit” and “Unabhängigkeit” when those terms are applied on the side of subjects. Being a self in the sense of being a subject of such basic normative statuses is another kind of normative status, as is being a member of a community of selves or normative subjects, synthesized by normative attitudes of reciprocal recognition between such subjects. The model explains how it is that these two in some sense derivative normative statuses, being a normative self or subject and being a member of a normative community, are actually and necessarily the same normative status, looked at in two different ways. It is the normative, social “substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses … ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I.’ ”

The minimal community that is self-instituting in the dual sense of instituting both selves and a community of selves (along with normative statuses of responsibility and authority) is a recognitive dyad: two individuals who each recognize and are recognized by the other, who both attribute and acknowledge normative statuses. Much larger such communities are possible, in which each member stands in reciprocal recognitive relations to each other member: each recognizing and being recognized by all the others as at once normative subject and a member of the recognitive community. Hegel uses “self-consciousness” to describe the dual status each member of such a recognitive community has as both a subject of genuine normative statuses and a member of a recognitive community. Self-consciousness in the sense of this normative status is not the immediate achievement of an individual, as it is for Kant. It is an essentially social status, a kind of self-relation that is mediated by recognitive relations to others. It is a paradigm case of a kind of identity forged from differences, as a status that essentially includes relations to others, who also have that status in virtue of their recognitive relations. Each exercises independent authority in adopting attitudes of recognition toward others, and each is in turn responsible to those others in being dependent upon them for their recognition in turn (on pain of no actual normative statuses being instituted, including those of being a self-conscious normative subject and community member). This constitutive constellation of reciprocal authority and responsibility, normative independence and dependence, Hegel calls “freedom.” As Hegel puts it in the passage I have already cited several times, which closes his introduction to his Self-Consciousness chapter:

A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it.… A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much “I” as “object.” 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]

What we, the readers of the Phenomenology, are to learn is the social metaphysics of genuine normativity—authority, responsibility, self-conscious selfhood, and the normative social substance that is Geist—as presented in the model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes of reciprocal recognition. The form that the argument for this model takes is a rehearsal of the defects of social structures of normative attitudes that do not have the symmetrical social structure required by the model for the institution of genuine normative statuses. That is the topic of the next chapter, which reads the various allegories recounted in the Self-Consciousness chapter, beginning with those collected under the rubric of the Master and the Servant (“Herr und Knecht”), in terms of the reciprocal recognition model presented here.

Before embarking on that enterprise, it will be helpful to consider one further consequence of the recognitive model of norm-instituting communities we have been considering. For in addition to the core notion of recognitive communities synthesized by recognitive attitudes that are universally reciprocated, the model generates various more complexly structured communities centered around, but extending beyond, dyads of reciprocal general recognition. So far we have considered communities comprising only the following:

Full recognitively symmetrical (reciprocally recognizing and recognized) community members are recognized by other members and recognize other members, and are recognized by some they recognize.

In addition to these full-fledged normative subjects, the relations that articulate the recognitive model as laid out here also make sense of three categories of second-class recognitive citizens:

Linking members, recognitively asymmetrical (asymmetrically recognized and recognizing) members are recognized by other members and recognize other members, but are not recognized by anyone they recognize.
Invited (= merely recognized) members are recognized by someone in the community, but do not recognize anyone in the community.
Petitioning (= merely recognizing) members recognize someone in the community, but are not recognized by anyone in the community.

Although relations of one subject being responsible for recognizing another, though not actually doing so, do contribute to complex membership statuses built out of these, we do not need to recognize primitive recognitive community membership relations articulated just by such relations, because anyone who stands in these relations must also stand in actual recognitive relations.

