The main task of this concluding chapter is to summarize the philosophical view I take Hegel to bring us to by the end of the Phänomenologie des Geistes, after we have been educated by traversing the path he rehearses for us. I express that view in my preferred terminology rather than his, and ignore other things he thinks that seem to me extraneous to and potentially distracting from his central philosophical contribution. Hegel has views about practically everything. But the story I have told here is focused on one central, core topic: the nature of discursive activity and the sort of conceptual contentfulness things show up as having in virtue of their involvement with that kind of activity. As I read him, everything else he addresses should be understood to stand downstream in the order of explanation from his pragmatist semantic insights.
This telling of Hegel’s story revolves around three master ideas. First, on the semantic side, is a nonpsychological understanding of conceptual contentfulness in terms of determinate negation. Second, on the pragmatic side, is a social understanding of normativity in terms of mutual recognition. Third, articulating his pragmatism, is a historical understanding of the relations between conceptual content and implicitly normative discursive practices in terms of an expressive process of recollection. Each of these ideas comprises a number of subsidiary ones, and has an intricate fine structure relating them. The model of expression as recollection—the story about what one must do to count as thereby making explicit something that was implicit—is in many ways the keystone of the edifice. It explains the representational semantic and cognitive relation between how things appear “for consciousness” on the subjective side of thought and how things really are “in themselves” on the objective side of being. It explains the constitutive reciprocal relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses: how attitudes both institute norms and answer to them. And it explains the relations between those two stories: how normative practices bring about semantic relations. (In Hegel’s terms, explaining how cognition presupposes recognition is explaining how consciousness presupposes self-consciousness.) Conceptual idealism is a kind of pragmatism, in virtue of the way what one is practically doing in recollecting (producing a retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a course of experience as expressively progressive) is the basis for an expressive semantic account of relations of representation.
Hegel thinks that once we properly understand in his recollective terms the process of experience that both determines and expresses conceptual contents, we will explicitly acknowledge practical commitments concerning how we ought to treat one another that we will see as having been implicit in our discursive activity all along. Exercising the discursive capacities to think determinate thoughts (to take the objective world to be one way rather than another) and to formulate definite intentions (commitments to make the objective world be one way rather than another) commits knowing and acting subjects to adopting definite kinds of recognitive attitudes to each other, and so to instituting a special kind of recognitive community. Heightening our specifically semantic self-consciousness is the road to practical self-improvement. Hegel’s astonishing aspiration is for a morally edifying semantics. The truth shall set us free, and guide us to a new age of Geist whose normative structure is as much an improvement over the modern as the modern was over the traditional. It is a pragmatist semantic truth: an understanding of what is required for the determinate contentfulness of concepts.
The path that leads from cognition to recognition goes through the pragmatist idea that the content of concepts is properly intelligible only in a larger explanatory context that includes the use of those concepts: the practices of applying them in judgment and practical agency that must also be intelligible as instituting the norms that govern such applications. Bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism understands conceptual content as coming in two forms: the subjective, deontic normative form of thoughts and the objective, alethic modal form of facts. Objective idealism asserts the reciprocal sense-dependence of those two different forms. Conceptual idealism explains the intimate relations between the two forms of conceptual content (the representational dimension of semantics) in terms of what subjects do in recollectively retrospectively rationally reconstructing their experience into the form of expressively progressive cumulative revelations for consciousness of how things really are, in themselves. The momentous transformation from modernity to the postmodern age of trust will take place when we give our practical, norm-instituting recognitive attitudes this magnanimous recollective shape. Recognition as recollection is forgiveness. The process and practice of recollection and the distinctive kind of rationality it embodies, which emerge from the investigation of what it means for conceptual content to be determinate, are the basis of the recognitive relations, and hence the normative structure, characteristic of the heralded, nascent third form of Geist.
I begin rehearsing the story that has this edifying punchline by introducing the topic of Geist, the sense in which it has a large-scale metaphysical history, and the idea of a recollective phenomenology rehearsing that history. As we have seen, the modern stage in the development of Geist suffers from the metaphysical defect he calls “alienation” [Entfremdung]. I consider four contemporary philosophical issues that are recognizably symptoms of alienation, when it is understood as I recommend. I then explain the two main claims that Hegel makes in his Preface. They are both focused on truth. Like most prefaces, it was written after the body of the work was completed, and so serves in many ways as his conclusion. The first of the core claims of the Preface is his account of the experience of error as the way of truth, epitomized in his memorable dictum that “truth is a vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a soul sober.” The second is the doctrine that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.” Along the way I rehearse some of the lessons we have learned about normativity, and pull together a number of threads under the heading of Hegel’s logical, metaphysical, and semantic holism.
I close by considering more closely the morally edifying, practically uplifting lesson we are supposed to learn from the extended investigation of the relations between conceptual content and the use of concepts in cognition and intentional action. Recollection has emerged as the core of the pragmatist semantic story Hegel tells. The pragmatism of that story consists in the way conceptual content is understood functionally, in terms of the role it plays in implicitly norm-governed discursive practices. Hegel’s normative pragmatics understands the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses according to the model of mutual recognition. When norm-instituting, content-conferring recognitive social practices are explicitly and self-consciously given the historical form of recollection, the result is a distinctive kind of recognitive community, a distinctive kind of normativity, and a distinctive kind of intentional agency relating the community, the norms, and the self-conscious individual community members who adopt those recollective recognitive practical attitudes toward one another. Recognition that includes commitment to the magnanimous recollective rationalization of norms reachieves sittlich, unalienated practical acknowledgment of the authority of norms over attitudes, which are applications of those norms, and combines it with the acknowledgment of the authority of instituting attitudes over instituted norms that is the characteristic insight of modernity. The heroic, postmodern, magnanimous form of self-conscious intentional agency that is governed by norms instituted by the recollective recognitive attitudes of forgiveness and confession is the practical ideal projected by Hegel’s semantic theory.
In order to write the Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel had first to come up with its topic: Geist. There is clearly a sense in which no one had ever thought about this topic before he did. Yet it is part of his argument that everyone had been thinking about it all along. Further, he had to explain how the distinctive kind of invention and discovery, at once a making and a finding, that he was engaged in with the concept of Geist, is a basic feature of concept-use as such. The idea of a “phenomenology” of Geist is the idea that rehearsing the right sort of survey of the ways in which Geist has shown up to us (which is to itself) will reveal what it has in fact always been. Such a phenomenology is a retrospective recollective narrative that makes explicit a noumenal reality found to be already implicit in its various phenomenal appearances, which are what we have made of it, the way it has appeared to us.
Hegel’s conception of Geist is what he makes of Kant’s revolutionary insight into the fundamentally normative character of discursive intentionality. That is the idea (so often invoked in these pages) that what distinguishes judgments and intentional doings from the performances of merely natural creatures is that they are things their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for, as exercises of their authority. They express commitments of knowers and agents, whose entitlement to those commitments is always potentially at issue. Indeed, knowers and agents count as rational subjects just insofar as assessment of their entitlement to doxastic and practical commitments depends on the reasons they have for those judgments and intentions.
Hegel synthesizes Kant’s normative understanding of mindedness with his reading of Enlightenment traditions of thought about the nature of normativity to yield a naturalized social account of norms. On his account, normative statuses are social statuses. He takes them to be products of the practices of those who attribute and are governed by and assessed according to those norms. In particular, he understands normative statuses of authority and responsibility as instituted by normative attitudes. The social structure of the constellation of what he calls “recognitive” attitudes determines the metaphysical structure of the resulting forms of normativity. What such a constellation of practical attitudes institutes is at once recognitive communities (“social substance”) and the self-conscious individual normative selves, which are the subjects of normative statuses just insofar as they are members of such communities constituted by their attitudes. What is brought into existence in this way is what Hegel calls “Geist.” Geist comprises all our normative doings, and everything they make possible: all the norms and recognitive attitudes and their subjects (“subjective Geist”), the practices they engage in and the communities and institutions they produce (“objective Geist”). Geist is us described in a normative vocabulary.
A metaphysics of Geist is such a vocabulary. Hegel’s preferred vocabulary for discussing things on the normative side of subjects begins by distinguishing what things are in themselves from what they are for (a) consciousness. I have rendered this application of the reality / appearance distinction in terms of the distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes. The two principal normative statuses for Hegel are independence and dependence. I have rendered these as authority and responsibility. The two principal normative attitudes for Hegel are what something is for itself, and what it is for another. I have rendered this basic distinction of social perspective as that between acknowledging a commitment (responsibility), or claiming authority for oneself, and attributing responsibility or authority to another. The subjects of these normative statuses and attitudes are individual self-conscious selves, who are particular desiring biological creatures, who become self-conscious individual selves in virtue of being members of a recognitive community—that is, falling under a Hegelian universal. (In general, as Hegel uses these logical terms, individuals are particulars as characterized by universals.) All the terms structuring the metaphysical vocabulary Hegel uses to discuss Geist, on the side of knowing and acting subjects—“in itself” / “for consciousness,” “independence” / “dependence,” and “particular” / “universal” / “individual”—have corresponding uses on the objective side of natural objects known and acted upon. That this is so is an essential element of Hegel’s idealism. How and why the concepts articulating the metaphysics of normativity also apply to objective nature is what that idealism proposes to teach us.
In spite of these basic metaphysical concepts being amphibious between the subjective and objective poles of the intentional nexus, one of Hegel’s most basic claims is that normative, geistig things are structurally different from natural ones. For they have histories rather than natures. To say that something has a history in this special sense is to say that it is subject to a special kind of self-constitutive developmental process. It doesn’t just change, it changes itself. The paradigmatic case is individual selves, the subjects of normative statuses and attitudes. As such subjects, they are not only something in themselves (their normative statuses); they are something for themselves (their normative attitudes). The normative attitudes are the commitments (responsibilities) and entitlements (authority)—that is, the normative statuses—they in practice take (acknowledge or claim) themselves to have. As having such attitudes, individual normative subjects are self-conscious, just in the sense of being something for themselves.
One of Hegel’s big ideas is that what self-conscious subjects are in themselves essentially depends on what they are for themselves. For he takes it that normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes of reciprocal recognition. Such statuses, what one is in oneself, are the product of what one is for others and what one is for oneself—what one is recognized as by those one recognizes. And what one is for them depends on what one is for oneself. Paradigmatically, what one is held responsible for depends on what responsibilities one acknowledges. So any subject’s statuses depend on its attitudes: what others are for it (whom it recognizes) and what it is for itself. It by no means follows that a subject simply is whatever it takes itself to be. The recognitive metaphysics of normativity is a social metaphysics. The recognitive attitudes of others make just as important and essential a contribution to constituting normative statuses as the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: the statuses it attributes to itself and to others.
Because subjects of normative statuses are essentially self-conscious in the sense that what they are in themselves depends upon what they are for themselves, they are subjects of a distinctive kind of self-constitutive developmental process. For if their attitudes change, so do their statuses. Changing what they are for themselves (or, indeed, what others are for them, the commitments and entitlements they attribute as well as those they acknowledge or claim—for instance, whom they recognize) can change what they are in themselves. That change in what they are in themselves, their statuses, can produce in turn a change in what they are for themselves or for others—resulting in a further change in what they are in themselves. Geistig items, which are what they are as the ever-changing products of such a cascade of interdigitated changes of attitude and status, can be understood only historically—that is, by recounting a narrative recollecting or reconstructing the history of their development. To understand them, one must tell a story about how they got to be what they are.
This is true not only of essentially self-conscious individual selves, who are subjects of normative attitudes and statuses. This historical character is inherited by other geistig items. Particular electrons and animals, as natural, can have pasts. This individual electron was bound first in this atom, then in that one. This individual animal first flourished in that environment, and then struggled in this one. But the concepts electron and species, as normative, geistig things, have histories. For the contents of those concepts, what they are in themselves, depends on the practical attitudes manifested in actual applications of those concepts—what they are for their users. As the applications change, so too do the contents expressed. Those conceptual contents determine what one has endorsed, committed oneself to, or made oneself responsible for in judging. They are what one has invested one’s cognitive authority in. They determine the normative statuses one acknowledges or attributes in using or applying those concepts—that is, in adopting the discursive attitudes that both shape and reveal (make and find) those contents.
It is a consequence of the fact that all of its components are in this sense historical entities that the whole constellation of normative subjects and their attitudes, statuses, practices, communities, and institutions that is Geist must itself have a history. One of Hegel’s master ideas is that in addition to what follows from the historicity of the smaller normative items it comprises, the structure of Geist as a whole undergoes large-scale historical transformations. In particular, he thinks that the biggest, most momentous event in human history—simply the single most important thing that ever happened to us—is a vast change in the most basic structure of normativity. This is the transition from the traditional form of Geist to its modern form. This titanic sea change affects every aspect of the normative realm: the self-conscious normative selves or subjects themselves, the norms they are governed by (both in the sense of being guided by and in the sense of being assessed according to), their understanding of and attitudes toward those norms, and the practices, institutions, and communities articulated by those norms. All the canonical philosophers from Descartes through Kant were centrally engaged in developing the modern understanding of discursive normativity in its theoretical and practical forms. But Hegel was the first to take modernity in all its multifarious aspects—intellectual, political, economic, institutional, and psychological—as a single phenomenon, a single topic of research. What unifies it, on his account, is the way the structure of normativity it articulates differs from the traditional structure of normativity out of which it developed. The concept of Geist is in no small part delineated for Hegel by this contrast between traditional and modern structures normativity can take and has taken.
The traditional conception of Geist understands norms as objective in much the same sense that the natural world is objective. Normative statuses, paradigmatically the authority of the superior to command and the responsibility of the subordinate to obey, are a feature of how things simply are—just part of the furniture of the world. The most basic metaphysical structure of that world is epitomized by the scala naturae, the Great Chain of Being, stretching from God, through the celestial hierarchy of his thrones and dominions, down through emperors, kings, and lords, to people of various ignoble stations, animals, and inorganic nature. It orders all things by those normative relations of subordination. The “fitnesses” of things, how it is appropriate that they be, what they ought to be, are built into how things in fact are. Those who cannot see those appropriatenesses are barbarians—or simply not properly brought up. Normative proprieties, no less than natural properties, are found, not made. We may make some laws. But the warrants for those laws, what makes them binding on us, are to be found outside of us, in the nature of things. Our task is properly to acknowledge their authority, by conforming our practical attitudes to those antecedently existing objective norms. We are made what we are, as geistig, normative beings, by the norms (the normative statuses) by which we are governed and assessed.
The modern conception of Geist understands norms as subjective products of our activities and attitudes. The subjective normative realm is sharply distinguished from the objective natural realm. The Enlightenment had the idea that there were no normative statuses of authority and responsibility (superiority and subordination) in the objective world, before we started practically taking or treating each other as authoritative or responsible (superior and subordinate). Norms are not found, but made. Indeed, they are instituted by our practical attitudes. Social contract theories of political obligation are paradigmatic of this Enlightenment line of thought. Obligations are understood as brought about by social normative attitudes such as promising, agreeing, or contracting. Normative significances are like cloaks thrown over natural things (“imputed” to them) by the role they play in our practices of praising and blaming, holding each other responsible, treating each other as having authority or being responsible. The discovery at the core of modernity is the realization that we are self-made creatures. The norms that make us the geistig beings we are, are our own products. From the modern point of view, when thinking traditionally we fetishized norms, in the technical sense of the term Marx introduced to express this Hegelian idea. We treated what in fact were the products of our own activities as though they were objective things independent of us.
The modern realization of the constitutive role of our attitudes in instituting norms is a new, deeper form of self-consciousness. It is consciousness of ourselves as essentially self-conscious, so that what we are in ourselves (our normative statuses) essentially depends on what we are for ourselves (our normative attitudes toward ourselves and each other). Hegel takes it that this insight is a realization: the appreciation of something that always was true of us, without us knowing it. So it is learning something about normative selfhood. But because we are in fact essentially self-conscious beings, this change in what we moderns are for ourselves, our attitudes, changes also what we are in ourselves—the kind of normative beings we are. The structure of normativity itself changes when we become self-conscious in this sense characteristic of modernity. The kind of authority we exercise, the sort of responsibilities we undertake and attribute, our normative practices, institutions, and communities all change with this change in self-conception. (Again, that is not to say that they all automatically become just whatever we take them to be.) That change is the cataclysmic advent of modernity.
Expressed in the most general terms articulating Hegel’s metaphysics of normativity, the structural transformation defining the progressive move from traditional to modern Geist is that from appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes to appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. In the traditional structure of Geist, the norms are independent, in the sense of authoritative. Our normative attitudes, what we take to be correct or appropriate, who we treat as authoritative or responsible, are responsible to the independent (authoritative) norms, which set standards for assessing those attitudes. In the modern structure of Geist, our attitudes are independent, in the sense of exercising authority over normative statuses. They institute statuses of authority and responsibility.
The issue that distinguishes the premodern and modern structures of normativity is the relative normative and explanatory priority of norms (normative statuses) and normative attitudes. Are there norms that are objective in the sense of being attitude-independent? The tradition says yes, and modernity says no. Does the bindingness of norms come first, or the subjects’ attitudes of acknowledging and attributing that bindingness? Is the normative force of statuses such as authority and responsibility conditioned on the attitudes of those who attribute or possess such statuses? The principal dimension of priority here is normative: the status-dependence of attitudes and the attitude-dependence of statuses is a question of the authority of the one over the other. But these normative relationships entail explanatory ones, too. In the traditional structure of Geist, there is a normative pressure pushing attitudes to conform to norms because individual normative subjects are liable to criticism insofar as their attitudes do not conform to the objective norms. In the modern structure of Geist, claims about what the norms are can be justified only by appeal to the attitudes that acknowledge or attribute them.
Hegel regards the transition to modern forms of Geist as expressively progressive. Something important about what Geist always was implicitly or in itself becomes explicit for it with modern self-consciousness. Normative statuses really are attitude-dependent. The Enlightenment is quite right that apart from practical attitudes of attributing and acknowledging them, there are no normative statuses of responsibility and authority. In failing to understand that, traditional Geist was opaque to itself in ways that modern Geist is not. This is a defect in the normative self-consciousness native to Geist with that premodern structure, and hence to the normative selves that are what they are in virtue of being governed by norms with that practical structure.
But the modern form of Geist is also defective. Its defect is the mirror image of the defect of the traditional form of Geist. For each has seized one-sidedly on just one of two complementary aspects of the metaphysics of normativity, making no room for appreciation of the other. The premodern understanding of normativity holds fast to the status-dependence of normative attitudes, ignoring the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The modern understanding of normativity holds fast to the attitude-dependence of normative statuses, ignoring the status-dependence of normative attitudes. In fact, according to Hegel’s metaphysics of normativity, the dependence relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses are reciprocal. Each exercises a distinctive kind of authority over the other, and each is accordingly responsible to the other in a distinctive way. A proper understanding requires appreciating both the sense in which statuses are responsible to attitudes (as the moderns do) and the sense in which attitudes are responsible to statuses (as the tradition does).
The failure of modern normative self-consciousness to appreciate the status-dependence of normative attitudes Hegel calls “alienation” [Entfremdung]. In the distinctively modern form of Geist, he thinks, realizing the attitude-dependence of normative statuses is incompatible with treating normative statuses as exercising authority over normative attitudes. The authority of norms over attitudes is undercut. The norms cannot be understood as genuinely binding on the practical attitudes of normative subjects, including those expressed in intentional actions. The cost of appreciating the authority of attitudes over statuses is to lose sight of the complementary responsibility of attitudes to statuses. This is the bindingness or validity (Kant’s “Verbindlichkeit,” “Gültigkeit”) of norms. Practically acknowledging the authority of norms over attitudes is what Hegel calls “Sittlichkeit.” It is what the traditional premodern form of Geist got right. Hegel thinks that when we realized that we are responsible for our norms, we lost sight of the crucial sense in which we are also responsible to them. The good insight that our attitudes institute the norms is stretched inappropriately into the idea that there are only attitudes, which answer to nothing outside those attitudes. Modern Geist is not sittlich, but alienated.
The ultimate theoretical challenge is to formulate a metaphysics of normativity that overcomes the one-sidedness that both the traditional and the modern forms of Geist exhibit. This is to do justice at once to the sittlich appreciation of the authority of norms over attitudes and to the self-conscious appreciation of the authority of attitudes over norms. Retaining the advance in self-consciousness of modernity while overcoming its alienation would usher in a new, self-conscious sittlich structure of Geist—a third phase in human history. This is what I call the “age of trust,” after the final form of reciprocal recognition that structures it.
The key to a metaphysics of normativity that adequately appreciates the reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility between norms and normative attitudes—acknowledging both the status-dependence of attitudes and the attitude-dependence of statuses—is to be found in understanding what is required for both normative statuses and normative attitudes to be determinately contentful. That is, it lies in understanding the relations between a normative pragmatics and a semantics that explains the concept of determinate conceptual content. At the center of Hegel’s account lies the process of experience [Erfahrung] that is at once the application and the institution of determinately contentful conceptual norms. This process of determining the conceptual norms is structured by normative relations of authority and responsibility that have the historical recognitive structure of a tradition. If conceptual contents are understood as determinate in the sense of the tradition Kant inherited (and Frege continued), according to metaconcepts exhibiting the structure Hegel calls “Verstand,” the reciprocity of authority and responsibility that relate norms and attitudes is unintelligible. The attitude-dependence of normative statuses can be made sense of only at the cost of alienation: being unable to make sense of the sittlich status-dependence of normative attitudes. What is needed is Hegel’s new understanding of the determinateness of conceptual contents, according to metaconcepts exhibiting the structure he calls “Vernunft.” The notion of determinate conceptual content is to be understood in broadly functional terms—that is, in terms of the role such contents play in the interplay of normative attitudes and normative statuses in the process of experience. Hegel’s semantics arises as a chapter in his normative pragmatic story. In this sense, he offers a pragmatist account of the relation between pragmatics and semantics. The overall aim of the Phenomenology of Spirit, as I understand it, is to introduce the constellation of metaconcepts Vernunft comprises, and to deploy them to explain both the process of experience structured by reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility relating normative statuses and normative attitudes and how the conceptual contents applied by adopting those statuses and attitudes are determined by the very same experiential process that is their application.
Before rehearsing how we are to understand the relations between norms, normative attitudes, and conceptual contents in the heralded third, postmodern phase of Geist—the age of trust—it will be helpful to consider in further detail the modern phenomenon of alienation that must be overcome to achieve that ideal of sittlich subjective self-consciousness. Hegel sees alienation as inextricably woven into the metaphysics of normativity characteristic of modernity, deforming our actual norms and attitudes (what they are in themselves) by deforming our understanding of them (what they are for us). If he is right, then alienation should be manifestly pervasive in our contemporary philosophical understanding of normativity, once he has opened our eyes to see it. Is it?
I want to point to some familiar lines of thought that offer evidence for Hegel’s diagnosis, two centuries on. The first and most obvious is moral or ethical relativism. Next, we can look to the principal twentieth-century philosopher who rediscovered Kant’s revolutionary insight into the fundamentally normative character of intentionality, and placed that discovery at the center of his problematic: the later Wittgenstein. From the point of view of what we have made of Hegel’s notion of alienation, it is interesting to consider both the skeptical semantic worry Kripke extracts from Wittgenstein in his book on rule following and a more general characterization of the later Wittgenstein’s largest philosophical concerns. A further test case is what contemporary jurisprudential theory finds puzzling about the institution of legal norms in the case of “judge-made law”—turning on its head the example I have appealed to at various places in this work in articulating Hegel’s positive view. Finally, reductive naturalism, which evidently is a pervasive party in contemporary philosophical debates, shows up as a paradigmatic form of Hegelian alienation, when we understand the latter as suggested here. Other candidate illustrations abound, but perhaps these suffice to make the point that the large-scale philosophical tendencies and temptations Hegel takes to be pathological symptoms of modernity are still alive and abroad in the land. If and insofar as they are characteristic of our time, we ought to be all the more interested in the details of his diagnosis, and the shape of the theoretical and practical therapy that he recommends.
In the broad terms I have used to characterize it here, alienation is what happens when appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses makes theoretically and practically unintelligible the status-dependence of normative attitudes—that is, the sittlich appreciation of the genuine bindingness of norms, their authority. Metaethical moral relativism is a relatively straightforward, explicit version of this phenomenon. For what moral norms are taken to be relative to is moral normative attitudes. This idea first becomes tempting with an anthropological understanding of the cultural diversity of normative attitudes as expressed in the various practices, traditions, institutions, and avowed beliefs of different groups. There evidently are substantial differences in what people practically take to be appropriate and inappropriate, obligatory and permitted. Whether or not this diversity of attitudes is treated as disagreement, the thought is not far off that there might be no fact of the matter determining one of these conflicting constellations of practical attitudes as correct. In particular, insofar as one thinks that moral normative statuses (what really is right or wrong) do not swing free of normative attitudes (in one expressivist tradition thought of as “sentiments”) of praise or blame, approval or disapproval—that is, insofar as one appreciates the attitude-dependence of those norms or normative statuses—the systematic variation of attitudes with cultural circumstances undercuts the validity claims of any particular one. While metaethical moral relativism is by no means a consensus view among contemporary theorists of this dimension of normativity (though it has a number of distinguished proponents), its popularity and easy accessibility will be attested to by anyone who has taught undergraduate introductory surveys of moral theory. In this population, at least, as a matter of sociological fact it seems to be contested principally by those whose religious convictions lead them to premodern rejection of any form of attitude-dependence of moral norms.