If we take into account these derivative, fringe sorts of relations to the core recognitive communities defined by recognitive attitudes that have the structure of equivalence relations (symmetrical, transitive, and reflexive) and so define communities as equivalence classes, we see that recognitive communities can have more complex structures (see Figure 9.6). In this figure, the members of reciprocal recognitive dyads are marked by shading. The only core structure involving more than two members is the set {X₁, X₂, X₃, X₄}, in which each recognizes and is recognized by all the others. Most tenuously connected to this community is W₃, who is recognized by no one. The one W₃ is petitioning for recognition is recognized, but recognizes no one. W₂ is merely invited by W₁ and W₃. On the other hand, everyone in the {X₁, X₂, X₃, X₄} core community is committed to recognizing W₁. (The diagram omits some of the relevant dotted lines to avoid further clutter.) U₃ is merely recognized, and so a member of the {U₁, U₂} recognitive dyad in the extended sense of being an invited member. But {U₁, U₂} is an invited member only relative to {Y₁, Y₂}, just as {T₁, T₂} is invited only relative to {X₁, X₂, X₃, X₄}. Notice that although recognitive attitudes that are merely virtual, in being objects of statuses of responsibility-to-recognize (because actually recognized by someone one actually recognizes) add further recognitive relations to an extended community, they do not actually extend the status of community membership to any new subjects someone is responsible for recognizing, or who are merely responsible for recognizing others. For one must actually recognize someone in order to be responsible for recognizing anyone, and must actually be recognized by someone in order for anyone to be responsible for recognizing one.

The list of simple relative recognitive membership statuses (1)–(4) above accordingly gives rise recursively to an indefinite number of complex relative recognitive membership statuses and relations between recognitive communities and subcommunities: for instance, the relations among all of the recognitive dyads and core communities and their satellite fringe members.8 We can lay this construction of complex general recognitive relations, and corresponding complex statuses of membership in recognitive communities, alongside the construction of complex constellations of statuses and attitudes invoked in the account of the sort of “suitable complementation” of attitudes necessary for the institution of normative statuses generally. There the relations among simple attitudes and statuses that generate complex constellations are those of statuses of responsibility and authority being the objects of attitudes of attribution and acknowledgment, and attitudes of those kinds being the objects of statuses of responsibility and authority. Together these methods of constructing complexes out of simples, epitomized in the various diagrams, are what could be called an “algebra of normativity.”

VI. The Status-Dependence of Attitudes

At the center of this chapter has been an account of Hegel’s successor-conception to Kant’s autonomy version of the attitude-dependence of some crucial normative statuses—specifically, determinately contentful responsibilities, both doxastic and practical (for Kant, endorsements in the form of judgments and practical maxims). Kant’s autonomy model treats individual normative subjects as having the normative capacity, the authority, to institute normative statuses by adopting attitudes that are immediately constitutive of the statuses that are their objects. They can make themselves responsible just by taking themselves to be responsible.

Kant combines his development of the characteristic modern idea of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with an acknowledgment of the traditional idea of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. For Kant, the authority that is autonomy and the responsibility that is the duty to respect (the precursor of recognition) are statuses that are not instituted by attitudes. They are postulated as actual authority and responsibility that are not promoted from the virtual status of being objects of attitudes that institute them. Hegel’s critique of modernity takes the form of a diagnosis of it as opposing a one-sided hypersubjectivity to the one-sided hyperobjectivity of traditional conceptions of normativity. That normative statuses are attitude-dependent is a genuine insight. But it will be understood only one-sidedly if it is not balanced by an appreciation of what was right about the traditional appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes: the responsibility attitudes owe to statuses, the dimension of authority that statuses exert over attitudes. Kant has one way of combining these insights. Hegel proposes another.

The bulk of the discussion in this chapter has been on the side of pragmatics: the study of the normative attitudes and statuses that are the bearers of determinate content. To understand the dimension of status-dependence of attitudes, we must look also to the side of semantics. For the distinction between phenomena and noumena, between appearance and reality, between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, shows up both in the form of the pragmatic distinction between attitudes and statuses and in the form of the distinction between senses and referents, as that semantic distinction is rendered in Hegel’s terms. In pragmatic terms, it takes the form of the distinction between what consciousness is for (a) consciousness (itself or another) and what (a) consciousness is in itself. This is the distinction between what a normative subject is really committed or entitled to, its actual responsibilities and authority, and what responsibilities or authority other subjects attribute to it, or it acknowledges itself. That is just the distinction between statuses and attitudes. Semantically, though, appearances, what things are for consciousness, are the Hegelian analogue of Fregean senses. What those senses refer to or represent, how things are in themselves, is the reality that is the Hegelian analogue of Fregean referents. (The idea of using Hegelian versions of these Fregean semantic metaconcepts is motivated and unpacked in Chapter 12.) Hegel accepts Kant’s insight that what a representing (here, a sense, an appearance, what things are for consciousness) represents is what exercises a distinctive kind of authority over the correctness of the representing. That is what the representing is responsible to for its correctness, what provides the normative standard for assessments of its correctness. This is the semantic correlate of the status-dependence of normative attitudes: the sense in which what consciousness is for consciousness, a subject’s normative attitudes, is responsible to (dependent upon) what consciousness is in itself (what it is really committed to or authoritative about), which accordingly exercises authority over those attitudes.

The relation between phenomena as representings (Hegelian senses) and noumena as representeds (Hegelian referents) is established by the process of recollection (Erinnerung). That is a retrospective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive process of experience as explicitation: the gradual emergence for consciousness of how things are in themselves. There is a deep connection between this account of the process by which content is determined—viewed prospectively, becoming more determinate, viewed retrospectively, explicitly revealing new aspects of the always-already determinate content that has been implicit—and the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses according to the recognitive model of the institution of statuses by attitudes. To begin with, the context of those content-determining processes on the side of semantics is provided by the recognitive processes that institute normative statuses on the side of pragmatics. As we see in the discussion of the Consciousness chapters, and consider further in the discussion of Reason, content-determination is the incorporation of immediacy in the mediated form of conceptual content. Specifically, that immediacy takes the form of normative attitudes that subjects actually adopt in the course of experience, in response to collisions among attitudes they find themselves with, both through perception and through inference. Those collisions of attitudes are the experience of error. Acknowledging some commitments normatively requires sacrificing others incompatible with them. That phase of the experience of error in turn requires retrospective revisions of one’s understanding of the conceptual contents of one’s commitments: of what is really incompatible with what and what really follows from what. The final retrospective, rationally reconstructive recollective phase of each cycle of the experience of error enforces to consciousness the distinction between noumena and phenomena, the distinction between how things really are and how things merely seem or appear. The form that distinction takes on the side of the subject is the distinction between normative statuses (what one has really committed oneself to in claiming, for instance, that the coin is copper) and normative attitudes (what one takes oneself to be committed to in making such a claim). This pragmatic distinction reflects the distinction between the conceptual contents that are Hegelian referents and those that are Hegelian senses: the appearances of those referents, what they are for consciousness.

Thought of from the point of view of the subject, the process of content-determination, by which noumena (referents, representeds) become something to consciousness distinct from the phenomena (senses, representings) that the experience of error unmasks as what things are for consciousness, is the emergence of the distinction between what is right (with respect to the relations of material incompatibility and consequence that articulate conceptual contents) and what seems right to the subject whose contentful commitments are at issue. This is just the distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes. As Wittgenstein puts the point: “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right.’ ” [PI §258] On the side of pragmatics, the question of how to understand noumena in terms of phenomena, which we have been addressing semantically, shows up precisely as the question of how it is that attitudes (how things seem to the subject) can institute genuine statuses, which are binding on and beyond the attitudes of the subject. How can mere attitudes be transcended? (Compare: How can referents, as what things are in themselves, become something to consciousness beyond mere senses, what things are for consciousness?) Here we have seen that the key insight motivating the recognitive model is that we can make sense of the distinction between status and attitude only if in acknowledging a responsibility (committing oneself) one is at the same time authorizing others to hold one responsible, by attributing that responsibility (commitment). They then can be understood as administering a content one has committed oneself to—a content that is not determined just by the attitudes of the acknowledger. To see acknowledging a responsibility and attributing authority (to hold one responsible) as two sides of one coin both articulates the distinction between mere attitudes and genuine statuses and brings into play the notion of determinate conceptual content as what one makes oneself responsible for. This is what the requirement that attitudes be suitably complemented in order to institute genuine statuses does. It makes available determinate contents, and thereby articulates the dimension along which attitudes are dependent upon statuses, in the sense of being responsible to them for assessments of their correctness: senses as answering for their correctness to referents. The status-dependence of attitudes shows up in the recognitive model as a sense in which pragmatics (the theory of normative force) is constrained by semantics (the theory of conceptual content). The attitude-dependence of normative statuses shows up in the recognitive model as a sense in which semantics answers to pragmatics, in that the only thing there is to determine the semantic contents of expressions is the pragmatic use that is made of them.

Statuses are normative noumena (what consciousness is in itself), and attitudes are normative phenomena (what consciousness is for itself or for others). The story about noumena / phenomena in terms of recollection is accordingly the form of the story about the status-dependence of attitudes. Kant, having top-level general statuses, had this aspect of status-dependence of attitudes as well as attitude-dependence of statuses, because both autonomy and the duty of respect (the precursor of recognition) are statuses. But what autonomy is the authority to do is to institute statuses by attitudes, which is a form of the attitude-dependence of the resulting specific statuses. So Kant divided the labor: status-dependence of general attitudes and attitude-dependence of specific statuses.