Relativist skepticism about moral norms as a response to observed variations in moral normative attitudes is an obvious expression of Hegelian alienation. That the skeptical arguments about semantic norms that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein are also expressions of alienation in Hegel’s sense is much less clear. But in fact Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s argument essentially consists in the confrontation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the attitude-dependence of normative statuses, drawing the conclusion that the latter makes the former unintelligible.
Kripke begins with what is in fact a Kantian insight: applying a concept has normative consequences.1 Meaning plus by “+” includes undertaking commitments as to how it would be correct to apply the expression in cases beyond those in which I actually apply it. In the language I have been using to articulate Hegel’s views, adopting a determinately contentful attitude—for instance, acquiring a belief or forming an intention—is undertaking (or attributing) a normative status. The commitment undertaken, the status acquired by using the expression, is significant for assessments of the correctness of future applications. That status is a commitment or responsibility that one undertakes. Having such a status is subjecting oneself to a norm, in the sense of making oneself liable to assessments of the correctness of one’s attitudes, according to the standard set by the norm. The content of the normative status (here, belief or intention) determines what norm one makes oneself liable to by acquiring that status, by adopting an attitude that is the undertaking of that status. The content of the commitment (e.g., the concept plus) is the standard according to which attitudes expressed using “+” are to be assessed. In other words, the determinate contentfulness of normative attitudes is intelligible only in terms of the authority that normative statuses (the commitments one undertakes in expressing a belief or forming an intention using “+”) have over those attitudes. This is the status-dependence of normative attitudes. The observation that sets the stage for Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s argument is that the determinate contentfulness of normative attitudes is intelligible only insofar as those attitudes are understood as responsible to norms—that is, only insofar as normative statuses, in the form of the commitments one undertakes by believing or intending, are authoritative with respect to assessments of the correctness or success of the attitudes in question.
The second step in setting up the skeptical argument directed against the criterion of adequacy of making sense of the status-dependence of normative attitudes then appeals to the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. We can ask: What is the source of the norms that set standards for assessments of correctness of the attitudes that are applications of concepts such as plus? Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s second claim is that only the use of the expression can confer that content on it. All there is to determine the content of the concept applied, and so the norm that governs applications of it (in the sense of providing a standard of normative assessments of correctness for those applications) is the way it has been applied, the attitudes that have in fact been adopted. So the question becomes: What fact is it about the use of the expression “+” in virtue of which it means plus? The use of the expression consists in adopting attitudes expressed by means of it: undertaking and attributing commitments, whether theoretical, in the form of beliefs, or practical, in the form of intentions. So the challenge becomes explaining how the adoption of a sequence of prior attitudes can determine a norm governing which possible future applications would be correct. How are we to understand those attitudes as exercising the appropriate authority to institute determinately contentful normative statuses—the attitude-dependence of those statuses?
The third move in the argument is then the claim that there is no way to explain how any course of past actual applications of a concept can determine a normative standard for assessing the correctness of novel possible future uses. How is such a passage from an “is” to an “ought” to be justified? Past usage consists of a finite number of candidate cases where the term was in fact applied, and a finite number of candidate cases where its application was withheld. How is that supposed to determine how it would be correct to apply (or withhold application of) the concept in an infinite number of future cases? What gives those past applications binding normative force over future ones? Here, though tempting, it is no help to appeal not only to actual applications, but to dispositions to apply the concept. For such dispositions will not underwrite a notion of mistaken application robust enough to make sense of the idea that one might be disposed to make mistakes. As Wittgenstein says, if whatever seems right to me is right, then there can be no question of right or wrong. [PI §258] Further, even if we can tell a story about the origin of normative force in nonnormative matters of fact—the attitudes that have actually been adopted—and so justify a transition from “is” to “ought,” the question will still remain: which ought, which determinately contentful norm, of all the ones compatible with the actual prior applications, should be taken to be instituted thereby? For there are many ways to “go on in the same way” as the prior applications, and for any of them a story can be told about why it is the right one. And it seems that appealing to definitional or inferential connections to other concepts—defining addition in terms of counting, plus in terms of successor—merely puts off the issue, because the same sort of question can be raised about the institution or the determinate contents of those conceptual norms by prior applications of them.
The conclusion is that if we accept that all there is to institute a conceptual norm is prior uses of the concept (and perhaps the use of related concepts, for which the same issue arises), then it is hard to see how such uses can institute a norm that is sufficiently determinate to serve as a standard of correctness for an indefinite number of further possible uses. That is, accepting the attitude-dependence of normative statuses seems to rule out the authority of those attitude-instituted norms over further attitudes: the status-dependence (norm-governedness or responsibility to a norm) of normative attitudes. In gesturing at the familiar argument of Kripke’s Wittgenstein, I am ignoring a host of subtleties, because I am after only one conclusion: the argument is a paradigm case of the alienation Hegel diagnoses as the worm in the apple of modernity. It is a particularly important contemporary philosophical manifestation of that alienation, because it directly addresses the issue of how to understand determinately contentful conceptual norms, and it is one of the master ideas of the reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology that I have been offering here that this topic is at the core of the book. It is part of that claim that in 1806 Hegel already foresaw the problem that Kripke’s Wittgenstein raises. It is accordingly a principal criterion of adequacy of the account I attribute to him of how to overcome alienation and reconcile a sittlich appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes with a modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses that it provide a pointed and powerful response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical semantic challenge. The account Hegel offers splits the difference between what Kripke calls “straight” and “skeptical” solutions to the problem. It is like the straight solutions in that it explains what is required for claims about what someone means and what the determinate content of their normative statuses and attitudes is to be true. It is like the skeptical solutions in that it agrees that the dilemma posed by the apparent conflict between the status-dependence of discursive normative attitudes and the attitude-dependence of discursive norms cannot be resolved in terms articulated according to the traditional modern philosophical metaconcepts of Verstand, but only if we shift to thinking about truth and determinateness according to the philosophical metaconcepts of Vernunft. In any case, insofar as Hegel’s counts for this reason as a skeptical response, it is a very different one from the proposal Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, of replacing talk of truth conditions with talk of assertibility conditions.
I think there are good and sufficient reasons to doubt that Wittgenstein endorses the response Kripke suggests for him. And though Wittgenstein points out many of the raw materials Hegel deploys in his account, I do not think he does or would endorse the detailed, theoretically ambitious, constructive recollective metaphysics of normativity Hegel develops by assembling and processing them as he does. But at the level of abstraction at which I have described it, using the terms I propose for understanding Hegel’s, I think Kripke is right to see Wittgenstein in effect as centrally concerned with the difficulty of reconciling commitment to the status-dependence of discursive normative attitudes with commitment to the attitude-dependence of discursive normative statuses. And I take it that, like Hegel, Wittgenstein thinks it is absolutely essential to appreciate both of these apparently incompatible but actually complementary aspects of discursive social practices.
Wittgenstein clearly did—as far as can be told, independently—recover the Kantian insight into the fundamentally normative character of intentionality. He understands that being in an intentional state, such as having a belief or an intention, includes having a kind of normative status. For it involves committing oneself as to how things are or are to be. In believing or intending one essentially makes oneself liable to normative assessments of the correctness of the belief or the success of the intention. And he is interested in a certain kind of puzzlement we might have about the nature of that normative significance. How are we to understand the way intentional states, as it were, reach out to various possible states of affairs and sort them into those that are and those that are not in accord with the content of the state?
Someone says to me: “Show the children a game.” I teach them gambling with dice, and the other says “I didn’t mean that sort of game.” Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order? [PI §70]
The thought is that the retrospective claim about what was meant, intended, ordered, or requested is quite correct: he did not mean that kind of game. But what, exactly, does that fact consist in? We might find ourselves puzzled about this normative significance, as about how a signpost (“considered just as a piece of wood”) can show us the right way to go.
This question is the first move that sets up the problematic of Kripke’s Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein has concerns broader than those that show up there—concerns that also articulate the alienation characteristic of the modern metaphysics of normativity. Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with processes and practices of learning language games is often remarked upon. Less often noticed, but at least equally central to his thought are the processes and practices of extending a familiar language game to a novel one. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that he takes the way in which an extended language game can grow out of a more restricted one to be the most central and essential discursive phenomenon. It is for this reason, I think, that he is pessimistic about the prospects for systematic semantic theorizing about language—the project of associating meanings with expressions in such a way that even the most basic proprieties of their use could be systematically computed from those meanings. For even if one could achieve such a codification, it would hold at most for a brief time slice of the evolving and developing language, liable to falsification by the next transformative extension. It is because it is at every stage the product of a multifarious process of organic growth that language is at every stage in its development a “motley”—a messy, unsurveyable assemblage of suburbs that have grown out of adjoining regions without a central downtown.2
It seems to be the contingency of the budding and sprouting course of development of discursive practices that matters most to Wittgenstein. What developments of a practice take place depends to begin with on what extensions practitioners can catch on to, so that they practically agree about “how to go on” in new cases. These can turn on quirks of embodiment, large and small. (“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”3) But what extensions are in this sense practically possible for a community can also depend on the details of the forms of life they already share and can learn and teach each other to project to new situations. Whether a particular local projection of one practice into another that people could learn actually takes place also depends on which among all the practically possible candidates in fact arise, and which of those happen to catch on in the community. The observation motivating this line of thought is that if any of these contingent matters of fact had been different, the contents of our concepts, and hence the norms we bind ourselves to by using them in thought and judgment, would be different. But the occurrence of those contingencies does not provide reasons that justify talking as we do rather than some other way. “In” means something different, is governed by different norms, because we could and did extend our purely spatial use from applying to gold in teeth to applying also to pain in teeth. One lesson illustrated and reinforced by many of Wittgenstein’s anecdotes is that the matters of fact (of quite various kinds) on which the boundaries of the norms that govern various expressions are subjunctively and counterfactually dependent, are contingent in the sense that they could have been different—some features of our embodiment and the history of our practices more easily, and others less easily.
A foreseeable consequence of appreciating these contingencies conditioning our practices is a delegitimizing of the norms whose contingency has been revealed. This undercutting of the rational bindingness of the norms is alienation in Hegel’s sense. A familiar example of this general phenomenon happens when a young one realizes that the religious commitments she has always taken for granted are as they are because of the community she was born into—that she is a Baptist because her parents and everyone they know are Baptists, and that had they all instead been Unitarians, Buddhists, or Muslims, she would have been, too. Realizing the contingencies on which her commitments are counterfactually dependent has the effect of bringing into question their justification, and so their normative force. What is the warrant for taking seriously the claim of those norms, for practically treating them as binding, once the accidental character of the standard for assessment they provide has been revealed? Pointing to the radical contingencies that our conceptual norms are subjunctively dependent upon poses a threat to our understanding of those norms as rationally binding on us. The challenge is to see why, if the norms are to this extent and in this way our products, they can nonetheless be understood to be binding on us, to be correctly used this way and not that. How can conceptual norms provide us with reasons to apply them one way rather than another, given their counterfactual dependence on contingencies that do not provide reasons for the contents of those norms to be as they are, rather than some other way?
The legitimation problem is not just that there are true counterfactuals to the effect that if some contingent fact had been different, the content of the norm in question would have been different. It is that those counterfactuals codify the dependence of the attitude of, for instance, believing (acknowledging or undertaking a doxastic commitment) on the occurrence of events that do not provide reasons or evidence justifying the content believed. That the believer was born into a Baptist community is not evidence for the truth of predestination. This is the structure that underlies the delegitimizing force of genealogical explanations generally. The great unmaskers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, all told stories of this shape. If one’s approval of treating labor as a commodity is due to one’s bourgeois upbringing, if one’s Christian humility is the result of ressentiment, if one’s authoritarianism should be understood as stemming from unresolved conflicts left over from the Family Romance, then the justifiability and hence the normative force, the authority, of those commitments is challenged. For being raised in bourgeois circumstances is not evidence for the justice of labor markets, being riven with ressentiment does not provide reasons for esteeming humility, and Oedipal rivalry with one’s father does not justify the contents of authoritarian attitudes. Genealogies point to causes of attitudes that are contingent relative to the norms articulating the contents of the concepts, showing them to be as they are because of those contingencies, in the sense that these conditions and the occurrence of these events do not provide reasons for applying the concepts one way rather than another. They do not provide evidence that could be appealed to in justifying the application or withholding of the application of the concept in particular cases.
Exhibiting these sorts of causes for attitudes undercuts the sittlich claim of those attitudes to be responsive and responsible to the authority of reasons provided by the norms those attitudes acknowledge. In the cases to the fore for Wittgenstein, the contingent fact that we did extend our practice of spatially locating some things in others to include treating pains as in body parts, and did not extend it to treating sounds as in bells explains why we say the ache is in the tooth and not that the peal is in the bell, but it does not justify, does not offer evidence or reasons for the claims that pains are in body parts and sounds are not in bells. That as a matter of contingent fact we can catch on to an extension of prior practice, that we can all learn to agree in practice about “how to go on” to apply it in new cases, is not a reason to go on that way. “We just talk that way,” is an observation about our practices that is not at the right level to serve as a justification for claims about the world to the effect that one thing is to be found in another—any more than offering a historical explanation of why we use the sign designs “dog” (written and spoken) to refer to dogs, instead of some other arbitrary marks and noises, justifies the claim that Lassie is a dog.
I think Wittgenstein’s thought in this area begins with appreciation of the contingency of important aspects of our discursive practices. We inherit ways of using expressions that both are essential to their meaning what they do and show on their surfaces the marks of the contingencies that have shaped them. We find ourselves always already “thrown into” such a situation, and have no choice but to conduct our practical and theoretical discursive affairs against that in many ways arbitrary background. Adapting a Heideggerian term, this fact might be called “semantic Geworfenheit.” I think Wittgenstein both thinks that semantic Geworfenheit threatens our sense of the norms our discursive practices institute as rationally binding on us, in the sense of providing genuine reasons for applying expressions the way we do in novel cases (that is, that it is alienating), and that he diagnoses this threat as resulting from a residual misunderstanding of the discursive norms that articulate what is a reason for what.4 In particular, I think he objects to the way of thinking about the division of labor between instituting discursive norms and applying them that is implicit in seeing semantic Geworfenheit as threatening the intelligibility of understanding those discursive norms as governing our practice, in the sense of exercising authority that is genuinely binding on (sets a standard of correctness for assessments of) future uses. The use of expressions, applying them in some circumstances and withholding application in others, is all there is to institute the norms that govern such applications. The contingencies that turn out to be inherent in our adoption of normative attitudes are essential to their having the determinate contents they do. Any picture of discursive norms as answering to norms that are rational in a sense that excludes genealogical contingencies is an idealized fantasy, visible as such by its precluding the determinate contentfulness of those norms.
I take it that Wittgenstein is concerned both to point out our semantic Geworfenheit and to show that it ought not to be understood as impugning the integrity of discursive norms, because it is essential to their determinate contentfulness. If we are to talk at all, we have no choice but to do so by engaging in practices whose implicit norms are as they are as a result of contingent facts that don’t justify talking as we do. (As to the alternative, recall Sellars’s dictum “Clearly human beings could dispense with all discourse, though only at the expense of having nothing to say.”5) Any account of discursive normativity that treats the fact of our semantic Geworfenheit as undercutting the legitimacy of those norms (that is, any alienating account), is to be rejected as incorporating an evidently mistaken metaphysics of normativity. The proper response to this realization, Wittgenstein thinks, is not to construct some alternative positive metaphysical story, but simply to acknowledge and embrace discursive contingency and semantic Geworfenheit. We might call this recommended therapeutic meta-attitude “semantic Gelassenheit,” to continue the Heideggerian metaphor. (Though so used, the term owes more to Meister Eckhart’s original usage than to Heidegger’s radical adaptation of it.) Basically, it recommends that we just get used to our Geworfenheit, rejecting theories according to which it is alienating, without adopting others in their stead.
According to this line of thought, the culprit responsible for the threat of alienation from the discursive norms that make our thought possible is outmoded metaphysical pictures of what would be required to justify those norms, to show them to be genuinely binding on us, to provide suitable standards for assessing the correctness of our attitudes. Rather than holding our practice up to Procrustean standards provided by a priori models of what rationality must be like—requiring, for instance, that reasons have the form of deductive derivations from noncontingent premises, or that they maximize utility in the light of subjective preferences and credences—we should accept that our discursive practices are in general in order as they are, and understand justification in terms of those semantogenic practices. So understood, the recommended Gelassenheit is a kind of pragmatism, in the sense of investing authority in our reason-giving practices, and taking our theories to be responsible to them, rather than the other way around.
Hegel anticipated Wittgenstein’s social-practical understanding of discursive normativity. That is how he brings Kant’s insight into the normativity of intentionality down to earth—in a suitably broad sense naturalizing it. And he foresaw the danger that appreciation of our normative semantic Geworfenheit poses for the intelligibility of discursive norms as genuinely binding on the attitudes of those who engage in practices of applying those norms. I have been claiming that that is the core of his concept of alienation: that the modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses (a matter of how discursive norms are instituted) undercuts the traditional sittlich practical appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes (a matter of how discursive norms are applied). Hegel, too, rejects the conclusion that there is an ineluctable incompatibility here, and so rejects any and every metaphysics of discursive normativity that entails such an incompatibility. For him, these are accounts that operate with the concepts construed according to the categories of Verstand, which Kant brought to explicit flowering. One diagnosis he offers is that in Kant’s hands the distinction between reasons and causes (articulating the overarching distinction between the normative and the natural) has been regimented and rigidified into a dualism. (As I am using the term, a distinction becomes a dualism when it is drawn in terms that make the relations between the distinguished items unintelligible.) In particular, it is of the first importance to Hegel that the contingent causes on which genealogical analyses show our discursive norms to be counterfactually conditioned are themselves features of prior applications of concepts. In striking contrast to Wittgenstein’s version of normative semantic Gelassenheit as theoretical quietism, Hegel offers a detailed systematic account of the process by which and in which actual, and therefore contingent, applications of concepts both institute norms governing such applications and acknowledge the authority of those norms.
This is the process Hegel discusses in the Introduction as the experience of error and in the Preface as the truth-process (“A vast, Bacchanalian revel with not a soul sober.”). It is the process, he says, of giving contingency the form of necessity—that is, normative form. It is the process of determining the contents of concepts, as norms governing applications of them, in the sense of setting authoritative standards for assessments of the correctness of applications that accordingly show up as responsible to them. In that process, actual applications of concepts play the role both of causes and of reasons. As actual applications of concepts, the causes are also takings-to-be-correct. Such attitudes also determine what is correct. The relations of dependence (authority and responsibility) between attitude and norm are reciprocal. We could think of this reciprocity in terms of a positive feedback loop, or as the process of achieving a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium—and neither of those would be wrong. But Hegel’s story has a lot more structure than either of those models (which can still serve as useful points of comparison). The main point of the Phenomenology as I read it is to teach us about how conceptual contents, the norms that articulate truth, are determined by the process that is the experience of error, and especially the role played in that process by its recollective-reconstructive phase. It is that understanding, replacing the categories of Verstand with those of Vernunft, that permits us to overcome alienation by showing us in detail how to reconcile modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with the sittlich appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. Hegel moves beyond the strategy of overcoming alienation by embracing Gelassenheit to offer a detailed systematic account of the recollective dimension of the experiential process that institutes, articulates, and sustains the reciprocal attitude-dependence of normative statuses and status-dependence of normative attitudes.
Before turning to an exposition of that account, it is worth looking beyond Wittgenstein and pointing to two further contemporary philosophical manifestations of alienation in Hegel’s sense, one concerning jurisprudential theory and the other reductive scientific naturalism. These discussions can be brief, because both are familiar, though for quite different reasons. The jurisprudential case is familiar to readers of this work because I have appealed to it many times, beginning already in the discussion of the Introduction, as offering a paradigmatic example of how Hegel’s explanation of the determination of conceptual content works, and in particular of the distinctive historical recognitive structure of reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility he invokes. Reductive scientific naturalism is familiar just because it is a ubiquitous presence in the contemporary philosophical scene.
The jurisprudential question concerns the origin, nature, and extent of the determinate contentfulness of the concepts used to formulate laws. The question is important because the rational authority of legal judgments and legal argumentation derives from the capacity of laws articulated by those concepts to serve as reasons justifying those judgments and arguments. It is essential to the normative bindingness of applications of legal concepts to particular cases that those applications can be rationally licensed by laws articulated by legal concepts. The issue arises most clearly in Anglo-American common law. By contrast to statute law, in which norms are made explicit in the form of stated principles, the legal norms articulated in common law are implicit in the tradition of applying them. All there is to determine the contents of the concepts of common law is the way they have in fact been applied in prior judicial decisions. The need to understand how legal norms can emerge from actual applications of those norms is not restricted to common law, however. For even where legal norms are stated explicitly in the form of rules or principles (statutes), they must be interpreted in order to be applied to particular cases. (This is a point to which Wittgenstein has sensitized philosophers.) Case law works like common law.6 What distinguishes these contexts is that the legal norms they involve are evidently attitude-dependent. What constitutes “strict liability” in assessment of torts is settled, insofar as it is settled at all, by the prior applications of that concept by judges deciding cases. They are the only source of authority that a current judge can appeal to in offering reasons justifying her own decision to apply or not apply that concept to a novel set of facts.
The fact that common and case law is in this sense “judge-made law” has seemed to some to offer grounds for skepticism about whether determinately contentful, genuinely binding norms have actually been instituted. Does not the idea that the process or practice of applying concepts determines the contents of norms governing such applications involve the naturalistic fallacy? For acknowledgment of the normative significance of conceptual contents means that understanding such contents to be conferred or instituted by the process of applying concepts requires a transition from “is” to “ought.” Somehow, what practitioners actually do in applying concepts—accepting some arguments and judgments articulated by a given constellation of concepts, and rejecting others—must be intelligible as settling what those practitioners ought to do—which such applications would be correct, in the sense of rationally justifiable by appeal to the contents of those concepts (in the context of the facts), and which not. One form such skepticism takes is to let normative attitudes do all the work, in effect dropping the notion of norms or normative statuses entirely. A statement of what is legal (a normative status) is understood as a matter-of-factual prediction about what a judge would decide (the judge’s normative attitude). Extreme forms of legal realism in addition insist that what the judge says is typically determined by nonlegal reasons or causes. Legal decisions are brought about causally by such factors as “what the judge had for breakfast,” as the slogan has it (and more realistically, by her training, culture circle, reading, and political inclinations).
The point I want to make by gesturing at this skeptical challenge in the philosophy of law is just that it clearly deserves to be counted as a manifestation of alienation in Hegel’s sense. The intelligibility of the governing authority of norms over normative attitudes, of what is right over what is taken to be right—that is, the status-dependence of normative attitudes—is understood to be threatened by the attitude-dependence of norms (normative statuses). This line of thought is generally thought to be corrosive of jurisprudential practice, which depends on the traditional commitment of the responsible jurist not to make the law, but to find out what it already is. But such sittlich acknowledgment of the status-dependence of normative attitudes seems incompatible with the legal positivists’ appreciation of the attitude-dependence of legal norms. From Hegel’s point of view, of course, both of the parties to this debate are defending one-sided views. The former sees only the judge’s authority, but not his responsibility, and the latter sees only his responsibility, but not his authority. What is needed is an account that does justice to both, to their essential interrelations with one another, and to the way the process of which both are aspects determines conceptual contents. That is precisely what Hegel offers us—and is the direct applicability of his account to his case that has motivated my recurring invocation of it in expounding his resolution in these pages.7
The final contemporary philosophical expression of normative alienation I want to point to is reductive scientific naturalism about norms. A good point of departure is the Sellarsian principle that has come to be called the “scientia mensura”:
In the dimension of describing and explaining, science is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not. [EPM §41]
Sellars was a Kantian, who took on board as master ideas two of Kant’s most basic insights. The first is the normative character of intentionality. The second is the idea that some concepts do not play the ground-level role of describing or explaining, but rather make explicit essential features of the conceptual framework that makes describing and explaining possible. Sellars gave that second thought a Carnapian twist, by treating the concepts that play that categorial role as essentially metalinguistic. Following out the first thought, for Sellars, prime among the framework-explicating concepts are concepts articulating the normativity of discursive activity. So the opening phrase of Sellars’s slogan is specifically meant to exclude normative concepts from those over which science is claimed to have exclusive ontological dominion. For he takes it that because they do play metalinguistic roles, they therefore cannot play descriptive or explanatory roles. Perhaps this is not so. Even if he is right about their categorial role, perhaps Sellars is wrong to deny normative concepts descriptive and explanatory roles, and so to exclude them from the intended scope of the scientia mensura. In any case the subsequent philosophical tradition has not so far been much cognizant of or influenced by Sellars’s sophisticated views on this point. The line of thought I am concerned to point to here is one that is widely shared in the contemporary philosophical scene and that is well formulated by Sellars’s naturalistic principle, taken against his intent as applying specifically to what is picked out by the use of normative vocabulary.