The statuses and their contents are determined by what is represented. The attitudes can be thought of as senses, which inherit this crucial dimension of content from their referents. The content determines what one is really responsible for: the status to which the attitudes answer for their correctness. That responsibility is administered by those one has made oneself responsible to in endorsing or acknowledging a responsibility: those to whom one has thereby ceded the authority to determine what one is really responsible for. If there is no responsibility to others, then in exercising one’s authority to commit oneself, one has not succeeded in making oneself responsible for any determinate content. That is the cost of not having responsibility to others, any authority of others, correlative with one’s own authority (to undertake responsibility).

In claiming that the coin is copper, the commitment I undertake, the responsibility I acknowledge, is not determined just by my attitudes. I have made myself responsible to the actual content of the concept copper I have applied. By using the term “copper” I have authorized others to hold me responsible, not just according to my conception of copper (what I take to follow from or be incompatible with such a commitment, a matter of my attitudes), but according to the real content of the piece I have played in the public language game. That is what determines what I have really committed myself to, the status I have actually acquired by my performance. The essentially social relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses—both the institution of statuses by attitudes and the dependence of attitudes on statuses (their responsibility to statuses for their correctness)—on the pragmatic side of force and the essentially historical relations between what the contents are for consciousness (phenomena, senses, representings) and what they are in themselves (noumena, referents, representeds) on the semantic side of conceptual content are two sides of one coin, recognitive and recollective aspects of one sort of developmental process. The complex structure that links them becomes clear only when, in the discussion of Reason, we look at exercises of intentional agency, which mediate the relations between self-consciousness and consciousness. There the distinction between phenomena and noumena, what things are for consciousness and what things are in themselves, shows up as the Vorsatz / Absicht distinction, the distinction between the agent’s attitude of endorsing and the intention the agent has actually endorsed. The key to it is recollection: the retrospective rational reconstruction that is the final phase of an episode of experience (see Figure 9.7).

The retrospective, rational-reconstructive historical phase of the process of experience, Hegel’s “Erinnerung,” explains how, on the semantic side, objective conceptual contents (referents, noumena) articulated as laws, facts, and objects with properties are both to be understood in terms of and to serve as standards for assessments of the correctness of the process of manipulating subjective conceptual contents (senses) by applying rules, propositions, and singular terms and predicates in adopting doxastic (and, as we see further along, practical) attitudes. The social character of the recognitive process that institutes both normative subjects and their communities explains, on the pragmatic side, both how normative statuses (noumena, what self-conscious subjects are in themselves) are instituted by (and in that strong sense dependent upon) normative attitudes (phenomena, what self-conscious subjects are for themselves) and how those statuses have authority over those attitudes in serving as standards for assessment of their correctness. This is the dimension of status-dependence of normative attitudes, the responsibility of those attitudes to (Hegel’s “dependence on”) statuses that balances the attitude-dependence of normative statuses.

VII. Conclusion

At this point we are in a position to see the answers to two structural questions that might well be asked about the definition of recognition:

On the side of attitudes: Why should recognition bundle together attributing the authority to attribute statuses (constitutively if suitably complemented) and the authority to acknowledge statuses (constitutively if suitably complemented)? Why isn’t the attribution of authority to adopt the two kinds of attitudes separated—in the sense that one might attribute one and not the other, so keep separate sets of books on them? Why do they come as a bundle?
On the side of statuses: Why should recognition bundle together the authority to attribute and acknowledge (constitutively if suitably complemented) responsibilities with the authority to attribute and acknowledge (constitutively if suitably complemented) authority? Why isn’t authority to adopt attitudes toward these two kinds of statuses separated—in the sense that one might attribute one and not the other, so keep separate sets of books on them? Why do they come as a bundle?