In its starkest form, the idea is that norms and normative statuses are explanatorily otiose. They are not to be found in the causal order as it is made visible by natural science, and (so) need never be appealed to in explanations of events that are in that order. There are only normative attitudes. People really do take some behaviors to be appropriate and others inappropriate, they do attribute authority and responsibility, commitment and entitlement. Those practical attitudes are in the natural order and can appropriately be invoked in explaining why people do what they do. But all the explanatory work can be done by normative attitudes. There is no explanatory surplus gained by postulating, in addition to people’s adopting practical attitudes of taking or treating something as right or wrong, actual statuses of being right or wrong. While the best explanation of people’s beliefs and intentions concerning electrons is that there really are electrons—that’s why things work out as they do in our interactions with them—the best explanation of people’s normative beliefs and intentions are just more beliefs and intentions: theirs, those of their parents and teachers, those of the ones they interact with practically and verbally. If that is right, then it seems we do not have the same sorts of reasons to believe in norms that we do in electrons. The argument Harman offers for the specific case of morality is a case in point.
At least in its general outlines, I suppose this is a familiar line of thought. I have argued that this way of thinking is already visible in the person of Hegel’s allegorical valet, for whom the status-dependence of his master’s attitudes, the responsibility they acknowledge to authoritative duties, remains invisible, supplaced by self-standing self-regarding attitudes. This niederträchtig meta-attitude is an extreme version of the modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses: the authority of attitudes over statuses. For according to this extreme version of that modern insight, normative statuses have no actual existence. They have only a virtual existence, as the objects of normative attitudes. No attitude-transcendent statuses are instituted at all. Such a view is a kind of ne plus ultra of alienation.
And this view is contestable in its own right. For an argument-to-best-explanation strategy to yield an attitudes-only ontological verdict, it needs to restrict the vocabulary in which both what is to be explained and what is available to explain it are specified, so as to meet two criteria of adequacy. It is not clear that they can be jointly satisfied. The scientific naturalism version excludes from the realm of facts whose best explanation need appeal only to attitudes facts such as that murder is wrong. Indeed, descriptions such as that, couched in normative terms, are not available in the language of natural science. But the normative attitudes for which explanations are sought and in terms of which explanations are to be given must then themselves be specifiable in that same language of natural science. This is a tall order. It is by no means clear that any specification of attitudes that can be given in the nonnormative language of the natural sciences can be entitled to treat them as having any determinate semantic content, never mind determinate content that is itself specifiable entirely in nonnormative terms. One would need such a specification in order to make sense of norms as having even virtual existence as the objects of acknowledgment and attribution in such normative attitudes.
A version of an argument along these lines against a naturalistic attitudes-only reductionism about norms is implicit in Hegel’s positive account of the reciprocal relation between normative attitudes and normative statuses—in the way he reconciles the traditional sittlich appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. What is most impressive, I think, is that he does not restrict himself to criticizing one-sided ways of thinking, such as the contemporary philosophical manifestations of alienation we have just rehearsed. He offers a detailed account of how things actually work. I have gestured at five contemporary lines of philosophical thought: metaethical relativism; Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s “rule-following considerations”; Wittgenstein’s broader concern with the apparent tension between the contingency of conceptual content and the rational bindingness of conceptual norms; jurisprudential puzzling about how, if it is judge made, case and common law can be understood as having the binding force of law; and reductive scientific naturalism about norms. According to Hegel’s conceptual scheme, they all deserve to be seen disparagingly as manifestations of modern alienation. They all accordingly set appropriate criteria of adequacy against which his constructive metaphysical account of both the semantics and the normative pragmatics of discursive practices should be measured. It is to that account that we next turn.
On the ground floor of Hegel’s intellectual edifice stands his nonpsychological conception of the conceptual. This is the idea that to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence (his “determinate negation” and “mediation”) to other such contentful items. The relations of incompatibility and consequence are denominated “material” to indicate that they articulate the contents rather than form of what stands in those relations. This is his first and most basic semantic idea: an understanding of conceptual content in terms of modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion.
The next move is to think of the relation between conceptual content, so understood, and the forms such contents can take. The result is a hylomorphic conception of the conceptual. Conceptual contents, understood as roles with respect to relations of material incompatibility and consequence, are amphibious: they show up in two different forms. They have a subjective form and an objective form. The subjective form articulates what things are or can be for consciousness, and the objective form articulates what things are or can be in themselves. The second is the form of empirical reality; the first is the form in which that empirical reality appears to knowing subjects. They are related as the two poles of the intentional nexus: what can be known and the attempted knowing of it, noumena and phenomena. Genuine knowledge requires that one and the same content shows up in both different forms: the subjective form of thought and the objective form of fact. Conceptual contents of the two forms stand in a broadly representational relation to one another, as subjective representings of reality and the objective realities represented. Hegel’s second semantic idea is this consequence of the hylomorphic development of the first: the two forms of conceptual content stand to one another in representational relations. These two dimensions of semantic contentfulness, the intelligible and the representational, can be thought of as Hegelian versions of the Fregean metaconcepts of sense and reference (Sinn and Bedeutung): thoughts and what thoughts are about, what can be expressed and what can be represented.
Hegel’s semantic explanatory strategy is to explain the representational dimension of conceptual contentfulness in terms of the basic sense of conceptual contentfulness as articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. What it is to represent something is to be understood in terms of relations among conceptual contents. The idea of a noumenal reality is to be explained in terms of how phenomenal appearances point beyond themselves, in virtue of their relations to one another. This is one sense in which his book counts as a “phenomenology.” This account is essentially expressivist and historical. Its key concept is recollection.
Another idea that is of the first importance for this enterprise is that conceptual content in the most basic sense is an essentially modal notion. The relations that in the first instance articulate conceptual contents of either form are modal relations. Incompatibility relations codify conjunctions (in a broad sense) that do not merely happen not to hold, but that are forbidden or ruled out. Consequential relations codify conjunctions that do not just happen to hold, but that are obligatory or must hold. The relations of incompatibility and consequence Hegel understands as articulating conceptual contents are related to one another as the two paired modalities of necessity and impossibility, or obligation and prohibition are related to one another. (That is one of the ways negation is built so deeply into his system.)
Of course it matters a lot for such a view how the modal force in question is understood. Here Hegel’s revolutionary idea is that the two forms conceptual contents can show up in correspond to two different kinds of modality. Modal relations of incompatibility and consequence have both alethic and deontic forms. They can be given both nomological and normative readings. These are the modalities that articulate the objective realm of being (reality, how things are in themselves) and the subjective realm of thought (appearance, how things are for consciousness, how they are taken to be), respectively.
On the objective side of reality, the properties of being a mammal and being a reptile are incompatible in the sense that it is impossible for them to be conjoined in one object at the same time. The property of being a mammal has being a vertebrate as a consequence in the sense that it is necessary that any creature that is a mammal is a vertebrate. On the subjective side of thought, it is not impossible to take one and the same creature to be both a mammal and a reptile. Those thoughts are incompatible rather in the sense that one ought not conjoin them. If one takes a creature to be a mammal, it is possible that one does not take it also to be a vertebrate. But one ought to do so, one is committed or obliged to do so. The relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate the conceptual contents of objective properties and states of affairs are alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessity, codified in laws of nature. The relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate the conceptual contents of subjective thoughts are deontic normative relations. Two thought-contents are incompatible when one cannot be entitled to commitments to both, though one might do so anyway. One thought-content is a consequence of another when commitment to one entails commitment to the other—though the actual attitudes of individual thinking subjects might not always actually include acknowledging that normative status. In addition to Hegel’s terms “determinate negation” and “mediation” having these paired senses, one for each form content can take, so too do “independence” and “dependence.” On the side of subjects, they are read normatively or deontically, as authority and responsibility; on the side of objects, alethically, in terms of necessity.
The resulting view is a kind of conceptual realism. For it takes the reality thought about, no less than thoughts about it, already to be in conceptual shape. It does that by starting with a conception of the conceptual that is not restricted to thoughts as thinkings, as psychological events or processes. It ties the conceptual to thought only in the Fregean sense of thinkables. (Frege says: “A fact is a thought that is true.”8) On this conception, to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of incompatibility and consequence: to exclude and include other conceptually contentful items. The relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate conceptual contents (and so count as “material” relations) are modally robust ones. So Hegel’s is a modal conceptual realism. His particular version is hylomorphic. Conceptual contents can take two forms: objective and subjective. Those two forms correspond to two different kinds of modality, alethic and deontic, nomological and normative. What accordingly becomes visible as bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism makes intelligible the possibility of genuine knowledge, by understanding conceptual content as actualizable in two forms: an objective form articulated by alethic nomological relations of necessary consequence and noncompossibility and a subjective form articulated by deontic normative relations of obligatory consequence and prohibited conjunction.
On an account of this shape, the subjective and objective poles of the intentional nexus, representings in thought and what in reality is represented thereby, correspond to the two modal forms conceptual contents can take. So implementing the semantic explanatory strategy of showing how to understand the representational dimension of conceptual contentfulness (“of”-intentionality) in terms of the expressive dimension (“that”-intentionality) requires explaining the relations between nomological and normative preclusion and inclusion, between alethic and deontic incompatibility and consequence. For it is those notions of incompatibility and consequence that articulate the basic notion of conceptual content.
The next large conceptual contribution Hegel makes in investigating the relations between the modally articulated realms of thought and being is a contribution to that investigation that takes the form of a broadly epistemic and semantic thesis. It is a pair of claims about what is required to understand the different kinds of modal structures. The first is perhaps not surprising: an essential aspect of understanding the structure of thought about the objective world is understanding the structure of the world being thought about. Less conventionally, he claims conversely that one cannot understand the most fundamental structure of the objective world unless one also understands the structure of the activity of thinking about it. Together these claims assert a reciprocal sense-dependence between the metaconcepts articulating the alethic modal nomological structure of the objective world and the deontic normative structure of the subjective world of thought. At a finer grain, the claim is that there is a reciprocal sense-dependence between the metaconcepts articulating the alethic modal structure of law-governed facts about objects and properties, on the side of objective reality, and the metaconcepts articulating the deontic normative structure of the processes and practices of inferring, asserting or judging, and referring and classifying, on the side of the subjective graspings in thought of those objective structures.
This is an epistemic and conceptual claim, not an ontological one. That is, what is claimed is sense-dependence, not reference-dependence. The thesis is not that there would be no laws, facts, objects, or properties if there were no activities of inferring and explaining, stating and judging, referring and classifying. (The converse is uncontroversially true.) The claim is that one cannot understand what one is talking about in talking about laws and facts and objects with properties unless one also understands what one is doing in inferring and explaining, stating and judging, referring and classifying. Some terms, such as “superior” and “subordinate” are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent. You cannot understand one unless you understand the other, and the phenomena they indicate cannot occur except in tandem. The largest normative categorial structures of activities of thinking and the largest modal categorial structures of the objective world thought about are reciprocally sense-dependent, with only a one-way reference-dependence: of the actual existence of activities of inferring, judging, and referring and classifying on the actual existence of laws, facts, and objects with properties.
In Chapter 7 I called this thesis “objective idealism.” It tells us we cannot understand the ontological structure of the objective world, its coming as law-governed facts about the properties of objects, except in terms that make essential reference to what subjects have to do in order to count as taking the world to have that structure—even though the world could have that structure in the absence of any subjects and their epistemic activities. What one needs to do in order to count thereby as treating two facts as incompatible in the alethic modal sense is to treat the corresponding subjective doxastic commitments as incompatible in the normative sense. That is to take it that commitment to one precludes entitlement to the other, so that if one finds oneself with both of them one is obliged to do something further, to change the situation by relinquishing at least one of the commitments. This is the deep connection between determinate negation and change or movement, which is central to Hegel’s system. What one needs to do in order to count thereby as treating one fact as a nomological consequence of another is practically to acknowledge that commitment to one obliges one to acknowledge commitment to the other.
It is obvious that one cannot understand anything about laws, facts, and objects with properties unless one can engage in the practices of inferring and explaining, asserting and judging, and referring and classifying. Those are things one must be able to do in order to count as thinking about things at all. The further claim is that one’s grasp of the concept law as a categorial ontological feature of the objective world essentially depends on one’s understanding the role statements of laws play in explanation, and so in subjunctively robust inferences. Laws are the sort of thing expressed by modally qualified quantified conditionals (in the simplest case, “Necessarily, all A’s are B’s”). One’s grasp of the concept fact as a categorial ontological feature of the objective world essentially depends on one’s understanding that facts are statables, judgeables, thinkables. They are the sort of thing expressed by the declarative sentences one uses to say things.
Similarly, one’s grasp of the concepts object and property as a categorial ontological feature of the objective world essentially depends on one’s understanding that objects are what one refers to by using singular terms and properties are what one classifies objects as falling under by using predicates. A necessary condition of understanding the ontological structure of the objective world empirical consciousness is consciousness of is that one must also understand the epistemic activities by which consciousness can become conscious of it. That is why there is the reciprocal sense-dependence, but not reference-dependence that objective idealism claims, of concepts articulating the ontological structure of the objective world, such as object, property, fact, and law, on the one hand, and concepts articulating the processes and practices of talking and thinking about that world, such as referring, describing, judging or asserting, and inferring (and so singular term, predicate, declarative sentence, and subjunctive conditional), on the other.
The objective pole of the intentional nexus is structured by subjunctively robust nomological relations. We understand these relations and the relata they articulate functionally (so holistically) in terms of their role in a whole constellation of lawfully related facts, surrounded, as it were, by a penumbra of excluded and merely possible states of affairs (Hegel’s “inverted world”). Those facts in turn articulate lawful relations among properties and the objects that exhibit them, surrounded, as it were, by a penumbra of excluded properties and impossible objects. The subjective pole of the intentional nexus is structured by processes and practices that are norm-governed, in the sense of being subject to normative appraisal. We understand these norm-governed activities functionally, and so holistically, in terms of their role in a whole constellation of commitments, articulated by subjunctively robust inferential relations among judgments and practical commitments, surrounded, as it were, by a penumbra of excluded and merely possible commitments—thinkables to which the thinking subject in question ought not to be or is not committed. Those claims in turn are articulated by acts of referring and classifying, expressed by the use of singular terms and predicates that can be used to express many more judgeables. This constellation of subjective doxastic commitments articulated by further commitments regarding which doxastic commitments are incompatible with or are consequences of others is what Hegel calls “the Concept.”
At the grossest level of structure, the objective realm of being is articulated by nomological relations, and the subjective realm of thought is articulated by norm-governed processes, activities or practices. We saw that it can be asked how things stand with the intentional nexus between these realms. Should it be construed in relational or practical-processual terms? If these are not mutually exclusive (as Hegel in fact understands things), so that both semantic relations and pragmatic discursive activities of knowing and acting are essential, does one have conceptual—that is, explanatory—priority over the other? Objective idealism asserts that the nomological and normative aspects of those relations and practices (what is expressed by alethic and deontic modal vocabulary), respectively, are reciprocally sense-dependent. Understanding these aspects of the two realms is symmetrical: each can be understood only as part of a whole that contains the other as well. For the norms articulate what one must do in order to count thereby as claiming that the nomological relations hold. But what about the activities and relations themselves? Here I claimed that Hegel takes there to be an explanatory asymmetry in that the semantic relations between those discursive practices and the objective relations they know about and exploit practically are instituted by the discursive practices that both articulate the subjective realm of thought and establish its relations to the objective realm of being. This asymmetry claim privileging specifically recollective discursive practices over semantic representational relations in understanding the intentional nexus between subjectivity and objectivity is the thesis of conceptual idealism.
The view Hegel develops in the Phenomenology is being expressed here by means of a progression of three ever more radical, distinctively Hegelian theses: bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism, the reciprocal sense-dependence of objective idealism, and recollective conceptual idealism. Each of these offers a sense in which the intentional nexus is to be understood as a special kind of unity that, each in its own way, cancels the distinction between its necessarily related poles, in virtue of the necessity of their being bound into the sort of unity they are. In each case, the related items are to be understood functionally, in terms of the role they play in the kind of unity in question. The first two make symmetry claims. Conceptual content is conceived in a unified way as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. It is then seen to show up in two forms, distinguished by the modality characteristic of each. In their objective form, incompatibility and consequence are alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessity. In their subjective form, incompatibility and consequence are deontic normative relations between commitments to which a subject cannot be simultaneously entitled and conclusions one ought to draw. Neither is accorded any priority or privilege over the other by the conceptual realist metaphysical claim. Those two modal forms are then asserted to be reciprocally sense-dependent. Neither can be understood apart from its relation to the other. Neither is accorded any priority or privilege over the other by the objective idealist epistemological claim. The conceptual idealism that digs deeper to explain and justify these less radical Hegelian theses breaks this symmetry. It asserts a distinctive kind of practical priority, and therefore a crucial dimension of explanatory priority, of norm-governed recollective discursive practices over alethic modal relations.
Because the objective world is both the cause of sense and the goal of intellect—the first a nomological matter and the second a normative one—cognition involves both alethic modal and deontic normative relations between the objective realm of being, whose structure is articulated by alethic modal relations and the subjective realm of thought, whose structure is articulated by deontic normative relations. The first are relations of epistemic tracking. They support subjunctively robust conditionals of the form “If the objective facts were different (or were to change) in such-and-such ways, the commitments endorsed in thought would be different in these-and-those ways.” These conditionals articulate a dimension of authority (independence) of the objective world over subjective thoughts—a dimension of responsibility (dependence) of thought to fact. This is the subjunctive sensitivity of thoughts to things. The second sort of relations are relations of normative responsibility of thought to fact. What things are for consciousness ought to conform to what things are in themselves. Those normative relations, too, express the authority of the objective over the subjective. Because the objective world is both the arena of action and the target of intention, intentional agency involves both alethic modal and deontic normative relations between the subjective and objective realms. Agency is efficacious insofar as subjunctively robust conditionals of the form “If the agent’s practical commitments had been different, the events in the objective world would have been different” hold. These articulate a dimension of authority of the subjective over the objective—a dimension of dependence of the objective world on subjective practical commitments. The normative standard of success of intentional agency is set by how things objectively are after an action. The idea of action includes a background structural commitment to the effect that things ought to be as they are intended to be. Conceptual idealism focuses on the fact that all these alethic and normative modal relations are instituted by the recollective activity that is the final phase of the cycle of cognition and action.
Conceptual realism asserts the identity of conceptual content between facts and thoughts of those facts. (Compare Wittgenstein: “When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this-is-so.” [PI §95]) Objective idealism asserts not an underlying semantic identity of content but a reciprocal semantic relation between the two different forms such contents can take: sense-dependence. The priority or dependence relation claimed by conceptual idealism is not in the first instance a semantic matter. It is not a relation between senses and senses, as in sense-dependence, or between referents and referents, as in reference-dependence. It is not even the semantic relation between senses and referents (representings and representeds). It is rather a matter of offering a pragmatic account of the practical process by which that semantic-intentional relation between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves is established. Pragmatics, as I am using the term, is the study of the use of concepts by subjects engaging in discursive practices. Conceptual idealism asserts a distinctive kind of explanatory priority (a kind of authority) of pragmatics over semantics. For this reason it is a pragmatist semantic explanatory strategy, and its idealism is a pragmatist idealism. The sui generis rational practical activity given pride of explanatory place by this sort of pragmatism is recollection.
The beating heart of the Phenomenology is the concept of experience [Erfahrung]. That is why Hegel’s original title for it is “The Science of the Experience of Consciousness.” Even after, in the course of writing the work, he came to see that “consciousness” picks out only one aspect of his real topic, Geist, he could still with full fidelity to his intentions have called it “The Science of the Experience of Geist.” Experience is the process by which the Concept develops, and so the process by which its constituent concepts develop. It is of the essence of the reading presented here that the notion of experience functions at two levels, corresponding to the two fundamental kinds of concepts Hegel distinguishes. These are “logical,” speculative [begrifflich, begreifend], or philosophical concepts, on the one hand, and ordinary empirical and practical “determinate” concepts, on the other.
The origin of the distinction lies in Kant’s revolutionary idea that besides the concepts that we deploy to describe and explain empirical goings-on, there are concepts whose distinctive expressive role is to make explicit crucial structural features of the framework that makes description and explanation possible. (Among them are alethic modal and deontic normative concepts.) Kant thought there was a single set of such categories that could express the structure of discursive activity überhaupt. The recollective story Hegel tells in the Phenomenology is a rationally reconstructed history of the expressively progressive development of “shapes of (self-)consciousness,” which are articulated by different, more or less adequate categorial metaconcepts. It culminates, however, in a single set of expressively adequate philosophical concepts. The master strategy animating this reading of Hegel (and of Kant) is semantic descent: the idea that the ultimate point of studying these metaconcepts is what their use can teach us about the semantic contentfulness of ground-level concepts, so the best way to understand the categorial metaconcepts is to use them to talk about the use and content of ordinary concepts. It is because it is aimed at extracting such lessons that what is being offered is a semantic reading of the Phenomenology. It is a pragmatist semantic reading because the key to understanding the conceptual contentfulness common to the objective empirical world of lawfully related facts about objects and their properties and the normative subjective activity of thinking (undertaking commitments by inferring and claiming, referring and classifying) is found to lie in the discursive practice and process of experience. The lead role in Hegel’s account of experience as instituting semantic relations is played by recollection.
The pragmatic metaconcept of the process of experience is first put in play in the Introduction, at the very beginning of the book, in the form of the experience of error. It is invoked to explain how the consciousness-constitutive distinction-and-relation between what things are for consciousness and what things are in themselves shows up to consciousness itself. Hegel assumes that, however vaguely understood it might be at the outset, it is a distinction-and-relation that can at least be a topic for us, the readers of the book, the phenomenological self-consciousness that under his guidance is rehearsing the development of phenomenal self-consciousness. Hegel’s terminology of what things are explicitly “for consciousness” and what things are “in themselves” [an sich] (“implicitly”) is his preferred way of talking about what I have been calling the “intentional nexus,” which relates the subjective realm of thought, the way things appear to subjects, with the objective realm of being, the way things really are. It is, as emerges already in the Introduction, the phenomenon addressed by the distinction between subjective representings and objective representeds (baked into Early Modern philosophical thought about mind and knowledge by Descartes). Partly on that basis, I have urged that we can think about it as the fundamental semantic relation between what Frege calls “sense” and “referent” (Sinn and Bedeutung). The question is how this crucial distinction already shows up practically for even the most metatheoretically naïve knowing subject. How are we to understand the basic fact that
the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all. Something is to it the in-itself, but the knowledge or the being of the object for consciousness is to it still another moment. [PG 85]
This is the most primitive, practical form of self-consciousness—awareness of what consciousness is—available even to conceptually untutored “natural consciousness.”
Hegel traces its origin to the experience of error—to what happens when a subject inevitably eventually discovers that it is in some instance wrong, that things are not in fact as they seemed. It is in having to give up a view that becomes untenable that it becomes visible as a view (a representing), normatively answerable for its correctness to how things actually are (what is represented). When an error is practically acknowledged, what was to the subject a reality is unmasked and revealed as merely a guise, an appearance, a way things were only for the subject. One took the stick to be bent. On pulling it all the way out of the water, one sees that it was really straight all along. One’s prior view shows up as just a view, a way it looked. That change of view involves distinguishing how things merely look from how they really are.
Later on in the book Hegel will root this sort of experience in our biological nature as desiring beings. For a kind of desire, such as hunger, comes with a characteristic associated sort of practical activity: eating. And responding to something in the environment by engaging in that activity, eating it, is according it a distinctive sort of practical significance: food. The very same desire that motivates the associated activity and defines that practical significance then serves as a protonormative standard of correctness. What a creature practically takes or treats as food, by eating it, can turn out not really to be food, if eating it does not satisfy the hunger that motivated it. Eating something that turns out to be disgusting, or just unsatisfying, is the most primitive form of the experience of error. In it one learns that what one took to be food, what appeared to one as food (what one orectically represented as food), was not in fact food. When a creature goes through that process of error and discovery, the distinction between what things are for it (the practical significance it practically assigned to them) and what things are in themselves (the practical significance they actually have, as assessed by the satisfaction of desire) becomes something to that creature. It is how a distinction between appearance and reality shows up practically already for preconceptual, merely desiring organisms. This sort of experience is the basis and practical form of learning. It is because it is also for Hegel the practical basis for the semantic distinction between representings and representeds, sense and referent, that his deserves to be called a “pragmatist semantics.” The justice of this characterization becomes still more evident further along in the book, when Hegel broadens his concern from the experience of error to the full cycle of cognition and action, which underwrites and incorporates not only cognitive error and knowledge, but also the practical failure and success of intentional actions.
We saw that the most basic concept in the purely semantic strand of Hegel’s thought is his understanding of the conceptual—in the sense of the graspable, what thoughts have in common with facts—in terms of relations of incompatibility and consequence. This is the semantic basis from which the expressive-recollective account of the representational dimension of conceptual content is elaborated. It, too, is explained in terms of the experience of error. For an essential part of the acknowledgment of error is practically taking or treating two commitments as incompatible. Such genuinely conceptual activity goes beyond what merely desiring beings engage in. The origins of Hegel’s idea here lie in Kant’s earlier broadly pragmatist account of what knowing subjects must do in order to count as apperceiving. Apperception is sapient awareness, as opposed to the merely sentient awareness exhibited by desiring animals. For Kant, to be aware in the narrower sense is to synthesize a constellation of commitments that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: apperceptive unity. This is a rational unity—and hence, he thinks, a discursive unity, in the sense of one that is conceptually articulated. It is a rational unity because of the distinctive kinds of norms that govern its synthesis.
Synthesizing a constellation of commitments (both doxastic and practical) exhibiting the rational unity distinctive of apperception is practically acknowledging a variety of task responsibilities. The one that matters most for Hegel’s later construal of the experience of error is the critical task responsibility to extrude incompatible commitments. When one finds oneself with commitments that are incompatible, by one’s own lights—that is, according to the contents one thereby counts as attributing to them—one must practically acknowledge the responsibility to do something: to change or relinquish at least one of them. There is also a rational ampliative task responsibility to acknowledge commitment to the consequences of one’s commitments: to draw conclusions that rationally follow from them. Further, there is a justificatory responsibility, to be able to give reasons justifying the commitments one incorporates in the evolving constellation. Being apperceptively aware or conscious of something is discursive awareness of it, bringing it under a concept. The concept is for Kant accordingly a rule that determines what is incompatible with what (giving specific content to one’s critical rational task responsibility) and what is a consequence of what (giving specific content to one’s ampliative and justificatory task responsibilities). Conceptual contentfulness is suitability to play a functional role in the process of synthesizing a constellation of commitments exhibiting the rational unity characteristic of apperception. So conceptual content is a matter of standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other such conceptually contentful items. This is a broadly pragmatist account, because the notion of conceptual content, which is the subject of semantics, is understood functionally in terms of the norm-governed practical synthetic activity by which one’s commitments evolve and develop, which is the subject of pragmatics.
Hegel builds on Kant’s model and develops it in his account of the experience of error. In doing so, he naturalizes Kant’s account, in a broad sense, bringing it down to earth by grounding it in the preconceptual experience of desiring animals. But he also radicalizes and generalizes both the methodological pragmatism that consists in reading off an account of conceptual contentfulness from an account of rational activity and the specific focus on incompatibility and consequence as the relations that articulate conceptual content. He further substantially adds to the picture of the experiential process that shapes the development of the constellation of commitments that the Concept comprises. As Kant would, Hegel sees a single episode of experiencing error as beginning with the registration of an anomaly: the acknowledgment that one finds oneself with commitments that are incompatible, in the sense that one cannot become entitled to them both (or to all of them). They preclude jointly fulfilling one’s justificatory responsibility. Practically acknowledging that incompatibility is taking oneself to be obliged to do something, change something. This is the obligation to engage in a process of repair of the anomaly, to replace rational discord with rational harmony, by altering or giving up some of the offending commitments. At this point, Hegel breaks from the Kantian picture by adding a crucial constraint on what counts as successful repairs. Not just any rejiggering that removes the incompatibility suffices. Successful repairs must explain and justify the changes made, in a special way, by taking a distinctive form. The addition of this requirement, the characterization of this constraint, is one of Hegel’s Big Ideas, and stands at the center of the conceptual idealism (and so the pragmatist semantics) of the Phenomenology.
Hegel’s idea is that vindication of a proposed reparative strategy in response to acknowledgment of incompatible commitments must take the form of a special kind of historical narrative: a recollection. One must tell a retrospective story that rationally reconstructs an idealized expressively progressive trajectory through previous changes of view that culminates in the view being endorsed after the repair of the most recently discovered anomaly. In the first stage of the experience of error, the previous conception of how things are, what played the role to consciousness of what things are in themselves, has been unmasked as appearance, and has accordingly shifted status. It now plays the role to consciousness of being only what things were for consciousness: an erroneous view of how things really are. To justify endorsing a new view as veridically representing how thing really are in themselves, one must show how, assuming that things are that way, one did or could have come to know that things are that way.
Doxastic commitments are for Hegel implicitly knowledge claims. He has characteristic versions of all three of the dimensions of classical conceptions of knowledge as justified true belief. What I have been calling commitments, a kind of normative status, are the analogues of thoughts or beliefs (putative knowings), in his deontically inflected conception of the geistig realm of thought. Conceptual realism teaches that the truth dimension of such claims to knowledge is a matter of thought and fact sharing a common conceptual content. The demand for recollective vindication of one’s commitments codifies Hegel’s version of the justification dimension of claims to knowledge. This distinctive kind of justification requires showing how the previous views one held in the process leading up to the current candidate can properly be understood as views, appearances, or representings of what one now endorses as the reality one claims was all along being viewed, appearing, or being represented. To be entitled to claim that things are as one now takes them to be, one must show how one found out that they are so. Doing that involves explaining what one’s earlier views got right, what they got wrong, and why. It involves rationally reconstructing the sequence of one’s previous views of what one now takes to be the same topic so as to exhibit it as a process of learning, of gradual discovery of how things actually are. This is the progressive emergence into explicitness, the ever more adequate expression, of what is retrospectively discerned as having been all along implicit as the norm governing and guiding the process by which its appearances arise and pass away.
Offering such a retrospective historical rational reconstruction of the process leading up to the constellation of commitments whose endorsement is being vindicated as the lesson properly to be learned from the earlier registering and reparative phases is the final, recollective phase of an episode of the experience of error. Recollection (Hegel’s “Erinnerung”) turns a past into a history.9 It transforms a mere description of past commitments into a progressive narrative of a sequence of lessons whereby how things really are, in themselves (according to one’s current commitments), gradually came to be revealed, through that progressive sequence of ever more adequate appearances, culminating in one’s current happy state of (as one takes it to be) knowledge of how things really are. A recollecting narrative is a narrative of expressive progress. It is a story about how what is now revealed to have been all along implicit in prior commitments, as the reality they were appearances of (the noumena behind the phenomena), gradually emerged to become fully explicit, showing up as what it really is, in the view currently endorsed, in which that process culminated. It is a story of how what things are in themselves (“an sich”) becomes what they explicitly are for consciousness.
Already something thought, the content is the property of substance; existence has no more to be changed into the form of what is in-itself and implicit, but only the implicit—no longer merely something primitive, or lying hidden within existence, but already present as a recollection—into the form of what is explicit, of what is objective to self. [PG 29]
A recollection accordingly exhibits past commitments that have been discarded because of their incompatibility with others as genuine (if only partially correct) appearances of reality as it is now known to be, and in that sense as not merely illusory.
As was indicated already in the discussion of Hegel’s Introduction, this recollective phase of the experience of error is meant to explain “of”-intentionality in terms of “that”-intentionality—the representational dimension of thought in terms of its conceptual contentfulness. Conceptual contentfulness in Hegel’s sense is what thoughts and facts (phenomena and noumena) can share: being articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other similarly contentful items. What practically distinguishes what is taken or treated by a conscious subject as noumenal, as how things really are, in themselves, from what it takes or treats as phenomenal, as presenting an appearance of things, is just the subject’s commitment or endorsement of the content. (This is adopting an attitude that undertakes a normative status.) Doxastically endorsing a conceptual content is taking it to be a fact. That what one takes to be facts (which contents, exactly, one endorses) changes is just a change in status of the contents involved during the registration and repair stages of the experience of error. The old content changes status from being endorsed to not being endorsed, and its replacement changes status from not being endorsed to being endorsed. What was to consciousness noumenal reality is unmasked as phenomenal appearance, and replaced by a different content, newly endorsed as objectively factual. The recollective stage of an experience of error justifies this change of status by forging a distinctive kind of link between the content newly endorsed as noumenal and all the previously endorsed contents that now are taken to be phenomena. It is a representational link, in virtue of which they show up to the conscious subject as phenomenal appearances of that noumenal reality. The link is forged by offering a retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a sequence of phenomena culminating in the facts as one currently takes them to be. That rational reconstruction exhibits them as all along implicitly normatively governed by their link to that noumenal reality, in the sense that it serves as the normative standard by which their adequacy as phenomenal appearances of it is to be assessed.
This recollective story about the representational dimension of conceptual content is, crucially, an expressive account of it. It explains how what was, according to each recollection, always implicit (“an sich,” what things are in themselves), becomes ever more explicit (for consciousness). The recollective story is an expressively progressive one. The representational relation between senses and referents is established by displaying a sequence of appearances that are ever more adequate expressions of an underlying reality. In general Hegel thinks we can understand what is implicit only in terms of the expressive process by which it is made explicit. That is a recollective process. The underlying reality is construed as implicit in the sense of being a norm that all along governed the process of its gradual emergence into explicitness. Without at any earlier point being fully explicit to the consciousness undergoing the experience, according to the recollection that unveils it as what the appearances were appearances of, it nonetheless practically (hence, implicitly) governed the process. According to the retrospective rational reconstruction that is the recollection, it served as a normative standard for better and worse appearances, accordingly as they revealed (expressed) that reality more adequately. And according to the recollection, those assessments were efficacious. The metanorm that governs recollection (determining better and worse recollections) demands expressive progress: progress in making explicit what shows up as having been all along implicit. This recollective notion of expression is more fundamental than the notion of representation it is called on to explain.
Telling that sort of recollective reconstructive story is offering a phenomenology of a view (a set of commitments). A phenomenology vindicates that view by showing how it gradually emerged into the explicit light of day from the partial, variously erroneous appearances of it. This is what Hegel does at the metalevel for various “shapes” of self-consciousness (and ultimately, of the whole of Geist) in the Phenomenology. The final, adequate form of self-consciousness (“Absolute Knowing”) knows itself as engaging in a process of this historical recollective kind in its dynamic experience of ground-level empirical and practical commitments and the determinate concepts that articulate them. Such a phenomenology vindicates the endorsement of some conceptual contents as noumenal reality, as objectively factual, by showing how they explain the sequential variety of phenomenal appearances by which a subject comes to know them as noumenal reality, and thereby explain the advent of that knowledge.
A recollective reconstruction does that by exhibiting the various erroneous beliefs that things are thus and so (phenomena) as appearances of the facts as they really are (noumena). A recollection performs a great reversal: what eventuates from a process of repeated experiences of error, as its final (thus far) end or result, is placed, as it were, also at the beginning of the sequence.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.10
(Hegel often uses circular imagery in this connection.) For the fact is seen as what drives its progressive revelation. How things actually are is recollectively revealed as normatively governing the process both deontically, as a standard of assessment of expressive success, and alethically, as that to which the episodes that count as expressively progressive are subjunctively sensitive. It is at once the cause of a course of experience and its goal. Linguistically, the kind of link that holds such a recollected history together is anaphoric. Hegel introduces it in the Sense Certainty chapter when he focuses on the sort of “this” … “it” … “it” … chain by which an initially unrepeatable demonstrative thought must be able to be taken up and repeated in order to be cognitively significant for subsequent thought. Later elements of the anaphoric chain pick up their referents from the earlier one, in virtue of the anaphoric repetition structure to which they belong. In the case of phenomenological recollection, the conceptual content that is endorsed as factual, as the underlying noumenon, is taken to be referred to by all the phenomena thereby linked to it as appearances of it. The recollective reversal marks the fact that this anaphoric chain also runs backward, with the anaphoric dependents temporally preceding the anaphoric “antecedent” on which their reference depends, and from which it is inherited.11 Hegel deepens and further articulates his view of such relations when in the Reason chapter’s discussion of intentional agency he explains how the intention [Absicht] that regulates an ongoing action can only retroactively be attributed, and is anaphorically linked to the various phases of the action it normatively governs. The fact that the model in terms of which we ought to understand the recollective phase of the experience of error as establishing a referential or representational relation between reality and its appearance in cognition is for Hegel to be drawn from the recollective form in which an agent’s doings are to be made intelligible as intentional is a significant component of his conceptual idealism.
Even at the ground level, as addressed to determinate empirical concepts, an Erinnerung, then, is a phenomenology: a process in which the stages of a rationally reconstructed sequence of conceptually contentful commitments are anaphorically referred back to the view in which they culminate, as phenomenal appearances or views of that noumenal reality. At the end of the Force and Understanding chapter, Hegel puts on the table the idea that the sense in which objective reality “stands behind” subjective appearances of it is best understood in ultimately expressive terms, rather than representational ones. The noumenal reality is revealed as implicit in phenomena accordingly assessable as more or less adequate partial expressions of it by recollectively arranging them in an expressively progressive history of the emergence of what was implicit into the explicit daylight of the view currently endorsed (which is to say endorsed as factual).
Stories of this recollective-vindicating sort are familiar from various institutional practices. Old-fashioned histories of science typically took the form of pointing to some feature of current scientific theories (genes are encoded by sequences of DNA base pairs, the division between subatomic particles described by Fermi-Dirac statistics and those described by Bose-Einstein statistics is exclusive and exhaustive, etc.) and then offering a canned Whiggish account of the process by which this truth was gradually discovered, one feature emerging from this experiment or conceptual breakthrough, another from that one. False starts, wrong turns, and dead ends are ignored, except insofar as some bit of the truth is taken to have been revealed thereby. For another example, the final results of complex medical diagnoses are explained by telling stories of this sort: “Even though the patient did have an infection, the absence of cytokines in the blood showed that, contrary to what we had thought, the fever must be exogenous.” And—to invoke a comparison I have returned to repeatedly in this work—recollective vindications also play an absolutely essential role in jurisprudential practice. This is clearest in case law, and (because it is essentially “case law all the way down”) especially common law. For there the principal form of justification a judge can offer for her application of a legal concept (strict liability, duty of care, etc.) is a suitable rational reconstruction of prior applications, which are considered precedential in that they reveal explicitly some of the contours of the underlying law that is implicit in the juridical tradition.
Kant had the idea that representation is a normative concept. Something counts as a representing in virtue of being responsible to something else, which counts as represented by it in virtue of exercising authority over the representing by serving as a standard for assessments of its correctness as a representing. It is in precisely this sense that a recollective story treats the commitments it surveys as representings of the content currently treated as factual. The current commitment in which the sequence being reconstructed culminates is treated as authoritative for the previous commitments that sequence comprises (and them as responsible to it) in that it provides the standard for assessing the extent to which they are successful or adequate expressions (and so representations) of it. In picking out a trajectory from the actual experiences of error that led up to the currently endorsed conceptual content (all of which exhibit “that”-intentionality by standing in relations of incompatibility and consequence), a trajectory that is expressively progressive by that standard—thereby turning a mere past into an intelligible history of discovery—the recollection treats them as responsible to it in the sense required for them to be representations of it (to exhibit “of”-intentionality). It is the sort of process that institutes representational relations—the process whereby conceptual contents become representations “to (a) consciousness.”
It is accordingly by engaging in a course of experience, a sequence of episodes of the experience of error each of which exhibits all three phases—critical registration of an incompatibility of commitments, constructive repair of the incompatibility by alteration of commitments, and recollective vindication of the new constellation of commitments—that knowing subjects establish representational semantic relations between what play the roles for Hegel of senses and referents. Hegelian senses are, for him as for Frege, thoughts as thinkables. For Hegel that means conceptual contents, apt to be both thinkable and, when all goes right, factual: to be the facts thought or, as we could also say, thought about. They are thinkable, conceptually contentful, in virtue of standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other such contents. As such, they exhibit “that”-intentionality. For they can be the content of thoughts that things are thus and so. Recollective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory culminating in a thinkable endorsed as factual precipitates out a representational relation. That anaphorically structured representational relation exhibits the elements of the favored trajectory as exhibiting also “of”-intentionality by expressing contents that are more or less adequate explicit expressions, and so representations of the content finally endorsed, which accordingly shows up as having been all along implicit in them. This is Hegel’s story about what a subject has to do in order to bring about representational semantic relations between its thoughts and the facts. Recollection is accordingly the core of his pragmatist semantics, and of his conceptual idealism.
Hegel’s Consciousness chapters bring into relief the modally robust relations of material incompatibility and consequence that articulate the contents of the concepts we use in describing and explaining the empirical world. Force and Understanding ends by recommending that we replace a representational understanding of the laws of nature, expressed in alethic modal vocabulary, by an expressive understanding of the laws as making explicit something that is implicit in ordinary empirical statements of fact. This alternative is marked as taking us from vorstellen to begreifen, and hence as an integral part of moving from using metaconcepts with the structure of Verstand to those with the structure of Vernunft. The move from representation to expression is accordingly put forward as central to the lessons of the whole book. But at that point, there is very little flesh on the bones of the concept of expression as making explicit what is implicit. The meat is added by the account, in Reason’s investigation of practical agency, of the retrospective recollective imputation of intentions as norms guiding and governing actions. What was only implicit when the action begins becomes more and more explicit as it unfolds. Recollection is what makes this process retrospectively visible as expressively progressive. By doing so it gives a definite sense to the notion of implicitness understood in terms of the recollective process of making it explicit. That model accordingly becomes available (retrospectively), for understanding the sense in which modal relations are to be understood as implicit in the facts they articulate, which Hegel put on the table at the end of Force and Understanding.
I have suggested that although both in the opening of the Introduction and at the end of Force and Understanding, Hegel strongly contrasts the way of thinking he wants to recommend—the expressive paradigm—with representational ways of thinking, his recollective elaboration of expression is designed to give semantic representationalism its due, by reconstructing in expressive terms what representationalists were right about. Conceptual content does have a representational dimension, and it can and ought to be understood ultimately in recollective expressivist terms. The strategy pursued in Chapter 12 to expound Hegel’s expressivist rational reconstruction of representational relations is to use Frege’s semantic vocabulary of sense and reference as an amphibious intermediary between representationalist and expressivist semantic idioms. On the one hand, it is recognizably a way of talking about representings and representeds. Senses do refer to, and in that sense represent, their referents. On the other hand, the senses that semantically determine reference are also thought of as intrinsically graspable. For Hegel, following Kant, that means they are conceptually contentful. Hegel’s understanding of conceptual contentfulness as articulation by relations of material incompatibility and consequence provides a model of thoughts as senses.
Hylomorphic conceptual realism then underwrites the idea of the categorial homogeneity of senses as graspable thoughts and their referents (what they represent) as correspondingly conceptually contentful, statable facts. This makes intelligible the idea that thoughts are the explicit expressions of facts. They make explicit (for consciousness) how the world is (in itself, implicitly, “an sich”). The objective idealist appeal to a reciprocal sense-dependence between specifications of objective facts and their modal relations, on the one hand, and norm-governed processes of practically acknowledging the consequences of one’s commitments by rejecting others and accepting yet others is one step in filling in the expressivist story. That story is completed by appealing to the model of practical agency to yield an understanding of expression in terms of recollection. The result is an expressive account of the representational dimension of conceptual content in the form of a recollective account of both representation and expression.
At the end of each successful episode of the experience of error rational harmony has been restored to the subject’s commitments. The incompatibility detected has been repaired and the resulting constellation of commitments recollectively vindicated by recollecting it as the result of a course of experience that has been selected and rationally reconstructed as an unbroken triumphalist expressively progressive narrative of revelation and discovery—as the gradual making explicit of what is presented as having been all along implicit. But Hegel takes it that every achievement of this sort of rational equilibrium is temporary. It is fated to be disrupted by the eruption of new anomalies. Acquiring new empirical commitments immediately (in the sense of noninferentially, perceptually) and mediately, by inferentially extracting consequences from one’s current commitments (fulfilling one’s ampliative rational task responsibility), will inevitably, sooner or later, result in one’s finding oneself once again with commitments that are incompatible with one another, by one’s own lights (the contents one takes them to have). The plight of finite knowing and acting subjects metaphysically guarantees liability to empirical error and practical failure. The experience of error is inescapable. What I earlier called the “false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends” of inquiry can be retrospectively edited out of the sanitized, Whiggish vindicating recollective narrative, but they cannot be avoided prospectively.
Why not? In short because the rational, conceptual character of the world and its stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency are equally fundamental, primordial features of the way things are. On the one hand, the world is lawful, articulated by alethic modal relations of incompatibility and necessary consequence, so conceptually contentful and graspable. (“To him who looks on the world rationally, the world looks rationally back,” Hegel says elsewhere.12) It is, in Hegel’s terms, thoroughly “mediated.” On the other hand, it is shot through with brute immediacy, which impinges on thought through perception. Kant, following the empiricist tradition, conceives the task of conceptualizing sensuous immediacy as an uncompletable, infinite task. For him, sensuous immediacy is conceptually inexhaustible. There is no aspect of what you see when you look at the palm of your hand that you cannot express in a perceptual judgment. But no matter how many such judgments you make, you will never run out of new, as yet unexpressed judgments that would codify genuine features of what you see. One of Hegel’s most original ideas is his understanding of the sense in which the immediacy of objective being outruns what can be captured conceptually in subjective thought, not in terms of its necessary inexhaustibility by empirical judgments, but in terms of the necessary instability of determinate empirical concepts.
For Hegel, the experience of error requires not just the revision of beliefs (doxastic commitments) but also of meanings—the concepts or conceptions that articulate empirical judgments. If my conception acid includes as circumstances of appropriate application tasting sour and as appropriate consequences of application turning litmus paper red, then if I run across something that tastes sour and turns litmus paper blue, I will find myself with commitments that are incompatible by my own lights. The world, it seems, will not let me have that conception of acid, because it commits me to consequences that do not in fact follow in the objective world. In response to registered anomalies, I might need to revise not just my doxastic commitments, but also my broadly inferential commitments concerning what is incompatible with what and what follows from what. In fact Hegel (in striking contrast to Kant) thinks that there is and could in principle be no set of determinate empirical concepts that when correctly applied to things (according to the normative circumstances and consequences of application defining those concepts) will not eventually lead to the undertaking of incompatible commitments articulated by those concepts, and hence to an experience of error. This is his way of registering immediacy as an irreducible, ineliminable aspect of determinate objective being, and hence of determinate thought about it.
The manifestation of stubborn, residual immediacy in thought is the inevitability of the experience of error. Every recollectively vindicated, rationally harmonious constellation of commitments achieved along the way is fragile, precarious, and temporary—doomed eventually to be riven by incompatibility and unmasked as presenting one more appearance of a reality that is thereby shown to be elusive. Such a view licenses the fallibilist metainduction. Every previously adopted view has been found wanting—indeed, incoherent—so the way things are presently taken to be, and every way they will be taken to be in the future, also will turn out to misrepresent them. On such a view, experience would seem to be a skeptical “path of despair,” as Hegel puts it.
This is not the conclusion Hegel was aiming at. The Introduction starts off the book by insisting that we must not endorse a semantics that makes the achievement of genuine knowledge unintelligible in principle. And what becomes of the conceptual realism that was supposed to match the contents of commitments in thought with those of facts in the world, at least when all goes well? Holding on to hylomorphic conceptual realism while accepting that every constellation of determinately conceptually contentful commitments is doomed to be found to be incoherent (to include incompatible ones) would seem to yield the conclusion that the objective world itself is incoherent—“inconsistent.” Hegel sometimes puts his own claims in ways that invite such a reading.
Hegel presents the tension between the ineluctability of error and the realistic possibility of genuine knowledge as not only a destructive, but also a productive one. Both express valid perspectives on what is always at once both the experience of error and the way of truth. The important thing is not to seize exclusively—and so one-sidedly—on either aspect, but to understand the nature of the process as one that necessarily shows up from both perspectives. It is of the essence of the historical process of experience to afford both retrospective and prospective temporal perspectives on it. Looking back, from the vantage point of each recollectively vindicated constellation of commitments resulting from the repair of acknowledged incompatibility, one sees unbroken epistemic expressive progress culminating in the achievement of genuine knowledge of truths, as construed by bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism. Looking forward, one sees the inevitable decay of each such beautiful harmony by the unavoidable advent of commitments incompatible with one another by their own lights, and the initiation of new trifold episodes of the experience of error. The retrospective point of view, recollectively producing by rational reconstruction an expressively progressive tradition in which what was implicit (an sich) becomes explicit for consciousness, makes visible the sense in which subjective thought can genuinely grasp the objective world: how things can be for consciousness what they are in themselves. The prospective point of view focuses on the ruptures occasioned by the disparities between successive recollective reconstructions, as what is endorsed by one is rejected by a later one. It makes visible the sense in which the immediacy of actual being, reflected in sensuous immediacy, inevitably outruns what is captured by any determinate conceptual (mediated) structure, inferentially articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. We have seen that one of Hegel’s animating ideas is that the independence of immediacy (its distinctive authority over structures of mediation) is manifested in its role as a principle of instability, as providing a normative demand for change, for both rejection and further development of each constellation of determinate concepts and commitments articulated by them. The independence of mediation (its distinctive authority over immediacy) is manifested in all the retrospective recollective vindications of prior constellations of commitments as genuine knowledge, as resulting from the expressively progressive revelation of reality by prior claims to knowledge.
Determinate negation, material incompatibility, is not only the fundamental conceptual structure, but also marks the moment of immediacy within what is conceptually articulated, whether on the side of being or of thought. Immediacy in the realm of being necessarily produces / reveals, via perception of cognitive error and practical failure, the incompatibilities of commitment that normatively oblige the knowing and acting subject to do something, to engage in the reparative and recollective phases of experience. The forward-looking obligation to repair acknowledged incompatibilities of commitment acknowledges error and the inadequacy of its conceptions. The backward-looking recollective obligation to rationalize as expressively progressive previous, now superseded, repairs and recollections institutes knowledge, truth, and determinate concepts whose incompatibilities and consequences track those articulating (in a different modal key) the objective world. Acknowledging this obligation by constructing retrospective expressively progressive recollective narratives is the form of Reason’s march through history. It is what “looking on the world rationally” consists in.