The recognitive model is Hegel’s way of synthesizing two crucial insights. First is what he sees as the founding insight of modernity, the idea that normative statuses are attitude-dependent, as boiled down and purified in the Kant-Rousseau idea of autonomy into the idea that at least some normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes. The second is what was right about the traditional idea (one-sidedly overemphasized by premodern thought) of the status-dependence or norm-governedness of normative attitudes: the idea that our attributions and acknowledgments (or claimings) of responsibility and authority answer for their correctness to facts about what people really are committed and entitled to. The complex social-historical recognitive model of normativity is Hegel’s way of performing the Eiertanz required to make simultaneous sense both of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes and of the role of normative statuses as standards for assessments of the correctness of normative attitudes. At its base is the idea that to undertake a responsibility must always also be to acknowledge the authority of others to hold one responsible—which is implicitly to attribute that authority. And explicitly to attribute determinately contentful authority to someone is also always to attribute the implicit responsibilities defined by that content, administered on its behalf by others to whom one has made oneself responsible by the original assertion of the authority to make oneself responsible. In the case of the attribution of authority that is general recognition, this includes acknowledging one’s own responsibility to respect exercises of that authority. In Hegel’s terms, there is no independence without a correlative dependence, and vice versa. And consciousness is essentially self-consciousness, in the sense that one cannot make sense of what consciousness is in itself apart from concern with what it is for itself. Further, it is of the essence of the recognitive model of self-conscious normative subjects that “what consciousness is in itself” is always a matter of the constellation of attitudes comprising what a self-consciousness, an individual normative subject, is both for itself and for others in the recognitive community that is necessarily simultaneously synthesized by reciprocal recognitive attitudes along with individual self-consciousnesses.

The interplay between the historical and social dimensions of Hegel’s story is intricate. To forestall misunderstandings, it is worth explicitly noting two ways one should not understand it. It is only by ignoring or eliding the intricacy of that fine structure that one could think that the social dimension commits Hegel to a “consensus theory of truth,” according to which objective truth becomes just whatever all community members agree on. According to the historical side of the story, the present community is responsible to future stages of the community for properly administering norms instituted by the actual attitudes adopted by the tradition it inherits, from which derives the only authority its concept-applications (both doxastic and practical) can claim, and to which it is ultimately responsible. At no stage in its development is any community immune to these Janus-faced retrospective and prospective responsibilities and authority. Nor does the invocation of the historical articulation of the constellation of recognitive authority and responsibility distinctive of discursive traditions constituted by experiential processes warrant assimilating this picture to the sort of theory of objective truth propounded by the early C. S. Peirce, which identifies it with the views “fated” to be held by the community at an “ideal end of inquiry.” The Hegelian account is much more robust and sophisticated than these later faint echoes of it.

The next chapter offers readings of the allegories of Mastery in Hegel’s Self-Consciousness chapter in terms of the recognitive model presented here. A central recurring theme is that if the various interdependencies and symmetries that articulate that model are violated, the result is both a pragmatic and a semantic defect. Genuine normative statuses are not instituted, and as a result, even the normative attitudes that exhibit the structure characteristic of self-consciousness misunderstanding itself according to categories of Mastery fail to be determinately contentful. This is the underlying argument animating the critiques of the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity in all the phases of the allegory of the Master and the Servant. It continues to be the guiding thread running through and tying together the allegories of Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.

METHODOLOGICAL AFTERWORD

Before turning to the task of extracting the nuanced semantic lessons that emerge from those discussions, I want briefly to address some methodological misgivings that might arise concerning the status of the models presented here of the structure of understandings of normativity in terms of Kantian autonomy and Hegelian recognition. First, one might object to the use of models at all. Why import a terminological apparatus that is alien to Hegel’s own elaborate technical vocabulary? What is the point of bolting additional conceptual machinery onto the original? Why not just make sense of it in the same terms Hegel himself used? Second, even if the first worry is responded to or put aside, there are bound to be objections to mobilizing as elaborate an interpretive apparatus as I am proposing for the reading of Hegel’s texts. Is it really plausible that beneath the surface of his (admittedly baroque and daunting) writing lie the sort of intricately articulated structures I discern? Finally, even if these two concerns were blunted, one might still object to the specific kind of model developed here. For one might find objectionable in principle the sort of algebra of normativity epitomized by the various diagrams purporting to dissect both the Kantian autonomy model and the Hegelian recognition model, which build up regimented versions of them as complex constellations of simpler elements and relations. (Of course, these objections by no means exhaust the myriad ways in which my rendering of Hegel’s thought could be dead wrong. I am addressing only some more general methodological worries here.)