The recollective process is also what Hegel calls “giving contingency the form of necessity.” Objective immediacy, what brutely is, shows up cognitively (becomes something for consciousness, is expressed) as sensuous immediacy in the deliverances of commitments by perception. The “form of necessity” is a normative form. (“Necessary,” “notwendig,” for Kant means “in accordance with a rule. That is why it has for him two species: natural necessity, articulated by alethic modal relations, and practical necessity, articulated by deontic normative relations.) The intrusions of commitments arrived at noninferentially in perception give rise to anomalies through engendering incompatibilities. Giving those eruptions the form of necessity is incorporating them into an expressively progressive recollective narrative that exhibits them as the agents whereby the true contents of concepts are gradually revealed and become more explicit.
So a version of Kant’s evenhandedness regarding the cognitive contributions of the faculties of understanding and sensibility is eventually reachieved within Hegel’s more comprehensive rationalist order of metaphysical and semantic explanation, in the form of the equilibrium of retrospective and prospective perspectives on the process that is experience. A common caricature has Hegel, in a simple-minded rationalist way, trying to do with concepts alone what Kant does by dividing the labor between the discursive and the sensible. The real story is much more complicated and interesting.
Understanding the experiential process, which comprises both what shows up when that process is viewed retrospectively and what shows up when it is viewed prospectively, so as to see truth and error as equally essential, complementary aspects of it—as two sides of one coin—requires reconceptualizing both truth and determinateness. The key in each case is to understand them not as properties, states, or relations that can be instantiated at a single time, but as structural features of enduring experiential processes. This is making the shift between the static modern metaconceptual structure Hegel calls “Verstand” and the dynamic successor metaconceptual structure he calls “Vernunft.” According to the categories of Verstand as articulated by Kant, for instance, the understanding has available to it a stock of concepts that are determinate, in that it is already settled in advance what manifolds of intuition they can successfully synthesize. What is recognizably a cognate Verstand conception of determinateness shows up in Frege as the requirement that concepts fix extensions, in the sense of determining, for every possible object, whether that object does or does not fall under the concept. The view is that fixed, permanent truths can be formulated using concepts that are determinate in this sense, and that progress in knowledge consists in endorsing more and more such truths, and rejecting more and more falsehoods formulated in terms of those same determinate concepts. By contrast, the metaconceptual standpoint of Vernunft focuses on the malleability of concepts. In the toy example of an experience of error mentioned earlier, a subject finds herself with commitments incompatible by her own lights because she endorses a concept of acid that includes tasting sour as a sufficient reason for applying the concept, and turning litmus paper red as a necessary consequence of its application. Immediate perceptual experience of a liquid that tastes sour and turns litmus paper blue precipitates a crisis. While either of the perceptual judgments might be relinquished, progress can consist in amending the content attributed to the concept. Perhaps only substances that both taste sour and combine with metals to form salts should count as acids. Insofar as this emendation is successful, progress is made in that the subject deploys concepts that better track what really follows from what in the objective world. The experience of error obliges not only change of belief, but change of meaning.
The metaconceptual move that takes us from vorstellen to begreifen (Verstand to Vernunft) is the replacement of the model of experience as representation, an external relation between independently specifiable realms of representings and representeds, confronting each other across a gulf, by a model of experience as expression. This is an internal process of development whereby each single content, retrospectively recollectively identifiable as persisting throughout the process of its development, shows up originally in implicit form and is gradually expressed or unfolds, becoming available in ever more explicit form. Experience is the process whereby the determinate, and so mediated contents implicit in immediacy come to appear as explicitly mediated. Representational relations take their explanatorily subsidiary place as arising from one aspect of the activity of developing conceptual contents.
The residue of traditional Verstand ways of thinking about cognitive progress that consists in understanding experience as progressive insofar as it asymptotically approaches objective facts and relations of incompatibility and consequence is, according to the more capacious Vernunft picture, one-sided and incomplete. It results from appreciating only the retrospective-recollective perspective on experience, which underwrites talk of “facts” (true claims) and “what really follows from (excludes) what” (objective consequences and incompatibilities) from within each vindicating recollective rational reconstruction. Experience is indeed the royal road of truth and knowledge—but it is not that alone. Taking into account also the prospective perspective on experience, which focuses on the fragility and necessarily temporary character of any and every set of doxastic and inferential commitments, requires thinking of truth and determinateness as features of the process of experience, rather than as goals it asymptotically approaches. Experience is the truth-process. And it is the process of determining conceptual contents. It is expressively progressive, in the sense that the retrospective-recollective perspective shows it to be genuinely revelatory of reality. That experiential process both institutes (on the subjective side) and discovers (on the objective side) conceptually articulated contents, and so truths, that are determinate in the Kant-Frege Verstand sense (in its recollective phase) and engenders their dissolution in the discovery of residual error.
The comprehensive view that encompasses both what shows up as progressive from the retrospective-recollective perspective and what shows up as disruptive and erroneous from the prospective perspective (corresponding to different phases of the process of experience) is summarized in a central passage from the Preface:
[T]his whole movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth. This truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be regarded as something on the other side, positive and dead. Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is “in itself,” and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. [PG 47]
“Appearance” here is the phenomena, the world as it shows up for consciousness, in the form of conceptual contents articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence, which are endorsed by the knowing, acting subject of the cycle of cognition and action that is the process of experience. Although each such phenomenon is unmasked as erroneous, as an appearance that in some ways misrepresents reality, the recollective phase of experience also reveals each such constellation of commitments to be an appearance of a noumenal reality (what things are in themselves) represented by it, visible as having been all along implicit in it, gradually but inexorably emerging into greater explicitness. The passage continues with one of the most justly famous images of the whole book:
The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent. In the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence, is preserved as something that recollects itself [sich erinnert]. [PG 47]
In interpreting this allegory, it is important to keep in mind the two levels of concepts I have claimed are being considered. The surface topic is “shapes of Spirit,” various forms exhibited by the normativity articulating the thinkings and doings of self-conscious subjects, traditional, modern, and beyond. This is one of the places where Hegel explicitly marks that, besides thoughts and concepts at this categorial metalevel, he is also addressing the nature and evolution of ground-level determinate thoughts and concepts. A characteristic feature of the “pragmatist semantic” reading I have been presenting here is “semantic descent”: focusing on what we are supposed to learn about the use and content of these ordinary empirical and practical “determinate” concepts and commitments. Here the partygoers participating in the movable feast are those commitments: doxastic, practical, and inferential—in the broad sense that articulates conceptual content and so includes commitments concerning what is materially incompatible with (“determinately negates”) what. The revel is the process of experience. What matters about the image of their drunkenness is its picturing of the restless, woozy jostling and elbowing of each other as different contents of potential commitments that are incompatible with each other in the company of the others already on board seek a place at the table. Those that are forced out are immediately replaced by others, so the party continues, though with a shifting cast. The crucial contribution to the festivities that was made by the departed members, those who at some earlier point slipped insensible beneath the table, is still “preserved as recollected,” in the story the later revelers tell about how they got where they are.
This recollective activity establishes the relation between a sequence of phenomena (appearances, senses, representings) and noumena (reality, referents, representeds) in which the latter shows up twice: both as the current constellation of explicitly endorsed conceptual contents in which the rationally reconstructed sequence culminates and also as having been all along implicit in and normatively governing that sequence, by serving as the standard for assessing the expressive success of all of its members. It is because the account grounds the semantic relations between senses and referents, representings and representeds, in this recollective activity of the experiencing subject that it deserves to be thought of as offering a pragmatist semantics.
Conceptual idealism (the begreifen that comprehends vorstellen) claims both that that semantic, representational relation is to be understood only expressively, in terms of recollective activity, and that it is actually produced or instituted by that activity. The first is a sense-dependence claim, and the second is a reference-dependence claim. (What both address is representational relations between senses and referents.) The distinctive kind of doing that is experience for Hegel is, in its reparative and recollective phases, shaping and determining the conceptual contents the subject endorses at the end of each tripartite episode. In that sense it is making or producing conceptions (conceptual contents)—for instance, of acids as what both taste sour and combine with metals to produce salts. This is one sense of “determining conceptual contents”: determining as making up. But the recollective process essentially includes a commitment to having found what it in this sense makes. It is a process of discovery of what has according to it all along been being expressed and represented, first less and then more adequately, by the sequence of always partly erroneous constellations of commitments in the expressively progressive trajectory retrospectively recollectively rationally reconstructed. This is another sense of “determining conceptual contents”: determining as finding out.
That it is a finding rather than a making is an essential, constitutive commitment even of the jurisprudential species of recollection, which develops and determines legal concepts that are not empirical concepts, in that they are not controlled by perceptually immediate (in the sense of noninferentially elicited) applications of other legal concepts. To use an example of Frege’s, though we might progressively redraw the boundaries of the North Sea, we are not producing the thing itself by doing that. We produce it at most as the North Sea, as what is picked out by that concept. Repair of an anomaly and its recollective vindication produce new conceptions, articulated by deontic normative relations of material incompatibility and consequence. But the result of those activities as such purports to find alethic modal forms of those relations in the objective world being represented. In this hylomorphic sense, the conceptual contents consciousness finds in the world are just those that it has recollectively made. Conceptual idealism asserts that when, as self-conscious in the sense of being conscious of itself as conscious, consciousness distinguishes between its certainty and truth, between what things are for it and what they are in themselves, between appearance and reality, representings and representeds, it is neither alienating itself from itself nor acknowledging a confrontation with something alien to it. Its finding out how things really are is a distinctive, sui generis kind of active recollective making of that distinction, which is essential to consciousness as such, through its experience. The world as it is in itself as distinct from how it is for consciousness is not a brute other, but in that distinctive sense the product of its own recollective activity in experience. (This is not a reference-dependence claim.) In this sense consciousness finds only what it has made—and not only made findable. In this sense, it sees itself in the objects of its knowledge, even insofar as they transcend that knowledge.
One might be tempted to object that the recollective phenomenological story at most tells us about what activity institutes the semantic representational relation between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves as that relation practically shows up to consciousness. And the thought would be that we want rather to know what that semantic representational relation is objectively, in itself. This is a question at the metalevel. The response is that the begrifflich-Vernunft recollective story makes explicit how the institution of semantic representational relations by reparative-recollective reconstructions really works, in itself. And the story is that claims of this form are vindicated by retrospective recollective rational reconstructions of the process by which we found out that this is how things really work (in this case, how consciousness really works). That is exactly the metalevel story Hegel tells, in the form of a phenomenology of “shapes of Geist.”
The semantic story about how to understand both how facts as true thinkables are genuinely knowable and how the authority of facts over thought is manifested in the in-principle instability and untenability of every determinate conception of them is also a pragmatic story about the reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility that relate normative attitudes and normative statuses. The attitude-dependence of normative statuses is articulated by understanding normative statuses as instituted by reciprocal recognitive attitudes. The retrospective recollective perspective fills in the countervailing status-dependence of normative attitudes, by exhibiting the concepts that determine the statuses as the culminating phase of an expressively progressive tradition of ever more adequate conceptions normatively governed by the facts they reveal. The prospective disruptive perspective fills in the status-dependence of normative attitudes, by exhibiting each conception as inevitably failing adequately to express the objective concepts articulating the facts, which serve as the normative standards for assessing the correctness of the various conceptions. In this way, justice is done to the attitude-transcendence of normative statuses: the way what a subject is really committed to goes beyond anyone’s attitudes, beyond what that subject acknowledges and what others attribute.
Because the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses on the normative pragmatic side of the subject in this way mirror the semantic relations between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, understanding Hegel’s begrifflich Vernunft-structured historical biperspectival account of the relations between subjective conceptions and objective concepts decisively moves us beyond the alienation he diagnoses as characteristic of modernity. For the challenge he sees us facing is how to hold on to modernity’s defining insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses while reachieving the ancient sittlich appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. That is what the pragmatist semantics of conceptual idealism shows us how to do. The truth that shall set us free is truth understood as a vast Bacchanalian revel with not a soul sober, in which no sooner does one member of the party fall insensible beneath the table than his place is taken by another. For this semantic account explains how normative statuses can at once be instituted by (a tradition of) normative attitudes and also transcend those attitudes, exerting authority by both serving as a normative standard for assessments of the correctness of those attitudes and being what the attitudes reconstructed as expressively progressive are exhibited as subjunctively sensitive to.
Fully to appreciate Hegel’s resolution of the challenge set by alienation from norms—the loss of intelligibility of their binding force—that results from modernity’s recognition that those norms are instituted by subjective attitudes requires further attention to the fine structure of his account of how attitudes institute normative statuses that transcend and exert authority over those attitudes. The context in which the problem of how to understand this most pointedly arises for Hegel, and which provides the raw materials he reassembles for his own account, is Kant’s autonomy model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes. The strong version of the Enlightenment insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses is the idea that normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes. It is not just that there are no normative statuses of authority and responsibility except in a context where people take each other to have authority and hold each other responsible. The thought is that such attitudes of attributing and acknowledging responsibility and authority actually produce those statuses. Normative statuses are creatures of normative attitudes.
Kant implements an especially clear version of this thought. For Kant thinks that discursive subjects can make themselves responsible by taking themselves to be responsible. Indeed, on his understanding of normative bindingness, one is genuinely normatively bound only by commitments one has laid down for oneself, rules one has bound oneself by. (Some commitments turn out to be categorial—to explicate the structure of rational commitment as such—and so to be implicit in undertaking any determinate commitments.) For Kant, concepts are rules that determine what one makes oneself responsible for by applying them, whether doxastically in judgment or practically in acting intentionally. The content of the concept determines what commitment one has undertaken, what normative status one has acquired, by adopting the attitude of acknowledging it.
Hegel notices two potential problems with an account of this shape. First, though it is easy to think of autonomy as an ability possessed by rational knowers and agents—the ability to bind themselves by norms—it is a distinctively normative ability. In fact, it is a kind of authority. To treat someone as a rational being is to attribute to her the authority to bind herself by her attitudes, to become responsible or committed (subject to normative assessment) by acknowledging responsibilities or commitments. This authority is the dignity of rational subjects, and Kant takes it that other rational subjects have a duty or obligation to acknowledge and attribute that authority. That is the duty to respect their autonomy. But he does not take it that the authority that is autonomy is itself instituted by the attitudes of those who respect that normative status. The authority that is autonomy and the responsibility on the part of others to respect that authority are normative statuses that are not understood as instituted by normative attitudes. These normative metastatuses are brutely taken just to be part of what it is to be a rational normative subject, and not further accounted for. That the Kantian account has this structure might make it easier to retain a version of the status-dependence of normative attitudes, on which the premodern tradition focused. But that advantage is bought at the cost of not fully respecting the strong version of the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of all normative statuses.
A more serious issue concerns the contents of the attitudes that institute commitments according to the autonomy model. Those commitments, in judgment and intention, have determinate contents only insofar as the subject has available concepts with such contents. The model says that it is up to me whether I am committed—for instance, to the coin’s being copper. But if the relations of material incompatibility and consequence that articulate the concept copper I have applied in undertaking the commitment are also up to me, then I have undertaken no determinate commitment at all. As Wittgenstein says: “If whatever is going to seem right to me is right, that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right.’ ” [PI §258] Concepts with determinate contents serve as normative standards for assessing whether the subject who applies them has fulfilled the rational responsibilities undertaken thereby—has acknowledged incompatibilities and drawn appropriate conclusions. Hegel wants to know how it is that the subject has access to such determinately contentful normative standards. If they cannot be the products of the attitudes of the one who applies them in judgment, where do they come from? He does not find an adequate answer in Kant.
One of the master ideas of the interpretation of Hegel developed in this work is that a principal task of the Phenomenology is to explain the advent of determinately contentful concepts: their nature and the process of experience that not only applies but institutes them. That is what makes this a “semantic” reading. The trouble with the Kantian story is that it in effect envisages two different processes, one that produces determinate conceptual contents and a different one that then applies them in experience. For Kant, all empirical activity, whether cognitive or practical, consists in applying concepts. That is really the only thing Kantian rational subjects can do. So empirical activity presupposes the availability of the determinately contentful concepts whose application it consists in. Determining the contents of those concepts happens somewhere else, offstage. Once the conceptual enterprise is up and running, making judgment possible in the first place, Kantian judgments of reflection can form new concepts from old ones. But the institution of determinately contentful concepts generally is a precondition of experience, not a product of it. Hegel, by contrast, offers an account of experience as at once instituting and applying determinately contentful concepts.
For these two reasons, both because it takes the crucial normative metastatuses as not instituted by attitudes and because it unduly separates the institution of determinate conceptual contents from their empirical application, Hegel cannot just take over Kant’s autonomy story about the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes. But he does find in Kant’s account all the raw materials he needs for his successor account. The leading idea of that account is that instituting normative statuses 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]
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, their normative subjects, and the dyadic community that 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 others is practically taking or treating them as the subjects 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 understanding the constellation of attitudes that can institute (actualize otherwise virtual) statuses as 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].
“Independence” is in the model authority: the authority of the several recognitive subjects. It is not immediate authority (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). Hegel’s idea is that when recognitive attitudes are symmetrical, when each party attributes to the other the authority to institute by their attitudes both responsibilities on their own part and authority on the other’s part, then genuine normative statuses are instituted.
In the mutual recognition model, authority and responsibility are coordinate and complementary. It is entirely up to me whom I recognize: to whom I attribute the authority to institute normative statuses by their attitudes, when those attitudes are suitably complemented by those to whom they attribute them. In doing so, though, I make myself responsible to those I do recognize. For while it is up to me in that same sense (I have the authority) to acknowledge commitments (responsibilities) on my own part, it is not in the same sense up to me whether I succeed in making myself responsible by so taking myself to be responsible. My acknowledgment of a commitment, my claim of authority, yield actual statuses of responsibility and authority only if those statuses are also attributed to me by those I have granted the authority to do so, by recognizing them. Nothing but attitudes are necessary (or sufficient) to institute genuine normative statuses. But on the Hegelian recognitive model such normative statuses are understood as essentially social statuses. It is our attitudes—my attitudes and the attitudes of those I recognize and who recognize me, a recognitive community—that institute normative statuses. My attitudes play an essential role in determining what authority and responsibility I have, but I cannot make myself authoritative or responsible all on my own.
It is this feature that makes intelligible how, by my attitudes of acknowledgment and recognition, I can bind myself by norms that are not simply a matter of my attitudes—so that it is not the case that “whatever seems right to me is right,” in which case any norm governing assessments of right or wrong would accordingly drop out of the picture. It is up to me whether I use the term “copper” to express my claim, and so claim that the coin is copper. But the boundaries of the commitment I have succeeded in undertaking thereby, what is incompatible with it and what its consequences are, is administered by those I have granted that authority by recognizing them as metallurgical experts. On Hegel’s account, the distinction between force and content, between the attitude I express and the determinately contentful norm I thereby bind myself by, is practically enforced by a social division of labor. It is administered by different bearers of authority and responsibility. My authority is balanced by that of the recognitive community instituted by our reciprocal recognitive attitudes. Each of us is responsible to all the others for the constitution of that community, and of the normative statuses (including normative selfhood) that are instituted by our reciprocal attitudes. That is how the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes are reconciled.
At this point one might ask: But what of the process of experience, and the crucial role in it played by the retrospective-recollective institution of an expressively progressive tradition? The social division of labor in the story about the institution of normative statuses by reciprocal recognitive attitudes is from a temporal point of view horizontal, a matter of relations among contemporaries. The story about experience, in contrast, is essentially historical, temporally vertical, with the crucial relations holding between earlier and later episodes of experience. How do the social and the historical dimensions of Hegel’s story mesh?
The answer is that the social and historical dimensions are intimately related. Both are to be understood in normative terms of recognitive relations of authority and responsibility. So construed, the historical, temporally biperspectival account of how the process of experience institutes representational relations between phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality, senses and referents, and normative attitudes and normative statuses shows up as a crucial special case of the social reciprocal recognition model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes. For the triphasic experiential process by which representational relations to determinate conceptual contents are both made and found (considered prospectively and retrospectively, respectively) exhibits the structure of coordinate, reciprocal authority and responsibility characteristic of the institution of normative statuses by mutual recognitive attitudes. The historical process of determining conceptual contents in the Vernunft sense is a social recognitive process.
This point emerges most clearly, perhaps, in the institutionalized case of the determination of the contents of legal concepts by the judges who both make and apply common and case law. The norms in that example are laws, which must be determinately contentful in that they must settle what conduct is forbidden and what conduct is required by them (what is incompatible with or necessitated by them). In that forum, there is nothing to institute those norms except the attitudes of the judges, practically expressed in the decisions they make in applying them. That is the sense in which these norms are properly thought of as “judge-made law.” Each judge exercises real authority in each case she is deciding—in applying the legal concepts in question to novel sets of facts, specified in terms of nonlegal concepts. But it is authority constrained by corresponding responsibilities. For the judge’s decision is authoritative only insofar as its authority is recognized by future judges. If they do not treat the case as correctly decided, given law the judge inherited, they will not treat it as having precedential authority for their own decisions. In deciding a case, in applying the legal concepts one way rather than another, the judge is in effect petitioning future judges for recognition, for the authority to determine the content of the normative status, the law, by the attitudes she manifests in applying it that way. Their decision about whether to grant that authority is a decision about the extent to which the judge has been responsible to the authority of prior judges’ decisions as to the proper boundaries of the legal concepts in play. The authority of the “law-making” judge is balanced by responsibility to the applications of prior judges, the content of the norm inherited from them. And the judge is responsible to future judges in that they hold that judge responsible to the authority of the tradition she inherits. They administer that authority. And of course, no future judge’s decision to treat the current judge’s decision as precedential or not is itself finally authoritative. It, too, is responsible to the (equally defeasible) authority of judges of the still further future.
The recollective process is how causes get shaped into reasons. Even if what the judge had for breakfast made her decide as she did—in that the genealogical subjunctive is true that if she had eaten something different, she would have decided differently—a suitable recollective narrative can exhibit the decision as nonetheless correct: as a making explicit of some aspects of the content of the law that the recollection exhibits as having been all along implicit. The attitude so caused is exhibited as expressive of a genuine norm, and hence as reason providing for future judges. Recollection is a kind of rationalization. But it is not unconstrained. The authority of a present judge’s retrospective rationalization must be recognized by future judges to be more than just an attitude. Though he does not offer an alternative metaphysics of Vernunft, I take it that if he could be brought to use such language, Wittgenstein would agree with Hegel that one of the alienating culprits responsible for our inability to hold together the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes is a deformed, dualism-inducing conception of the relations between reasons and causes.
What is enacted in determining the content of legal concepts this way is recognizably a version of the model of instituting normative statuses by reciprocal recognitive attitudes. At each stage in the determination of the content of legal concepts, the authority of each judge’s attitudes over the developing content is balanced by a correlative responsibility to the norm being applied. The normative labor of instituting the norm by applying it is divided between different normative subjects. Authority is real (a normative status, not just an attitude of claiming authority) only insofar as it is recognized. And the authority of the recognizer suitably to complement the attitude of claiming or attributing authority must itself be recognized by others, on pain of demotion from actual to virtual: from status to mere attitude. Both the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes are in play at every point. For the authority of actual applications over the developing conceptual contents (making law) and the responsibility of such applications to the inherited conceptual contents (finding law) are active throughout. In the process of determining content (in the sui generis making / finding sense of “determining”), each generation inherits binding norms. But (seen prospectively) each alters them by their attitudes. This is how we (in the temporally extended sense) can both be bound by the norms we inherit, looking back, and make the norms, going forward.
It is worth briefly rehearsing a different path that can be taken through the story told here, emphasizing a common structure that is cumulatively developed in it. One of the big ideas that distinguishes Hegel’s thought from that of his predecessors is his commitment to what would come to be called “holism.” He talks about it under the heading of a new “speculative” conception of identity. Understood speculatively, identity is not to be contrasted with difference, but is to be thought of as comprising and being articulated by difference. We are to think first of a whole that is what it is, whose identity consists in, its different parts standing in the relations to one another that they do. Then we are to think of the parts themselves as being identified and individuated functionally, by the roles they play in constituting the whole in question. They are not to be thought of as self-standing, in that they are the things they are antecedently to and independently of being related to each other in the way they are in the whole that comprises them. Rather, they are identified and individuated by the functional roles they play in the whole. The parts play different roles in constituting the whole. But we are to think both that those differences are essential to the identity of the whole and that standing in the relations to the other different parts that they do is essential to the identity of each part. For these reasons, Hegel will say that the parts, though different from one another, are identical to one another “in the speculative sense,” which is compatible with and depends upon them also being different from one another.
Conceptual structures of this abstract shape—holistic conceptual structures—are ubiquitous in Hegel’s thought. He was the first to try to think through, consecutively and rigorously, what is involved in such holistic structures. And there is room for skepticism about whether the general concept is so much as intelligible. How, exactly, is the individuative work done? The whole is identified and individuated by the relations among its parts, and the parts are identified and individuated by their relations to each other in forming the whole that they do. There is potentially a chicken-and-egg circularity problem with this specification. Hegel’s characterization of such structures as “infinite” and his suggestion that they are to be understood by “traversing the moments” (at the end of Force and Understanding), might seem to acknowledge the difficulty without offering much concrete help in addressing it. The battle over Hegel’s later reception in fin de siècle British Idealism was largely waged over this issue of the intelligibility and usefulness of the idea that “all relations are internal relations.” The underlying distinction between internal and external relations was sometimes conveyed by the example of a ladder. The relations between its rails and its rungs are what make it a ladder. It is only by standing in those relations to each other that the bits of wood make up a ladder. By contrast, the relations between the ladder and wall it is leaning up against and the ground it is standing on are external to it. Move it, take it out of those relations, and it remains a ladder and the ladder that it is. Its internal relations are essential to (necessary for) its identity. Its external relations are accidental to (contingent with respect to) its identity. This is the model Quine had in mind when he said (in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”) that meaning is what essence becomes when it is detached from the thing and attached to the word. At the extremes, British Absolute Idealists thought of all relations as internal (Russell’s “world as a bowl of jelly”) and atomists thought of all relations as external (Russell’s “world as a bucket of shot”). Whitehead cited both as united in committing the “fallacy of lost contrast.”
But this is not the level of generality at which Hegel’s holism should be considered. It is best approached in terms of the various detailed uses Hegel makes of holist structures in his pragmatics and semantics, and in the intricate relations among them. We can begin with his recognitive metaphysics of normativity. Particular biological organisms, individuated by their different desires, adopt recognitive attitudes toward one another. They thereby institute recognitive communities—a kind of whole or universal—of those who are recognized by those they recognize. As members of such communities, as particulars “falling under” such universals, they become more than just the particulars with which we began. They become self-conscious individual normative subjects of statuses of authority and responsibility. The identity of the community is constituted by the recognitive relations among its different members, and those members are the more-than-merely-particular individuals they are by standing in just the recognitive relations to others that they do. They are identified and individuated by their recognitive relations to those specifically different from them. Any worries about the circularity of holistically individuated individuals and the universals that characterize them are resolved by the role of the orectically individuated particular organisms who recognitively bootstrap themselves from the realm of Natur to that of Geist. (I have argued elsewhere that a crucial role played by immediacy in mediated conceptual structures is precisely to provide antecedently individuated vehicles for holistically defined significances.13)
But we have seen that this simple story of the institution of norms by mutual recognition is just the beginning of Hegel’s sophisticated metaphysics of normativity. The critique of the Master’s practical conception of pure independence, authority without correlative responsibility, shows that these two fundamental normative statuses (aspects of what subjects are in themselves) are holistically related. Authority and responsibility are reciprocally sense-dependent and reference-dependent on one another. For one’s commitment to be determinately contentful, the authority to undertake such commitments must be balanced by the authority of others to hold one responsible for them.
Unpacking the recognitive model a bit further has showed that the two fundamental normative attitudes of attributing and acknowledging responsibility and authority—which express the difference in social perspective between what subjects are for others and what they are for themselves—are also holistically related to one another. They, too, are reciprocally sense-dependent and globally reference-dependent on one another. One cannot understand one except as part of a whole that includes the relations of these different attitudes toward one another, and subjects cannot have the capacity to adopt one practical capacity unless they have the capacity to adopt the other. Further, when we look at the normative fine structure of the recognitive process by which normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes—in particular, when we look at the way the recognitive model grows out of and builds on the basic Kantian normative status of having the authority to commit oneself (make oneself responsible by acknowledging a responsibility)—we see that the various normative attitudes and the various normative statuses are all holistically related to one another, too. Normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent on normative attitudes.
The recognitive model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes shows very well the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The converse status-dependence of normative attitudes shows up at several levels. One must have the recognitive authority to hold another responsible in order for one’s recognitive attitudes to count as suitably complementary and so able to cooperate in instituting a determinately contentful status. More deeply, for one’s acknowledgment or attribution of a responsibility to be determinately contentful, those attitudes must be acknowledgments or attributions of normative statuses with determinate contents. Explicating the status-dependence of normative attitudes in Hegel’s metaphysics of normativity requires attention to the contentfulness attitudes inherit from the statuses they are attitudes toward.
The semantics implicit in Hegel’s normative pragmatics begins with his nonpsychological conception of the conceptual. To be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of determinate negation (and so of mediation) to other such contentful items. The identity of each conceptual content consists in its relations of exclusive difference (contrariety) to other such contents, and the identity of the Concept that comprises them all is articulated by those relations of exclusive difference between all its component determinate conceptual contents. Here, too, to avoid paradox or regress we should think of immediately distinguishable particulars as bearers or vehicles of these conceptual contents. Those contents can then be thought of as identified and individuated by the relations of material incompatibility and consequence they stand in to other such contents. In discussing the Perception chapter we saw how Hegel unpacks what is implicit in this picture of conceptual content to derive a complex, multilayered holistic structure of properties and objects. Already at this point there is a lot more metaphysical fine structure to the holistic systems Hegel is considering than are hinted at in the simple-minded summary in terms of identity through difference with which I began. And we saw that Force and Understanding both takes the unpacking of holistic structures still further and takes the nature of such structures as an explicit topic. It is here that we get such characteristic specifications as these:
These moments are not divided into two independent extremes offering each other only an opposite extreme: their essence rather consists simply and solely in this, that each is solely through the other, and what each thus is it immediately no longer is, since it is the other. They have thus, in fact, no substance of their own, which might support and maintain them. [PG 141]
[A] difference which is no difference, or only a difference of what is self-same, and its essence is unity. The two distinguished moments both subsist [bestehen]; they are implicit and are opposites in themselves, i.e. each is the opposite of itself; each has its “other” within it and they are only one unity. [PG 161]
That the simple character of law is infinity means, according to what we have found, a) that it is self-identical, but is also in itself different; or it is the selfsame which repels itself from itself or sunders itself into two.… b) What is thus dirempted [Entzweite], which constitutes the parts … exhibits itself as a stable existence … but c) through the Notion of inner difference, these unlike and indifferent moments … are a difference which is no difference or only a difference of what is self-same, and its essence is unity.… The two distinguished moments both subsist; they are implicit and are opposites in themselves, i.e. each is the opposite of itself; each has its “other” within it and they are only one unity. [PG 161]
At the high level of metaconceptual abstraction at which we can characterize a conceptual structure as “holistic,” then, we see generically the same kind of holism characterizing Hegel’s initial conception of conceptual content that we saw characterize his recognitive conception of relations among normative attitudes and normative statuses. But we also saw that that conception of conceptual content is hylomorphic. Conceptual contents in Hegel’s sense can take two forms, objective and subjective, depending on whether the relations of determinate negation (material incompatibility) that articulate them are construed in alethic modal terms or deontic normative ones—that is, whether their exclusive difference means that it is impossible for two properties to be coinstantiated, or two states of affairs both to obtain, or whether it is merely impermissible for one subject to acknowledge two corresponding commitments.
The intentional relations between conceptual contents of these two forms (the one articulating subjective thoughts and the other objective states of affairs) are the basis of the representational dimension of conceptual content: “of”-intentionality rather than the “that”-intentionality articulated by relations of determinate negation. We saw that these representational relations between the two equally holistic forms of conceptual content (representings and representeds, Hegelian senses and referents, phenomena and noumena) are to be understood in terms of the recollective phase of experience. The process and practice that is experience in Hegel’s sense has both cognitive and practical dimensions. It inevitably is the experience of error and failure, but it is also the process and the practice whereby conceptual contents are determined and truth discovered. The exercise of recollective rationality reveals determinate conceptual contents and norms with those contents as governing the process of discovering them through experience. It is the practice that articulates at once the status-dependence of normative attitudes crucial to Hegel’s normative pragmatics and the notion of determinate conceptual content central to his semantics, tying them together holistically in a pragmatist account. Recollection in one sense makes, and in another sense finds, holistic interdependences between not only the two forms of conceptual content on the semantic side and the attitudes and statuses on the side of normative pragmatics, but the semantic distinctions and the pragmatic ones. As the origin of the distinction between sense and referent, the holistic interdependences recollection makes visible are not assimilable either to sense-dependence or to reference-dependence. The result is a holistic pragmatist interdependence of pragmatics and semantics. Hegelian holism is a house with many mansions. Hegel is happy to talk about each of the interdependencies it comprises, and about the system of all of them together, as exhibiting the holistic structure of identity through difference he calls “infinity.”
Like this Conclusion, Hegel’s Preface (written after the rest of the book) states some of the largest and most important claims he understands the whole book to entitle him to make. It is not a bit of philosophical argumentation that is supposed to do the entitling. Nor is it more than a minimal explanation of those claims. What we get in the Preface are only the minimal articulations necessary to locate, for one who has mastered the whole work, which features of it are being invoked and labeled. It is valuable for giving us in one place an overview of what Hegel takes himself to have established, a general picture of what he thinks he has accomplished.
The central slogan of the Preface is that
everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject. [PG 17]
Grasping the true is implicitly comprehending it, while expressing it is explicitly comprehending it. The latter involves the use of specifically logical vocabulary, of the sort Hegel deploys in the Phenomenology. The centrality of the claim that the True is not only Substance but Subject is indicated by its repetition—it appears with only slight variations in [PG 18], [PG 25], [PG 32], [PG 37], [PG 39], [PG 54], and [PG 65]. Let us look first at “the True.” In [PG 20] we are told that the True is the whole. In this idiom we do not find the opposition between truth and certainty that is in play in the rest of the book. The truth of Spirit’s self-consciousness and its certainty coincide when it knows itself absolutely.
The True … is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. [PG 18]
Here Hegel is talking about the expository process he pursues in the Phenomenology of philosophically making explicit what is implicit in ordinary empirical and practical concept-use, by considering the various “shapes of [self-]consciousness” that express different structural categories in terms of which it can be rendered. But he is also talking about the process of experience by which the contents of those concepts are determined and show up as representing how things really are. The recollective phase of each episode of experience places the explicit result in which experience (so far) culminates back at the beginning of the process, as having always all along implicitly governed the development of a constellation of commitments, as the normative standard for assessments of the partial success and failure of each prior episode in the process—episodes now rationally reconstructed into an unbroken, cumulative expressive progression. The truth is
the process which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth. This truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True. [PG 47]
(This is the passage that continues with the metaphor of truth as a Bacchanalian revel with not a soul sober.) It is by comprehending this process as a whole that we are to understand the dual manifestations of the true as substance and as subject.
The role the logical or speculative concept of substance has played in the body of the work is that of what constrains cognition and action, that on which individuals depend or answer to in experience. We have heard about two basic sorts of substance: natural substance and ethical [sittlich] substance. The first comprises the inorganic and organic aspects of things, as they at once provide an arena within which we actualize and express ourselves, and set standards for successful cognition and action. The second is the norm-governed, norm-instituting recognitive community. The two correspond to what are called, in the terminology Hegel inherits from Kant, natural and practical necessity. (“Necessary” for Kant means “according to a rule.”) We have seen that the two kinds of rules articulating these two kinds of necessity are made explicit in alethic modal and deontic normative vocabulary, respectively.
Representational thinking, vorstellen, articulating the metaconceptual categories of Verstand, understands both kinds of substance, natural and geistig, in terms of “abstract immediacy (the immediacy which barely is).” [PG 32] This is the immediacy of being and the immediacy of thought. Natural substance is construed as confronting thinking substance as an independent constraint on cognition and action. The focus is on external, objective representational relations between substances construed as different kinds of immediacy. The first step in overcoming this abstract opposition, which threatens to make cognition and action unintelligible, is to see both sorts of substance as involving also a moment of mediation.
Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment. [PG 33]
[T]he Subject … by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself. [PG 32]
Mediation is, broadly, inferential articulation. To understand both being and thought as “thoroughly mediated” is to understand them as articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. Such a conception makes possible “understanding truth as substance,” which is understanding truth as a matter of one identical conceptual content taking two forms: as fact and as thought. This is bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism.
But we have seen that “understanding truth as substance,” in the sense of bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism, is an ultimately one-sided view. It looks at things and thoughts only from the point of view of their conceptual articulation—that is, as mediated. Their surplus nonconceptual immediacy, overflowing containment by any determinate conceptual structure of mediation, is what both alethically necessitates and normatively demands change of conception.
[E]xperience is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate, the unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous being, or only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation, and is only then revealed for the first time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a property of consciousness also. [PG 36]
What alethic incompatibility (for instance, of properties) on the side of objects implicitly is becomes explicit in the normative demand that subjects resolve and repair incompatible commitments. This internal connection between determinate negation (material incompatibility) as an objective relation and practical normative obligations to do something, to change the contents they cognitively and practically endorse, shows mediation and immediacy to be two sides of one coin. Cashing that metaphor, mediation and immediacy must be understood as two aspects of the process of experience. Immediacy manifests itself in the disparity between the objective and subjective forms of conceptual content, which is the motor of the process of conceptual development constitutive of the subject.
This is the insight that Hegel invokes under the heading of “understanding the True as subject.”
For mediation is nothing beyond self-moving self-sameness, or is reflection into self, the moment of the “I” which is for itself pure negativity or, when reduced to its pure abstraction, simple becoming. The “I,” or becoming in general, this mediation, on account of its simple nature, is just immediacy in the process of becoming, and is the immediate itself.14 [PG 21]
The “I,” the self, the subject is identified with the movement, “becoming in general”—that is, experience. This is already Kant’s view, where the subject of experience, what is responsible for its commitments, is identified with the process of synthesizing a constellation of commitments that has the rational unity characteristic of apperception—by practically acknowledging the critical, justificatory, and ampliative rational task responsibilities constitutive of judgment. And it is this process of experience that determines (prospectively and retrospectively, making and finding) conceptual contents.
Determinate thoughts have the “I,” the power of the negative … for the substance and element of their existence. [PG 33]
The guiding slogan of the Preface,
everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject, [PG 17]
can be understood in four stages.
At this point, it is not just that we must conceive the truth not only as substance but as subject, but must also construe substance as an aspect of subject: as being implicitly what subject is explicitly. We must appreciate an asymmetrical priority of the recollective recognitive process that both constitutes self or subject and determines conceptual contents, over the semantic (including representational) relations between normative and natural substance. For that process institutes those relations. This final stage is what I have called “conceptual idealism.”
Hegel presents this final, culminating stage in our phenomenological self-consciousness as an “overcoming of otherness” on the part of the knowing and acting subject. That its independence (authority) is constrained by a correlative dependence (responsibility), manifested in a representational (semantic, intentional) relation to an objective world now shows up as a metaphysically unavoidable aspect of the determinate contentfulness of its own thoughts. Objective being as substance is understood in terms of the role it plays in the development of the thinking subject, the self. He makes this final stage of self-understanding explicit in a long passage that summarizes the lessons he takes Geist to have learned about itself over the course of its development, and wants us, his readers, to learn from his recollective rehearsal of that process.
The disparity which exists in consciousness between the “I” and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general.… Now although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the “I” and its object, it is just as much the disparity of the substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject. [PG 37]
The disparity within natural substance itself is the way its immediacy overflows every constellation of commitments articulated by Verstand-determinate conceptual contents, leading to a further episode of the experience of error and normatively demanding of the subject the alteration of its commitments. Those commitments include commitments concerning what is incompatible with what and what is a consequence of what. Changing those is further determining the contents of the concepts in terms of which cognitive and practical commitments are couched. The immediacy of objective being and the instability of every constellation of determinate commitments are two aspects of the same metaphysical matter of fact.
The passage continues:
When it has shown this completely, Spirit [Geist] has made its existence identical with its essence; it has itself for its object just as it is, and the abstract element of immediacy, and the separation of knowing and truth, is overcome. Being is then absolutely mediated; it is a substantial content which is just as immediately the property of the “I,” it is self-like or the Concept [Begriff]. With this the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded.
When, at this fourth stage, it conceives itself in these terms (that is, according to the categories of Vernunft), Geist becomes for the first time fully and adequately self-conscious. That is what Hegel means by saying that its existence is identical to its essence. Immediacy is now understood in terms of its role in the process of mediation—that is, the process of conceptualizing it, incorporating how things really are into how things are taken to be. Hegel talks about doing this as “mediating the immediate,” or “giving contingency the form of necessity.” The form of necessity is normative, conceptual form, the form in which it can be seen recollectively as exercising authority over the process of determining conceptual contents (the representings responsible to this represented). At this point, we (and Geist itself) can see how the determinateness of our very thoughts depends on incorporating natural, immediate contingency into our concepts as part of the process of determining their contents. This is self (truth as subject) overcoming the otherness of natural substance, by seeing the essential role it plays in the development of the self (as a truth process).
And at this point, the status-dependence of normative attitudes has been reinstated, and alienation overcome. Now the immediacy of being is understood in terms of the role it plays in the development of the self, which is the determining of conceptual content. The status-dependence of attitudes—the fact that the determinate content of attitudes depends on (is responsible to, is normatively governed by) how things really are—is seen as a necessary condition of the development of thinking subjects. We have seen that the status-dependence of attitudes—there being a fact of the matter about what a subject is really committed to that transcends what that subject or any other subject takes it to be committed to—is a matter of the determinate contentfulness of the attitudes. Their conceptual content—what one has committed oneself to by adopting the attitude—is what the attitudes remain responsible to, what exercises authority over them. And we have seen that that determinate contentfulness is intelligible in terms of the process of experience by which conceptual contents are determined. That process of determination shows up prospectively as a determining as making determinate (in the Kant-Frege Verstand sense) and retrospectively as a finding out of what is always already determinate (in the Kant-Frege Verstand sense). The first perspective articulates the attitude-dependence of normative statuses, and the second the status-dependence of normative attitudes. So the “overcoming of otherness” is a moving beyond alienation. The status-dependence of attitudes—the fact that the determinate content of attitudes depends on (is responsible to) how things really are—shows itself as a necessary condition of the development of thinking subjects.
The unalienated, sittlich, postmodern age is to be ushered in by the achievement of this final stage of self-consciousness. At this point self-consciousness finally understands what it has been doing all along in mediating immediacy by incorporating it into the content of concepts, thereby giving objective contingency the normative form of necessity. It now comes to realize that the Verstand-vorstellen conception of itself as an antecedently determinate normative subject, thinking substance, confronting and only externally representationally related to an alien antecedently determinate objective natural substance, was itself an appearance of the relations between appearance and reality. What it was a one-sided appearance of is the process of experience that is the real self. The finally adequate form of self-consciousness understands that the authority (independence) it exercises in cognition and action depends for its determinate contentfulness on being balanced by a coordinate dimension of responsibility to (dependence on) immediate being that manifests itself as the motor of the determining of the conceptual contents that articulate its own thoughts. (Hegel calls this “pure self-identity in otherness.” [PG 54])
The determinateness seems at first to be due entirely to the fact that it is related to an other, and its movement seems imposed on it by an alien power; but having its otherness within itself, and being self-moving, is just what is involved in the simplicity of thinking itself; for this simple thinking is the self-moving and self-differentiating thought. [PG 55]
This realization is a form of self-consciousness, not just of individual self-conscious selves or subjects, but, Hegel says (for instance, in the passage quoted earlier from PG 37) of Geist itself. The phenomenology that Hegel recollectively reconstructs for us in his book is not the process of determining ground-level empirical and practical concepts, along with the constellation of commitments they articulate—what he sometimes calls “the Concept.” It is rather the philosophical process of development of the speculative metaconcepts in terms of which we are to understand the ground-level process of experience. The subject here is not an individual knower and agent, but the whole of Geist. What is recollected is the “shapes of (self-)consciousness,” in the sense of the categories articulating the constellation of metaconceptual commitments that constitute Geist’s understanding of itself. What it arrives at explicitly at the end of the process recounted in the Phenomenology of Geist, and so recollects as having been implicit all along (what he calls “Absolute Knowing”), is a set of “speculative,” in Hegel’s sense logical, metaconcepts adequate for expressing explicitly how experience, consciousness, self-consciousness, and rational agency—all the aspects of normative, geistig, activity—really work.
It is one of the guiding ideas of the present reading of the Phenomenology that the book should be read at these two levels. It is a phenomenological recollection (and so rational reconstruction as expressively progressive) of the stages in the development of the self-consciousness of Geist, and of the philosophical concepts (such as “determinate negation,” “immediacy” / “mediation,” “in-itself” / “for consciousness,” “independence” / “dependence”) that articulate that self-consciousness. According to this reading, these are metaconcepts, whose distinctive expressive role is to make explicit the use and content of the ordinary empirical and practical concepts (Hegel’s “determinate concepts” expressing “determinate thoughts”15) deployed in nonphilosophical cognition and practical agency. I take it that the point of developing the philosophical metaconcepts is just to explain how things work at the ground level. This is what I have called the strategy of “semantic descent.” Adopting this strategy, I see Hegel as further developing Kant’s insight that in addition to concepts deployed in describing and explaining empirical goings-on and deliberating about and assessing practical doings, there are concepts whose expressive role is, rather, to make explicit fundamental features of the framework that makes possible description and explanation, deliberation and assessment. We can understand why both figures expend most of their attention and effort on the categorial metaconcepts. Their discovery is one of the transformative ideas that usher in this period in philosophy. But their excited exploration of the possibilities opened up by considering this new sort of concept can obscure what is of at least equal importance: what Kant and Hegel use those newly discovered categorial metaconcepts to say about the use and content of ordinary ground-level concepts.
Confusion can arise, however, about which of the two levels Hegel is referring to when he makes certain claims. Does he mean, at a particular point, to be talking about the empirical and practical experience of individual self-conscious subjects and the concepts they deploy, or about the experience that shapes Geist’s understanding of itself and the development of the metaconcepts used to make sense of ground-level experience? To what extent do the two stories run along in parallel, and to what extent do they diverge? Here I think two large-scale interpretive issues arise that Hegel does not explicitly address, and that his readers have by and large also not addressed. One concerns the relations between the sense in which ordinary knowers and agents are self-conscious and the sense in which Geist as a whole is self-conscious. The other concerns analogies and disanalogies between the process of development and what is required to understand ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts, on the one hand, and the process of development and what is required to understand categorial speculative or logical metaconcepts on the other.
As to the first of these issues, there is an obvious tension between Hegel’s treating Geist as a whole as a self-conscious normative self or subject, and his social-recognitive theory of what self-consciousness and selfhood (being a normative subject) consists in. After all, one of his big ideas is that self-consciousness in the sense that matters for sapience is a normative, and hence a social phenomenon—not something that happens between the ears of an individual, but something that arises as the product of individuals’ social-practical recognitive attitudes toward other members of the community and the social-practical recognitive attitudes adopted by those others in turn. Self-consciousness is the normative social status of someone who is reciprocally recognized: recognized by those she recognizes.
But how is Geist as a whole supposed to qualify as self-conscious in this essentially social sense? I rehearsed above a reading of Hegel’s claim that when it achieves fully adequate self-consciousness, consciousness is no longer “burdened by relation to an other” in the form of a wholly independent objective natural world, with thought and being conceived as antecedently and independently determinate substances standing to one another in representational relations that are purely external to those substances. In this sense, no doubt, for Hegel Geist as a whole is correspondingly not “burdened by relation to an other” in the form of the objective world. But what matters here is not intentional relations between subjects and objects but social recognitive relations of subjects to other subjects. Surely in this social sense, Geist is not related to any other comparable subject. Are the other subjects to which it is recognitively related—in virtue of which relations it can qualify as self-conscious in Hegel’s sense—then the individual normative subjects whose attitudes and practices Geist comprises? I suppose one might try out such a line, but it will be hard to tell a story according to which the recognitive relation Geist stands in to individual geistig normative subjects is the same as the recognitive relation they stand in to each other, or to it.
I take it that the right answer to this question is set out above. The structure of authority and responsibility exhibited by the historical development of Geist, shaped prospectively by the disruptive phases of the experience of error and practical failure and retrospectively by recollective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive tradition is recognizably a structure of reciprocal recognition—albeit a distinctive one. At any point in its development, Geist as a whole stands in recognitive relations to its past and future time slices, just as judges at common law do to past and future judges. Each is recognized as having a certain sort of authority in instituting the status claimed by the current incarnation: the status of being responsible to the past and authoritative over the future. Those current attitudes institute actual statuses of responsibility and authority only insofar as they are suitably complemented by the attitudes of those recognized as having the authority to do so. Although the temporal ordering is asymmetrical and cumulative, the recognitive relations are reciprocal and symmetrical in that every stage stands in the same recognitive relations to its past and future, and every stage also eventually plays the role of past and future to other stages. Individual normative subjects stand both in horizontal social reciprocal-recognitive relations to their contemporaries and in vertical social reciprocal-recognitive relations of the distinctively historical species to their predecessors and successors in those recognitive communities. Geist as a whole stands only in social recognitive relations of the vertical historical species, for it has no contemporaries to which it could be related recognitively in the horizontal social sense. That is a specific difference between the sense in which Geist is a self-conscious subject of normative statuses and the sense in which individual knowers and agents are self-conscious subjects of normative statuses. But they share the generic sense of normative selfhood as instituted by relations of reciprocal recognition.
As to the second issue about the relations between ground-level “determinate” concepts and metalevel “speculative,” “logical,” or philosophical concepts, as I have told the story Hegel certainly does take them to be different kinds of concepts. I have interpreted that distinction in terms of an understanding of categorial concepts in Kant’s framework-articulating sense as metaconceptual concepts: concepts concerning the use and content of ground-level concepts. It is part of that, potentially controversial, hermeneutic commitment that I see Hegel as assimilating determinate and speculative concepts in one crucial respect. The contents of both kinds of concepts develop by experiential processes of the same biperspectival sort, characterized prospectively by disruptive experiences of incompatible commitments and their repair, and retrospectively by healing recollective vindications of those repairs by rationally reconstructing them as the culmination of a process that takes the form of the step-by-step emergence into explicitness of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in the partially mistaken, partially revelatory constellations of prior commitments.