As to the first sort of question, I think the real methodological requirement in the vicinity is to be clear about what sort of an interpretation one is offering. I have elsewhere distinguished between de dicto readings and de re readings of philosophical texts.⁹ These two sorts of hermeneutic enterprise are named after two forms of propositional attitude ascriptions. They have different points and different rules. At least a substantial part of the meaning of a set of claims is their inferential role: what follows from them, what would be evidence for or against them, what they are incompatible with, and so on. But they do not play these inferential roles in a vacuum. A lot turns on what collateral premises one conjoins them with in extracting consequences, computing incompatibilities, and so on. De dicto interpretation appeals only to auxiliary hypotheses that are further claims the same author has made elsewhere, or that occur in the work being interpreted. It aims to do something like answer questions that the author might not have asked in the way the author plausibly would have done, or by his or her own lights should have done.

Offering readings of this sort is an honorable and important enterprise. But it is not the only legitimate way to read a text. For one can also ask: Apart from the commitments the author would have acknowledged, the consequences to which he or she would have claimed to be entitled, what is the author really committed or entitled to by the claims acknowledged? Besides the author’s attitudes, one can ask about the author’s actual statuses. To answer this sort of question, one wants to conjoin with the text collateral premises that are true—whether the author knew they were or not. In addition to these two index sorts of readings, one can explore the conceptual content of a set of claims by investigating their consequences and incompatibilities when conjoined with various hypothetical sets of collateral commitments. Here the spirit of the inquiry is subjunctive, perhaps even counterfactual: What would follow from these claims if the following claims were true? It is but a short step then to expanding the conceptual universe afforded by a de dicto reading of the text to include concepts drawn from other ways of thinking, and explore the inferential consequences of index claims in the text within the confines of the inferential consequences and incompatibilities of the expanded realm.

No one of these ways of reading a text offers the unique meaning of it. Each is a legitimate perspective on the multifaceted inferential role of the claims made, from the point of view of different collateral premises. Of course that is not to say that all will be equally illuminating. Reading this part of the Phenomenology in connection with a sketch of the tradition of early modern philosophical thought about normativity, or a history of the successful slave revolt in Haiti, or the Bhagavad Gita is liable to be more productive than reading it in connection with a work on contemporary quantum theory—but you never know.

Wittgenstein notoriously vigorously objected to theorizing in philosophy. “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences,” he says in the Tractatus [TLP 4.111], and this seems to be one claim that he never changed his mind about. In the Investigations he distinguishes philosophical concerns from scientific ones, saying that in philosophy

[w]e may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. [PI §109]

In the same place, he likens the view he rejects to “[t]he conception of thought as a gaseous medium.” I take it that the comparison he is rejecting likens a philosophical phenomenon to something that might be explained in the way the relations among observables in the basic law of gases, PV = nRT, turned out to be explicable in statistical mechanics by postulating unobservables. Inspired by Wittgenstein, Michael Dummett at various points urged that philosophical semantics should eschew the postulation of unobservable theoretical entities. On this basis he thought semantic theorists should reject appeal to truth conditions for sentences and identity conditions for objects, in favor of assertibility conditions for sentences and recognition conditions for objects. For unlike the former, he thought the latter can be read directly off of descriptions of what linguistic practitioners actually do.

I do not accept these methodological constraints as necessary or appropriate. First of all, important as the postulation of theoretical entities is to the empirical sciences, there is plenty of room for distinctively philosophical theories that do postulate unobservables without them therefore becoming indistinguishable from natural scientific theories. Sellars distinguishes within the philosophy of mind between logical behaviorism (as practiced, for instance, by Gilbert Ryle) and philosophical behaviorism (as practiced by his “genius Jones” in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”). The former restricts legitimate concepts of a philosophical psychology to those that can be explicitly constructed in a narrowly behaviorist vocabulary. The latter allows the postulation of what are initially unobservable entities (such as thoughts and sense impressions) to explain observed regularities of behavior. For Sellars, instrumentalism in the philosophy of mind is as objectionable as instrumentalism in the philosophy of science—and for analogous reasons. Theoretical concepts, those that do not (yet) have observational uses, do not in principle differ from concepts of observables in the ontological status of the entities they refer to. They differ only methodologically, in how we find out about those entities. Entities that at some point in the development of inquiry are purely theoretical entities are just those we can make justified claims about only as the result of inferences, whereas observables we have epistemic access to both inferentially and noninferentially, through observation. But that can change, for instance, as new instruments become available. In Sellars’s myth of Jones, thoughts and sense impressions, originally postulated to explain the rationality of overt behavior and the distinctive patterns of observational errors later turn out to be observable by their possessors—as Pluto, originally postulated to explain perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, later came to be observable by new, more powerful telescopes. I argued in discussing Force and Understanding in Chapter 6 that Hegel understands theoretical entities (allegorized as “forces”) in this way. From this point of view, Dummett’s semantic instrumentalism is as unwarranted as insisting on logical, rather than philosophical, behaviorism, simply on the basis (agreed to by all parties to this dispute) that the point of postulating entities not definable in purely behavioristic terms is still to explain behavior: what can be specified in a purely behavioristic vocabulary.