So it is of the essence of this reading to agree with Hegel both that there is an important distinction between determinate and speculative concepts, and that they are alike in the structure of the process by which both concepts of those two kinds and the constellations of commitments expressed by means of them develop. But Hegel couples those insights with two further commitments concerning how the two sorts of concepts are alike and different of which it seems to me we should be more critical. First, he takes it that because they both develop their contents in generically the same way, by processes having the same general structure, it follows that for concepts of both kinds the only way to specify or convey their contents is by a retrospective rational reconstruction of a tradition of their uses. This is how he proceeds for philosophical terminology in the Phenomenology, with a tradition reconstructed from actual precedent philosophical commitments, and in the Science of Logic, with a tradition reconstructed from merely possible antecedents—a way the final concepts could have been developed. It is also how he proceeds to illuminate the somewhat lower-level metaconcepts addressed by his lectures on religion and on art.
He means to contrast that recollective way of proceeding with the idea of specifying or conveying those contents by defining them in terms of other concepts. This venerable idea is pathognomonic of Verstand. Like so much else of that categorial framework, it culminates in Kant, whose philosophical prose is algebraic, in the sense that almost all of his technical terms have definitions, and that those definitions can almost always be substituted for the defined terms in his subsequent claims to yield formulations of those claims to which he would assent. If Verstand definitions are the only alternative, then Hegel is just following his insight where it leads in insisting that recollective reconstructions are the only way to render intelligible the contents of speculative ideas. But if I am right about the distinctive metaconceptual, metatheoretical character of speculative and logical concepts, then the characteristic framework-explicating expressive role that they play, which sets them off from ground-level empirical and practical concepts, affords another route to their contents. For we can convey concepts of this metaconceptual sort by explicating what they make explicit: by saying what features of the use and content of ground-level concepts it is that they express. This is the route pursued in this work—and in this Conclusion. So I disagree with Hegel’s assimilation of his philosophical concepts to ordinary “determinate” concepts in this respect.
There is a more substantive respect in which Hegel, as I read him, distinguishes “determinate” concepts from logical and philosophical ones. For he clearly and explicitly claims that it is possible to achieve a fully and completely expressively adequate set of philosophical and logical concepts. These are the concepts whose deployment at the end of the Phenomenology is announced as making possible “Absolute Knowing.” They are the concepts expounded in the Science of Logic, which articulate das System (not Hegel’s system, but the System). Thinking in these terms makes possible the final, fully transparent form of self-consciousness. On the metaconceptual reading, this means that these metaconcepts provide expressive tools sufficient to make explicit what we are doing when engaging in discursive practices—how constellations of commitments (including those regarding what is incompatible with what and what follows from what, which articulate conceptual contents) evolve experientially through the processes of empirical cognition and practical agency. Some of his readers have concluded, bizarrely, to my mind, that Hegel also thinks that there is or can be a final, fully adequate set of determinate ground-level empirical and practical concepts and commitments. There is no evidence he thought any such thing—if one is careful in keeping track of the distinction he clearly makes between philosophical-logical concepts and determinate empirical concepts. I take it he thought that the process of determining truth and conceptual content, the “vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a soul sober,” is for empirical concepts an everlasting party, for reasons of deep principle. The truth-process at the ground level is one that necessarily always has the potential, and is subject to an inextinguishable normative obligation, to continue on through further stages.
Supposing that that is right, Hegel sharply distinguishes philosophical concepts in this respect. The metaconceptual reading of those concepts offers room for such a distinction from ground-level concepts. The sensuous immediacy that always confronts and must be absorbed and digested into conceptual form is an inexhaustible normative motive force for change. It does not follow that what is true of empirical theories must be true of metatheories of them. Perhaps here, full expressive adequacy can be achieved. Perhaps not. It is possible that expressive progress in our metaconcepts, driven by inevitable experiences of error, inadequacy, and failure, requiring repair and recollective vindication of those repairs, is also a never-ending process. On this question, I think we should be prepared to be critical.
Already in his Introduction Hegel had pursued the Kantian thought that the most important epistemological issues should be addressed in terms of their implicit semantic presuppositions. Given his normative pragmatics, Hegel’s pragmatist semantics dictates that cognition be discussed in the wider social context of the institution of norms by recognition. The edifying aim of Hegel’s semantic theory is to rationalize and motivate us to adopt recognitive practices taking a distinctive new postmodern shape. Practical recognitive attitudes of confession and forgiveness institute a new kind of recognitive community. Exercises of practical agency within such a postmodern recognitive community exhibit a new, symmetrical normative structure of authority and responsibility: trust. It is an essentially historical social structure because of the role recollection plays in it.
Recollection and recollective rationality are the bridge between Hegel’s semantics and its edifying effect on our recognitive practices. On the side of semantics, recollection establishes and gives practical significance to the representational dimension of conceptual content. That is the relation between the subjective form of conceptual content in representing thoughts, articulated by deontic normative relations of material incompatibility and consequence, on the one hand, and the objective form of conceptual content in represented facts, articulated by alethic modal relations of material incompatibility and consequence, on the other hand. On the side of pragmatics, when recollection becomes a form of recognition (as magnanimous forgiveness) it institutes unalienated, sittlich relations between normative statuses and normative attitudes. Both the status-dependence of normative attitudes and the attitude-dependence of normative statuses are given their due.
The story here accordingly concludes by looking more closely at the sort of recognitive community and the nature of the newly self-conscious sort of intentional agency it supports, which our hard-won semantic understanding motivates us to institute. At its core is forgiveness: recognition in the form of recollection.
Hegel calls the traditional sittlich practical understanding of intentional agency “heroic,” in the sense that agents take responsibility for their doings under all the descriptions true of those doings. No normative distinction is made between what was done intentionally, or what the agent knew he was doing, on the one hand, and what he did unintentionally and without realizing that that is what he was doing. Thus Oedipus is held responsible for killing his father and marrying his mother, even though he did not intend to do those things and was not aware that that is what he was doing. For those are still things he did, not just things that happened. Oedipus did intend to, and did, kill that man and marry that woman. On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent’s attitudes. Parricide and incest ought not be. One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker. The ought-to-dos governing attitudes are just to be read off of the ought-to-bes that articulate statuses. Attitudes of knowing and intending matter only in determining that one is responsible for a deed, not for determining what one thereby did and so is responsible for having done. The status one acquires by doing something is not itself construed as mitigated by or otherwise relativized in any way to the attitudes of intending and knowing in virtue of which it counts as one’s doing in the first place. That one did not mean to do what one did can engender sympathy, but it does not diminish responsibility.
It is for this reason, Hegel thinks, that the traditional heroic practical conception of agency is inevitably always also a tragic conception. The tragedy does not consist in the badness of the outcome. It consists in the fact that in acting at all one puts oneself at the mercy of forces outside of one’s knowledge and control. Those alien forces determine the content of one’s actual deed, what one turns out to have done and to be responsible for having done. (Hegel quotes in this connection the medieval European proverb: “When a flung stone leaves the hand, it belongs to the devil.”) Tragedy is the unavoidable submission of the heroic agent to fate. The idea of fate invokes not some sort of determinism or antecedent necessitation of outcome but just those dark (because unknowable and uncontrollable) forces that engulf and overwhelm what is launched by one’s limited knowledge and intention, transforming it into deeds that reach far beyond those attitudes into unforeseeable culpability. Shouldering the responsibility that fate in this sense brings down upon one who acts is tragic heroism. This is the intimate relation of mutual presupposition between tragedy, fate, and heroism.
By contrast to this tragic practical conception of agency in terms of heroic identification with and submission to one’s fate, the modern conception of agency is distinguished precisely by the idea that agents are genuinely responsible for (status), and so should be held responsible for (attitude), only what they intended to do and knew they were doing. Davidson well articulates the distinction at the core of the modern conception when he distinguishes, among the specifications of things one has genuinely done, between descriptions under which what one did is intentional (turning on the light) and descriptions of what one did that are merely consequential (alerting the burglar, of whom one was unaware). What makes an event a doing at all, something that is imputable to an agent, is that it is intentional under some description. But that event then counts as a doing under all its specifications, including those that pick it out by consequences that were not intended or foreseen by the agent. It is of the essence of the modern idea of practical responsibility that acknowledgments and attributions of the normative status of responsibility are conditioned by and proportional to the agent’s attitudes of intending and believing. It is now seen to be unjust to condemn or blame someone for what he did on the basis of consequential descriptions under which the agent did not intend it and could not foresee it. Those attitudes of agents, what they intend and believe, are taken to play constitutive roles in determining their normative status as culpable or admirable. This conception of responsibility as proportioned to intention and knowledge is the application to the practical understanding of intentional agency of the distinctively modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses.
The core of distinctively modern practical self-consciousness is for Hegel a special way of understanding the “distinction that action implies”: “that between what is purposed and what is accomplished in the realm of existence.” [PR §114Z] It is to distinguish two senses in which agents do things, a narrower and a wider one, and to restrict responsibility to what is done in the narrow sense.
It is the right of the of the will to recognize as its action [Handlung], and to accept responsibility for, only those aspects of its deed [Tat] which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which were present in its purpose [Vorsatz]—I can be made accountable for a deed only if my will was responsible for it—the right of knowledge.16 [PR §117]
He explicitly appeals to this distinction as marking the decisive difference from traditional practical conceptions of agency:
The heroic self-consciousness (as in ancient tragedies like that of Oedipus) has not yet progressed from its unalloyed simplicity to reflect on the distinction between deed [Tat] and action [Handlung], between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances, or to analyse the consequences minutely, but accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety. [PR §118Z]
Hegel takes it that making this distinction between Tat and Handlung is a decisive advance in our understanding of ourselves as agents. But this new level of practical self-consciousness courts the danger of a distinctive kind of alienation from its deeds.
Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself: the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [PG 365]
If we misunderstand the distinction that action essentially involves by rendering it according to the Masterly categories of pure independence [Verstand], where authority must be total to be real, then our deeds are split into a native normative region of responsibility for what we are authoritative about and an alien, merely causally related region, comprising the unintended, unforeseen consequences of what we are genuinely authoritative about and responsible for. What threatens to go missing is the complementary unity that action essentially involves, the sense in which
[a]ction simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit. [PG 401]
Because we are not considered responsible for unintended, unforeseen consequences of what we do intentionally and knowingly, those aspects of our doings are not understood as really part of what we have done. For, as Kant saw, agency must be understood in terms of the authority to make ourselves responsible. And on the misunderstanding Hegel sees as part and parcel of the modern form of practical self-consciousness, no one is responsible for the part of the deed imputed to the agent that outruns what was authorized by her intentions, purposes, and reasons. Relative to the premodern, heroic conception, this notion of agency appears as severely cramped and contracted. In the purest, Kantian, form of this modern conception, what we genuinely do, in the sense of being responsible for, extends no farther than our intendings (willings, volitions) themselves.
The metaconceptual categories that articulate the self-consciousness characteristic of modernity—on display in Kant’s purifying distillation of it, which brings it to fulfillment and completion—are those of Verstand. At their core is the idea of pure independence, which though showing up in specifically different guises, is the generic structure that informs and deforms both traditional and modern forms of Geist. Diagnosed in Hegel’s allegory of Mastery and Servitude, it is the idea of authority without correlative responsibility to some countervailing authority. It is what deflects the progressive elements of Kant’s conception of autonomy into the contraction of objectively efficacious agency to the subjective realm of will, shrinking agents’ responsibilities from their doings to their mere tryings: that over which they can be misunderstood as having unlimited authority. The postmodern form of agency and its practical and theoretical self-understanding is to be structured instead by the metaconceptual categories of Hegelian Vernunft.
The conception of Vernunft is what explains the reciprocity of the normative statuses of authority and responsibility (the sense in which they are always two sides of one coin) and the reciprocity of normative recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing authority and responsibility, and the relations between these. In doing so, it reconciles the distinctively modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses—the sense in which statuses of authority and responsibility are instituted by reciprocal recognitive attitudes—with the traditional appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. This is the dimension along which attributions and acknowledgments of commitments (responsibilities undertaken by exercising one’s authority to do so) answer for their correctness to what agents are really committed to. The alienation that is the worm in the shining apple of modernity is the practical incapacity to see how normative statuses can both be instituted by normative attitudes and transcend those attitudes, so as genuinely to constrain them. His conception of Vernunft, and how it overcomes the commitment to Mastery as pure independence manifested in Verstand, is Hegel’s response to this challenge. It is what animates the postmodern shape of self-conscious practical agency.
At the heart of Vernunft, we have seen, is the conception of recollection. For the key to understanding the way Hegel moves beyond the basic Hegelian normative statuses jointly socially instituted by synchronic reciprocal relations of recognitive attitudes consists in appreciating the orthogonal diachronic historical dimension of recognitive processes. As we saw, Hegel emphasizes the significance for his story of such temporally evolving processes already in his Introduction, where we are taught that in order to understand representational relations between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, we must look to the process that is the experience of error. It is the recollective phase of diachronic recognitive processes that explains the attitude-transcendence of normative statuses. That includes the special cognitive representational norms according to which representing attitudes are responsible for their correctness to standards set by what counts as represented by those representings just in virtue of exercising that distinctive kind of authority over them. (It is this part of Hegel’s story that has been misunderstood in terms of coherence or consensus—not because anything he says encourages this, but because readers who ignored the historical dimension could not see any alternative, given the evident social underpinnings of his account.) Discursive norms, both practical and cognitive, are understood according to the categories of Vernunft as features of essentially social and historical recognitive processes, developing in tandem with the attitudes that articulate them. Understanding operating according to the categories of Verstand is blind to both the social and the historical dimensions of conceptual norms.
So what does intentional agency look like when viewed from the standpoint of Vernunft? To begin with, on the horizontal level of contemporaneous recognitive attitudes, we have a social division of normative labor between the deliberating and acting agent and the assessing community. The practical attitudes of the agent have authority over her doing in the narrow sense it is of the essence of modernity to distinguish: what Hegel calls the action, Handlung. The practical attitudes of the community have authority over the doing in the wide sense acknowledged already by traditional conceptions: what Hegel calls the deed, Tat. The first corresponds to specifications under which what happens is intentional and foreseen. The second corresponds to specifications in terms of consequences that were not intended or foreseen, but which count as things done, rather than just things that happen, because that very same event is intentional and foreseen under some specifications. The agent herself has no distinctive authority regarding the attribution of the doing under these specifications. They are available to any interested party. Hegel says:
Actualization is … a display of what is one’s own in the element of universality whereby it becomes, and should become, the affair of everyone. [PG 417]
The work is, i.e. it exists for other individualities.… The work produced is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is explicitly for himself what he is implicitly or in himself, and in such a manner that the consciousness for which the individual becomes explicit in the work is not the particular, but the universal, consciousness. [PG 405]
The “universal consciousness” here invokes the attitudes of the recognitive community.
As construed according to the constellation of metaconcepts that is Hegelian Vernunft, both the authority of the individual agent and the authority of the community of those recognized by and recognizing the agent essentially involve correlative forms of responsibility. Adopting the attitude that is endorsing an end or purpose, practically committing oneself, intending, is undertaking a distinctive kind of responsibility. And imputing the deed to the agent in the wider sense of something done by the agent, but for which the agent is not responsible in the narrow sense in which she is responsible for what she does knowingly and intentionally, is also taking a certain kind of responsibility for it. To understand those responsibilities, one must consider the vertical historical dimension, and look to the way they structure temporally extended processes.
For the paradigmatic actions Hegel addresses are not the punctiform events on which recent Anglophone action-theory has focused: flipping a switch, signing a document, calling a taxi, hanging up one’s hat, and the like. The kinds of doings he is principally interested in are processes rather than events: writing a book, building a house, learning a trade, diagnosing or treating a disease. The two sorts of cases are alike in that the agent is responsible for both sorts of doing in the sense of being answerable as to her reasons for what she does. But they are unlike in that Hegel is concerned also with the agent’s responsibility to formulate and carry out a plan, endorsing instrumentally structured subgoals and subplans, and to adapt those plans to contingencies arising during their execution, and he is concerned with all the instrumentally subordinate reasons that show up and come to bear on the success or failure of that extended process.
There is, however, a more striking difference between the projected Vernunft conception of agency and more familiar modern Verstand conceptions (under which rubric Hegel would include contemporary ones such as those of Davidson and Anscombe). That difference lies in the understanding of the responsibilities the agent’s recognitive community undertakes for the deeds of the agent. These are the responsibilities that complement the partly constitutive recognitive authority that community exercises—the authority to acknowledge, by holding the agent responsible, the partly constitutive practical authority the agent has to make herself responsible, in the ways distinctive of intentional agency. These communal responsibilities have no analogue in the modern conception. For on the postmodern Vernunft conception, the recognitive community not only has the authority to attribute the deed under descriptions in terms of unforeseen, unintended consequences; it in a distinctive way takes responsibility itself for the deed under those consequential specifications.
Properly understood and instituted, agency involves a division of normative labor in which agent and recognitive community play complementary roles. The agent exercises a distinctive kind of authority and undertakes a distinctive kind of correlative responsibility insofar as her acknowledgment of practical commitments (the attitudes that are intentions, Hegel’s Vorsätze) sets into motion the process that is the deed. But the deed is understood as not done by the agent alone, but as also done in a different, although equally constitutive sense by the agent’s community. All are responsible for the doings of each, and each for the doings of all. Appreciating this is the fundamental practical, agentive aspect of the self-understanding of Geist that is fully self-conscious as
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]
I have been reading Hegel’s “independence” here as invoking the reciprocal authority of the different parties to the action, and insisting with him that it necessarily involves also reciprocal responsibility—that is, “dependence.”
The recognitive community’s responsibilities for the deeds of its members are of two principal kinds: constructive ameliorative consequential responsibilities and reconstructive recollective hermeneutic responsibilities. The first are made possible because the deed an agent’s intention sets in motion is a process that is never finished and done with. It has true specifications in terms of any and all of its consequences, however distant. (This is what Davidson refers to as the “accordion effect.”) And those consequences roll on to infinity.
Action has multiple consequences in so far as it is translated into external existence; for the latter, by virtue of its context in external necessity, develops in all directions. These consequences, as the shape whose soul is the end to which the action is directed, belong to the action as an integral part of it. But the action, as the end translated into the external world, is at the same time exposed to external forces which attach to it things quite different from what it is for itself, and impel it on into remote and alien consequences. [PR §118]
That those consequences are “remote and alien” to the motivating intention (what the action is for the agent) but also “an integral part of it,” its “shape and soul,” is what makes the agent’s doing on the modern, alienated conception, “a riddle to itself: the consequences of its deed are for it not the deed itself.” By contrast, for the recognitive community attributing the deed, the consequences that outrun the specifications under which the doing is intentional (exercises of the authority of the agent) are an essential element of the deed. And the first point is that the community can intervene to affect those consequences. Subsequent actions by those who recognize the original agent and attribute the action contribute to the content of the always-evolving deed. Part of what one must do in order to count thereby as recognizing the original agent as one of us (a member of our recognitive community) is acknowledging one’s own responsibility to shape the agent’s deed by affecting its consequences. (One application of this view is Hegel’s notorious claim that punishment is recognitively owed to the criminal by the community. His fellow community members recognize him by punishing him. It counted as a crime insofar as his doing had the expressive significance of a rejection of recognitive community. By punishing him his fellows practically and constitutively reject that rejection of recognitive community.)
Leibniz took it to be a fact that nothing is for nothing in this best of all possible worlds—that what initially looks to be defective, a failure, or evil will eventually be redeemed and be visible (at least to God) as making a positive contribution, indeed, as being just what is necessary for the outcome to be optimal, the whole to which it contributes ideal. Hegel radicalizes Kant’s notion of a regulative ideal to understand this Leibnizian perfectionist thought, as expressing not an objective fact, but the content of a commitment: as something subjects are responsible for making true. Recognizing an agent as one of us is practically treating what she did as part of what we all are doing. Adopting that attitude is acknowledging the responsibility to make what was already done come out right, as a constraint on what we have reason to do now. What we must have reasons for, what we must justify doing now, is a deed that includes everything already done by those we recognize as our fellows. It is part of our task to see to it that those earlier doings make positive contributions to the larger whole that subsumes it—a whole that includes and so is partly constituted by our own current and future doings. Those earlier deeds are ongoing processes that flow as if streams into the river that is our doing. When agency is understood and recognitively institutionalized according to the metaconception of Vernunft, the act of one is recognized as the act of all. This conception is epitomized by the Musketeers’ slogan: “One for all and all for one.”
To understand what guides and sets standard for practical constructive ameliorative consequential interventions in the evolving processes that are the deeds of the members of a vernünftig recognitive community, we must look to the companion recollective reconstructive hermeneutic responsibility. The recollective task is one of rationalization, vindication, justification—of finding reasons in and for what happened. The job of recollection is, in the Hegelian slogan, giving contingency the form of necessity—that is, retrospectively exhibiting that contingency as norm-governed after all. Doing that is turning a mere past into an intelligible history. (Our history is both what makes us what we are and something we make.) Recognitively recollecting intentional doings is imputing to each one, under all its disparate and contingent specifications and manifestations, a distinctive kind of unified content. That content, what Hegel calls an “Absicht,” is a kind of rationalizing intention that stands to the deed in the wide, consequence-including sense, as the original, individually motivating practical commitment (Hegel’s Vorsatz) stands to the action in the narrow sense in which it is intentional (Hegel’s Handlung) and so rationalizable by the practical reasoning of the agent. The new consequential specifications of a doing that later community members are to contribute as part of their practical recognitive responsibility to those they hold responsible for intentional doings are supposed to be ones that make it easier to perform the recollective-reconstructive task on the emerging whole to which they contribute.
The aim is to make the deed as rationally reconstructed one that those recollecting it can endorse now, on their own behalf. However unpromising it might have seemed at the outset, the process the agent initiated by acknowledging a practical commitment (Vorsatz) is to be seen as turning out to have been a good one, one there is reason to have promoted then and to endorse now. Some illumination can be gained by comparison and contrast with the paradigm of recollection with which I introduced the notion earlier, and to which I have returned repeatedly in this work. Judges at common law justify their current decision by exhibiting it as the culmination of process encompassing prior precedential decisions concerning the applicability of the same concepts. That process is rationally reconstructed, by careful selection and characterization of precedents, so as to take the form of the gradual emergence into explicitness of a norm that becomes visible as having been all along implicit in the deliberations of prior judges. In that case, what is recollectively vindicated, motivated, and justified is the current judge’s practical attitude (applying or withholding the application of a legal concept), whereas in the case of agency what is recollectively vindicated, motivated, and justified is the original attitude of undertaking a practical commitment, which is now recollected as norm-governed (correct, precedential). The two sorts of case have, as it were, different directions of fit. But in rationalizing their own attitude, the recollecting judges also vindicate and endorse the prior decisions whose authority they acknowledge by treating them as precedential. The retrospective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive tradition incorporating prior adoptions of attitudes displays a norm (emerging into greater explicitness) that at least partly validates all the attitudes it incorporates as having precedential authority. That is analogous to the way in which the retrospective rational reconstructions of other members of the recognitive community can recollectively vindicate the actions set in motion by their fellows. It is also true that the judge’s own decision is responsible to the practical attitudes of earlier judges, manifested in their decisions, in that the authority of the current decision derives entirely from its fidelity to the norm it reconstructs as emerging from those earlier ones.
The final form of mutual recognition, discussed at the end of the long Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, is that in which the reciprocal recognitive attitudes take the form Hegel denominates “confession” and “forgiveness.” Hegel himself does not offer a name for this structure of recognition. Adopting and adapting a term he uses in a related context, I call this recognitive structure “trust” (his “Vertrauen”). This is recognition conceived and practiced according to the categories of Vernunft. Hegel presents it as developing out of the modern practical conception according to categories of Verstand, as distilled to its essence by Kant. In his allegorical presentation, the decisive move is the “breaking of the hard heart of the judge,” who, confronting the confession of the miscreant gives up the superior pose he has so far adopted, forgives, and himself confesses in turn: “I am as you are.” What is confessed and forgiven is the gap or disparity between normative attitudes and normative statuses. One confesses that what one has done is not simply to act according to a norm. One has always done both more and less than what one ought, what is appropriate or required. One’s attitude of acknowledging or attributing a commitment never does full justice to it, never gets its content quite right. One’s acknowledgment at once of the authority of a norm and of one’s responsibility to it is always impure, evincing an imperfect grasp of the content of the norm, admixed with other motives, and affected by the context of other collateral commitments.
Let us look more closely at how the transition to the third age of Geist is described and motivated. The Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology rehearses the progressive development from the traditional to the modern structure of Geist, so as to prepare us readers for the epiphany in which that development culminates: the envisaged transition to the third, postmodern stage, the age of trust. The capstone achievement of self-consciousness that brings about this transformation is making explicit what shows up retrospectively as having been all along the implicitly governing structural norm of recognition. As we saw, Hegel introduces this newly self-conscious form of normativity (and hence subjectivity) in the rhetorical form of a pair of allegories: the allegory of the hero and his valet, and the allegory of the penitent confessing his transgression to the hard-hearted, unforgiving judge.
Hegel introduces the first with a twist on a well-known slogan of his day:
No man is a hero to his valet; not, however, because the man is not a hero, but because the valet—is a valet. [PG 665]
The hero is allegorical for one who acts out of appreciation of his duty, one who fulfills his responsibilities, one who acts as he ought, as he is committed to act, one who in his practical attitudes and actions acknowledges the bindingness or authority of norms. “Valet” is the English translation of the German “Kammerdiener,” literally, room-servant. The valet in the allegory sees the attitudes of the hero not as governed by and expressive of the acknowledgment of norms, but as the product of immediate sensuous desires and contingent particular inclinations. The Kammerdiener stands for a view that explains all attitudes in terms of other attitudes, without needing to appeal to governing norms that they are attitudes toward and acknowledgments of. Hegel does not deny that this sort of explanation in terms of attitudes alone can be done. The norm-blind reductive naturalist perspective is an available perspective.
Hegel denominates the norm-blind reductive naturalism for which the Kammerdiener stands “niederträchtig.” The contrasting norm-sensitive hero-aware meta-attitude that takes some attitudes to be themselves genuinely norm-sensitive and norm-acknowledging he calls “edelmütig.” Hegel thinks that in being discursive beings at all, in believing and acting, we have already implicitly committed ourselves to an edelmütig meta-attitude. This is a possibility afforded by Vernunft, which, when it comes to explicit self-consciousness ushers in the postmodern structure of Geist.
The issue addressed by the allegory of the Kammerdiener concerns the intelligibility of the traditional idea of the status-dependence of normative attitudes in the face of the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The Kammerdiener stands for the self-sufficiency, the explanatory sovereignty, of attitudes. But this meta-attitude does not leave room for the authority and efficacy of norms—for the idea that normative statuses of authority and responsibility, what one is really entitled or committed to, make a real difference to attitudes that accordingly deserve to be thought of as acknowledgments of those norms.
The normative governance of attitudes by norms has two dimensions, deontic and alethic. First, the norms (normative statuses) serve as standards for assessment of the correctness of attitudes. My attitudes of acknowledging a commitment myself, or attributing a commitment to others, are correct just in case we really are committed, in case those attitudes properly reflect the statuses they are attitudes toward. This is what it is for the attitudes in question to be normative attitudes: attitudes toward norms, attitudes of acknowledging or attributing normative statuses. Second, the norms they are attitudes toward should make a difference to the adoption of those attitudes. The attitudes should be subjunctively sensitive to the normative statuses they acknowledge and attribute. This is to say that the norms are efficacious, in that if the content of the norm being acknowledged or attributed were (or had been) different, the attitude would be (or would have been) different.
The heroism of the hero is allegorical for the norm-governedness of his attitudes in this dual sense. The correctness of his attitudes is to be assessed according to the standard provided by the norms he acknowledges, and his practical attitudes are understood as being sensitive to the contents of those norms, in that if the norms were different, the hero’s attitudes would be different. The challenge allegorically represented by the Kammerdiener is to make the possibility of the status-dependence of normative attitudes intelligible in the face of the standing possibility (which Hegel admits) of purely naturalistic genealogical alternative accounts of the advent of normative attitudes that appeal only to other attitudes. If invocation of normative governance of attitudes by normative statuses is not necessary to account for the attitudes, it is not clear how it can it be legitimate. Insofar as this reductive naturalist challenge to the normativity of agency cannot be convincingly met, the result is alienation from the norms, the loss of traditional sittlich practical appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes, of the authority or bindingness of norms on attitudes.
The second allegory, of the confessing miscreant and the hard-hearted judge, presents a different sort of challenge to the intelligibility of the governance of practical attitudes by norms. It stems from Kantian rigorism about what is required for genuine responsiveness to norms, rather than from reductive naturalism. What the miscreant confesses is the admixture of nonnormative attitudes in the causes of his action. He did not act just out of acknowledgment of “pure duty for duty’s sake.” Other attitudes also provided motives to which the action was subjunctively sensitive, in the sense that if they had been different (and the norm not), what was done would have been different. Subjunctive sensitivity was not limited to the content of the norm being acknowledged. The doing was in this regard both more than and less than a pure acknowledgment of the norm. Here the challenge is not that treating the performance as the acknowledgment of a norm is not necessary to explain the practical attitude, but rather that it is not sufficient. If invocation of normative governance is not by itself sufficient to account for attitudes (because an admixture of contingent, particular motives and circumstances—what the penitent confesses—is also always in play), then how can it be legitimate?
The challenge to the intelligibility of normative governance comes from the idea that the authority of norms over attitudes must be total in order to be genuine. It is a manifestation of the deformed conception of pure independence: the idea that authority (normative independence) is undercut by any sort of correlative responsibility to (dependence on) anything else. This is the practical normative conception Hegel criticizes allegorically under the rubric of “Mastery.” Hegel sees Kant as perfectly distilling the essence of the modern form of this conception, as part of his otherwise progressive understanding of normativity in terms of autonomy. As a result, Kant adopts a contraction strategy, in which genuine doings shrink down to mere willings, because every more robust sense of action involves responsibility to other factors, subjective and objective, that are not themselves in the same sense governed by the norm that rationalizes the willing. In the allegory, the hard-hearted judge is the Kantian rigorist, who takes it that the penitent’s confession of an admixture of nonnormative motives shows that the action does not (also) express the acknowledgment of a norm, and so must be judged lawless. The affinity to the reductive naturalism of the Kammerdiener should be clear. For there, too, the mere possibility of a nonnormative, reductive naturalistic explanation of attitudes is taken to preempt the normative governance explanation, and in that sense to deny the authority of the norm. If the normative governance account of an attitude has a rival, it is taken to have no authority at all. Independence is seen as incompatible with any sort of dependence. Any correlative responsibility undermines claims of authority.
Unlike the Kammerdiener allegory, the allegory of the hard-hearted judge is extended to provide a path forward to a proper understanding of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. The “breaking of the hard heart” occurs when the judge rejects his original niederträchtig response to the confession of the wrongdoer and replaces it with forgiveness and an edelmütig confession of his own. The result is the achievement of a new kind of community (“The reconciling Yea, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the ‘I’ which has expanded into a duality.” [PG 671]). This is the final, vernünftig, postmodern form of reciprocal recognition, and so, of normativity and of Geist, structured by the normativity instituted by that newly self-conscious form of recognition.
What the contrite agent confesses is everything in its deed that is not norm-governed—in Hegel’s idiom, every manifestation of particularity (the agent’s circumstances and collateral attitudes in the form of intentions or beliefs, and of contingent unintended consequences) rather than universality (norm, governing normative status). It confesses every failure of the status-dependence of the practical attitudes whose content is revealed in the deed as actually done. Confession [Geständnis] in this sense is at once a performance partly constitutive of a special form of self-consciousness and a petition for recognition. (The connection is forged by Hegel’s understanding of self-consciousness as a social status that is the social product of attitudes of mutual recognition.) In Hegel’s allegory, it is met not with an edelmütig reciprocating recognition, but with a niederträchtig merely critical assessment of failure to fulfill responsibilities (failure of attitudes to be normatively governed by statuses). The blaming, hard-hearted Kantian rigorist judge plays the “role of the moral valet” to the penitent agent.
The consciousness that judges in this way is itself base, because it divides up the action, producing and holding fast to the disparity of the action with itself. Further, it is hypocrisy, because it passes off such judging, not as another manner of being wicked, but as the correct consciousness of the action, setting itself up in this unreality and conceit of knowing well and better above the deeds it discredits, and wanting its words without deeds to be taken for a superior kind of reality. [PG 666]
The judge’s attitudes are exclusively adopted from the perspective of normative assessment. The judge as assessor does not identify with the perspective of the deliberating agent, or even acknowledge the essential complementary roles in constituting normative statuses played by attitudes of assessment and deliberation—that is, attribution to another and acknowledgment oneself of practical commitments.
The point of this episode in the allegory is to enforce the contrast with the next step. The “breaking of the hard heart” describes the adoption by the assessing consciousness of the appropriate edelmütig recognitive response to the petition for recognition that is the penitent’s confession. That response Hegel denominates “forgiveness” [Verzeihung]. To understand the structure of normativity that gives Geist its characteristic postmodern shape, we must understand the constellation of reciprocal recognitive attitudes that institutes that structure. This is recognition in the form of mutual confession and forgiveness: the structure of trust. The shift to forgiveness that is the breaking of the judge’s hard heart is a move from the judge merely attributing responsibility for the agent’s deed to the judge practically acknowledging his own responsibility for that deed. As such, it is an act of identification with the doer, by making oneself coresponsible for what was done. The appropriate response to confession of an incapacity to produce deeds that are simply and purely governed by norms is for the judge to make a corresponding confession, to acknowledge “I am as you are,” admitting that the judge, like the agent, is also doomed to act from a mixture of attitudes that are acknowledgments of governing norms and attitudes that are not such acknowledgments.
The responsibility the assessing consciousness undertakes for what is done is complementary to the responsibility the deliberating consciousness undertakes for its act, rather than identical with it. It has two dimensions: reparative and recollective. The reparative responsibility is practically to intervene in the still-unfolding consequences of the doing, which provide an ever-increasing stock of consequential specifications of it. The deed is never done, and part of the generous edelmütig way of holding someone responsible for what they do is to acknowledge responsibility for helping to make it turn out well. One can do that by practically contributing new consequences, thereby making-true new consequential specifications of the deed. When everyone does acknowledge a responsibility to do that, each doing by a member of a community whose constitutive recognitive attitudes to one another take the form of confession and forgiveness is a doing by all. The deed of each is the deed of all.
But what counts as “better” consequences? The standard for such normative assessments of consequences is set by the other, recollective dimension of forgiveness. The reparative responsibility to ameliorate the consequences of the doing being forgiven must be understood in terms of recollection. The aim is to make the whole that results from one’s current action, thought of as a contribution to a tradition, more fully and successfully recollectable than that tradition would otherwise be. So this constraint, too, is defined in terms of recollection. It is the norms of recollection that determine what count as “better” consequences, and to which contributing to such consequences must be subjunctively sensitive.
Recognition in the form of recollective forgiveness is the key to understanding norm-governedness in general. Taking recollective responsibility for another’s doing is practically acknowledging the obligation to tell a certain kind of retrospective story about that doing. That is the responsibility to rationally reconstruct it as norm-governed. The magnanimous forgiving recollector must discern an implicit norm that governs the development of the deed. This is the intention [Absicht], which stands to the consequentially extended Tat as the agent’s initial Vorsatz stands to the Handlung, which is the narrower action specified only under the descriptions explicitly licensed by the purpose for which it was performed. The Absicht must be exhibited as normatively governing the doing in the dual sense both of serving as a normative standard for assessment of the practical attitudes it governs (each specification of the doing being thought of as an acknowledgment of that norm) and as being the norm that those attitudes can be seen to have been subjunctively sensitive to, in the sense that had the norm been different, so would the attitudes.
One recollectively discerns / imputes a norm that is in the form of an Absicht: something that governs the practical process as what is being striven for or aimed at. Saying that goes beyond just saying that it serves as a normative standard for assessments of the success of practical attitudes. For that could be true without entailing that anyone cares about the standard and is making decisions in the light of what the norm enjoins (is being heroic, in the sense the Kammerdiener denies). The additional element involves thinking of each component of the subsequent retrospectively constructed / discovered tradition as surrounded by a cloud of incompatible alternatives. The recollective forgiver then practically takes or treats the subject of the attitude in question as choosing the alternative taken (the one incorporated in the recollective-recognitive forgiveness-narrative), as having selected it out of the cloud of relevant alternatives, identifying with it by rejecting them. That is what it is to treat the governing norm as not just a norm of assessment, but as an Absicht. This is rationally reconstructing a tradition of attitudes that are status-dependent, in the sense of being governed, in the dual sense, by an implicit norm that becomes gradually more explicit as it is acknowledged by the attitudes incorporated in the recollected tradition.
The metanorm that governs recollective performances (and the practical attitudes they express) is that the norm one reconstructively discerns and imputes ought to normatively govern all the consequential specifications of attitudes in and downstream of the Handlung. That includes the practical-reparative and hermeneutic-recollective attitudes the assessing judge adopts. So the forgiving agent must endorse the norm being attributed as governing the deed—must acknowledge its authority. That is part of taking coresponsibility for it. In forgiving, one makes oneself responsible for the emerging norm one attributes as the implicit Absicht of the deed. This is identifying with the agent, in the sense of risking and if need be sacrificing one’s own attitudes, by subjecting them to normative assessment according to the norm one both attributes and acknowledges, and being subjunctively sensitive to that norm in one’s own attitudes. In this specific sense, the forgiving agent acknowledges the doing as its own, as the doing not only of the agent who initiated it, but also of the forgiving recollector.
Forgiving recollection can be understood on the model of the institutional common- or case-law jurisprudential practices mentioned earlier. There, the current judge rationally reconstructs the tradition by selecting a trajectory of prior precedential decisions that are expressively progressive, in that they reveal the gradual emergence into explicitness of a norm (the content of a law) that can be seen to have implicitly governed all the decisions (attitudes) in the reconstructed tradition. It is that norm that then justifies the current judge’s decision. The norm that is seen as emerging from the rationally reconstructed tradition of decisions sets the standard for normative assessment by future judges of the current decision, which claims to be subjunctively sensitive to that very norm. So the recollecting judge subjects herself to (acknowledges the authority of) the norm she retrospectively discerns. The more of the prior decisions the recollection rationalizes and exhibits as expressive of the norm, the better the recollective warrant that norm provides for the current decision. The larger the residue of decisions that cannot be fit into the retrospectively rationally reconstructed tradition as precedentially rationalizing and expressive of the norm, the greater the scope for criticism of the current decision by future judges, who may or may not acknowledge it as correct and so precedentially authoritative. For the only authority the decision has derives from its being a suitable acknowledgment of responsibility to the tradition of prior decisions.
Forgiving (recollectively recognizing), on this account, is hard work. It cannot be brought off with a single, sweeping, abstractly general gesture: “I forgive you for what you did.” One could always say that—but saying it would not make it so. In addition to fulfilling one’s commitment to practically affect the consequences of the doing one is forgiving, one must produce a concrete recollective reconstruction of the deed, under all of its intentional and consequential specifications. Recollection is a making—the crafting of a distinctive kind of narrative—that is successful only insofar as it ends up being recognizable as having the form of a finding. What is found is found as having been all along implicit. What is implicit is for Hegel always to be understood in terms of the process of expressing it: making it explicit. Explaining what one must do in order thereby to count as recollecting is filling in the notion of expression. The implicit norm it imputes as governing a doing is in one sense made by the recollection, and in another found by it. The idea of a doing of this kind only seems paradoxical—like the idea of giving contingency the form of necessity. Recollection is the narrative genre to which the rationalization of decisions appealing to common or case law also belongs. One must recruit and assemble the raw materials one inherits so as to exhibit a norm one can oneself endorse as always having governed the tradition to which one oneself belongs, with which one oneself identifies—a tradition that shows up as progressively revealing a governing norm, making ever more explicit what was all along implicit. The expressively progressive tradition discerned culminates (for now) in the consequential specification of the doing that is that very recollection of it.
What if what one is given to work with (the sum of all the purposive and consequential specifications of the doing one inherits) is too hard to forgive? What if the subject of the attitude that is being forgiven as part of the larger enterprise of forgiving something upstream of it is in fact dispositionally unresponsive to the verdict of the norm? What if (as the Kammerdiener alleges) the doing in fact is sensitive only to other concerns (attitudes) particular to its subject? What if the consequences are just too dire? It seems that the metanormative criteria of adequacy for successful forgiveness, both reparative and recollective, are in many cases impossible to satisfy. Some things people have done strike us, even upon due reflection, as simply unforgivable. In these cases, though we might try to mitigate the consequences of evil doings, we have no idea at all how to go about discerning the emergence of a governing norm we could ourselves endorse. This is just the limiting case of a ubiquitous phenomenon. Any actual recollective undertaking will involve strains: elements of what is actually done, at every stage in the developing process, that cannot be smoothly, successfully, or convincingly given a satisfactory norm-responsive explanation.
Indeed. But now we must ask: Whose fault is it that the doing, or some aspect of it, is unforgivable—the doer or the forgiver? Is the failure that of the bad agent or of the bad recollector? Is whose fault it is a matter of how things anyway just are? Or is it at least partly reflective of the recollector’s failure to come up with a more norm-responsive narrative? The first is the attitude of the unsittlich valet, for whom no one is a practically norm-acknowledging hero, in the sense of being genuinely responsive (subjunctively sensitive) to norms. To treat the recollective failure as wholly the fault of the doer, to take it as simply an objective fact that there is no norm we could endorse that governs the deed as the assessor inherits it, is to adopt exactly the blaming practical attitude of the hard-hearted judge—an attitude Hegel criticizes as niederträchtig. The contrasting edelmütig attitude he recollectively recommends as implicit in the idea of norm-governedness as such is rather recognition as recollective forgiveness, in the specific sense of identifying with the doer, taking coresponsibility for the doing. That is to acknowledge at least equal responsibility on the part of the unsuccessful forgiver. For the issue is not properly posed in alethic modal terms of the possibility or impossibility of forgiving what was done. It is a deontic normative matter. One is committed to forgiving, responsible for forgiving. This is the Hegelian version of a Kantian regulative ideal—one whose content is “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” One can be committed to that recognitive ideal (normatively governed by it in the dual sense) even if one must in many cases confess that one cannot understand—and so forgive—all.
It might well be that one is in fact incapable of fulfilling that magnanimous commitment, of carrying out that responsibility to forgive in concrete detail. If and insofar as that is so, it is a normative failure that the unsuccessful would-be forgiver should confess. To take proper recognitive recollective responsibility requires the forgiving agent to confess his own inadequacy to the recollective task. (Compare: The judge at common law fails, in her recollective vindication of her own decision, to treat all previously decided cases as precedential. That fact makes her own authority vulnerable. She must trust future judges to find a way to forgive the incompleteness of her recollective reconstruction of a tradition, and treat her decision as nonetheless authoritative in the sense of precedential, because adequately acknowledging its responsibility to, the authority of, the tradition being retrospectively rationally reconstructed.) Your confession of a failure of your practical attitudes appropriately to acknowledge a norm is a petition for my recognition in the form of my forgiving recollective taking of (co)responsibility for your doing. My subsequent failure to adopt adequately forgiving recollective recognitive attitudes is something I, too, am responsible for confessing. That confession is itself an act of identification with you: “I am as you are.” My attitudes, like yours, fail adequately to satisfy the norms that they nonetheless acknowledge as binding, as governing those attitudes. For one acknowledges an obligation (the bindingness of a governing norm) insofar as one confesses the extent to which one has been unresponsive to the demands of the recollective norm, unable properly to fulfill a recognitive responsibility. And one is genuinely sensitive to that normative demand in making such a confession. Confessing is a kind of doing that makes it the case that one both acknowledges the authority of and is in fact sensitive to the norm recollected as governing the attitudes that make up the tradition one has discerned (including one’s own attitudes), even though one admits one’s incapacity to fulfill the responsibility one thereby acknowledges.
As a magnanimous, edelmütig, forgiving assessor of another’s doing, one confesses that it is (also) one’s own fault, that one is not good enough at forgiving. And one must trust that this recollective-recognitive failure, too—like the failure of the original, inadequately forgiven doer—will be more successfully forgiven by future assessors (who know more and are better at it). That one cannot successfully tell a recollective story is not what matters. That is a deontic failure, relative to one’s commitments. It is something to be confessed, in trust that that failure, too, can be forgiven. The well-meaning but incompetent forgiving recollector’s confession, like that of the contrite agent, is a petition for recognition in the form of forgiveness. The trusting confession of recollective failure completes the identification of the one playing the role of assessor with the one playing the role of agent. The recognitive attitudes of forgiveness and confession emerge as two sides of one coin, two aspects of the symmetrical, norm-instituting, recognitive structure of trust. Its slogan is “Attribute responsibility forgivingly, acknowledge responsibility contritely.” In a normative community with this recognitive structure, everyone forgives to the limits of each one’s ability, everyone confesses those limits, and everyone trusts that each, too, will eventually be forgiven. The content of the shared recognitive attitudes with which all parties identify is “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass before us.”
It is of the essence of both the reparative ameliorating dimension and the recollective hermeneutic dimension of the forgiving recognitive attitude that they address a performance that expresses a prior practical attitude. The doing being forgiven must already be under way. For this reason, the final, vernünftig form of reciprocal recognition as confession and forgiveness is essentially historical. The attitude-governing norms it institutes and acknowledges have the rich diachronic recognitive form of traditions. Hegel himself practices forgiving recollection, retrospectively rationally reconstructing expressively progressive traditions, in his own accounts of intellectual and cultural history, in the way he reads the history of art, religion, and especially philosophy. It is what I mean to be practicing in the stories I tell here.
The claim that is crucial for understanding the third age of Geist as retaining the progress made by modernity while overcoming its structural alienation is that recognition understood as including the recollective institution of traditions acknowledges both the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes. On the one hand, it incorporates the insight that norms (normative statuses) are instituted by reciprocal recognition—that is, by recognitive attitudes that are symmetrical in the sense of being suitably socially complemented. On the other hand, each recollective rational reconstruction is obliged to display the normative attitudes it addresses as governed by norms (normative statuses) in the dual sense of being subject to assessment according to those norms and of being subjunctively sensitive to them. In this way, the postmodern recollective recognitive practices reachieve a sittlich appreciation of the authority of norms over attitudes, the sense in which attitudes are responsible to (governed by) norms they acknowledge and attribute. It is true that acknowledgment of the authority of governing norms is always within the scope of a recollective rational reconstructive story about what is going on. The normative status on which attitudes are understood as dependent (to which they are responsible) is itself always the object of a recollective attitude. In this sense, the overall account invokes nothing but attitudes. But that attitudes are status-dependent (norm-governed) is an essential, necessary, and characteristic structural feature of every recollective recognitive attitude as such. In that sense, the status-dependence of normative attitudes is not merely a contingent product of some attitudes people happen to adopt. It is in the end what makes normative attitudes normative attitudes—acknowledgments and attributions of normative statuses of responsibility and authority.
That the historical recognitive structure of trust (reciprocal recollective forgiveness and confession) balances and does equal justice to the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and to the status-dependence of normative attitudes is ultimately the justification for understanding forgiveness as the appropriate recognitive response to the petition for recognition that is confession. That recognitive structure provides the context in which it emerges that attributing responsibility (holding someone else responsible) and acknowledging responsibility (taking responsibility oneself) are not just different normative attitudes, and not just socially complementary normative attitudes that globally presuppose one another in the sense that they are each intelligible in principle only in a context that includes the other. They also presuppose one another locally, in a way that expresses an identity underlying their difference of social perspective. Confession makes the one who holds the penitent responsible for something, herself responsible for forgiving it. That is, confession normatively obliges the one who attributes a responsibility also to acknowledge a coresponsibility (both reparative and recollective) for that very same doing. That the attitudes of holding another responsible and oneself taking responsibility are in this very strong sense two sides of one coin (different only as aspects of a unity intelligible only as having both) turns out to have been implicit in the relations between normative statuses and normative attitudes all along. This is parallel to the metaphysically ironic lesson taught by the allegory of Mastery: authority and responsibility are not just coordinate normative statuses in that if X has authority over Y, then Y is responsible to X. For it to be determinately contentful, X’s authority must also always involve X having a correlative responsibility and must acknowledge the authority of some others to hold X responsible. Pure normative independence, without any corresponding dependence, is a fantasy. When acted on practically, that fantasy of authority without responsibility (pure independence, the ideology of Mastery) metaphysically deforms both the normative statuses it institutes and the self-conscious individuals whose statuses they are.
We have seen that one special case where it is particularly important to be able to make sense of the status-dependence of attitudes (the normative governance of attitudes by statuses) is cognition: the case we began by considering. Kant taught us to think about representation in normative terms. A representing is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to how things are with what counts as represented by it just in virtue of its having that sort of authority over it. For Kant, the principal challenge in making sense of the objectivity—in the sense of their objective purport—of our cognitive representations is understanding how they are normatively governed by what they thereby count as representing. In the terms Hegel puts in play already in his Introduction, this is understanding the normative character of the relation between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness. That is the authority that how things implicitly are in themselves exercises over how they explicitly are for consciousness. What knowing and acting subjects are in themselves is their normative statuses, while what they are for consciousness (for themselves or for others) is a matter of normative attitudes (acknowledged or attributed, respectively). In the special case of cognition, what things are for consciousness also consists of attitudes, which are now to be understood as responsible to, normatively governed by, how objective things are in themselves. Hegel offers an expressive account of this semantic relation, which is in turn cashed out in terms of the process of recollection.
For this sort of normative governance of attitudes, too, is to be understood ultimately in terms of traditions consisting of recollectively rationally reconstructed attitudes. Any way things could be in themselves is already conceptually articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other possible states of affairs. Thus it is in shape to be the content of an attitude, to be grasped as how things are for consciousness. (The same contents can show up both in objective-alethic and subjective-deontic forms.) What for each recollection plays the role of noumenon, the referent represented with varying degrees of fidelity by the senses of all the recollected cognitive attitudes (phenomenal appearances of that noumenal reality) in the rationally reconstructed