I want to say the same thing about hermeneutic instrumentalism. It can be agreed that the point of offering a specification of the meaning of a text is to make sense of the surface text, perhaps as specified in a narrowly de dicto reading. Here the text as rendered de dicto plays the role of discursive behavior in the philosophy of mind and of observation in empirical science more generally. Hermeneutic instrumentalism restricts legitimate interpretive devices to those that can be assembled entirely from the raw materials that lie on that surface, forbidding the postulation of “unobservables” behind that surface that are only inferentially available. It is analogous to logical behaviorism and Dummett’s semantic instrumentalism, and equally as unwarranted and crippling methodologically. As in the case of empirical science generally, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical semantics, so too in reading a text it can be that adding to Hegel’s texts (both the ones describing the overall view, from the introductory paragraphs, and the texts describing the allegories further on) a model couched in newly added vocabulary yields a whole that is intelligible in a way that the texts taken just by themselves are not.

In fact, the conceptual raw materials of the model I present of the institution of normative statuses by suitably socially complemented normative attitudes adopted by subjects who recognize and are recognized by each other are lightly regimented versions of concepts that do appear both in Hegel’s texts and in the tradition of early modern thought about normativity that Hegel rationally reconstructs. The distinction between statuses and attitudes in the model regiments Hegel’s concepts of “what consciousness is in itself” and “what consciousness is for consciousness.” The normative statuses of authority and responsibility in the model regiment his “independence” and “dependence,” as those concepts apply to normative subjects. The normative attitudes of attributing and acknowledging those statuses in the model regiment his concepts of “what (a) consciousness is for another consciousness” and “what (a) consciousness is for itself.” The distinctions between simple and robust recognition and between general and specific robust recognition, introduced in Chapter 8, further articulate Hegel’s generic notion of “Anerkennung.”

The model constructed from these building blocks certainly moves beyond what is explicit in Hegel’s claims about recognition (and Kant’s claims about autonomy, from which I have claimed it develops). The exactness of the fine structure postulated behind the observable surface brings with it characteristic advantages.¹⁰ Hegel is trying to do something very difficult. It is accordingly important to be as clear as possible about how the theory I am attributing to him manages to satisfy two principal criteria of adequacy—how he pulls two rabbits out of the hat of the considerations assembled from a reading of the tradition he inherits and completes. These are, first, to say exactly what is required for normative statuses that are to begin with merely virtual as the objects of normative attitudes (statuses that are just attributed and acknowledged) to be instituted, actualized as statuses. How is it that reciprocal recognition is to be understood as making that possible? Second, the task is to say how and in what sense the statuses that are instituted socially by suitably complemented attitudes including reciprocal robust general recognition transcend the attitudes that institute them, so as to serve as standards for assessments of the correctness of attitudes toward them. This is where the story about the determination of representational content of statuses and attitudes by the process that is the experience of error that began in the Introduction comes in. It must be as clear as possible how this trick is taken to be pulled off—just how it is supposed to work.

There is a further advantage of the clarity and detail of the model presented in the diagrams in the body of this chapter. For construction of a model is a proof of consistency. The criteria of adequacy that have at their center combining the distinctively modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with the characteristic traditional insistence on the status-dependence of normative attitudes can consistently be satisfied. And they can be satisfied using the conceptual tools Hegel provides, guided by various principles he enunciates. As we shall see, this extends to his criticism of conceptions of pure independence of attitudes in immediately constituting normative statuses, under the heading of self-consciousness understanding itself according to categories of Mastery—a genus that Hegel thinks includes the otherwise progressive modern Kantian autonomy model.

Chapter 9

The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition

The Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes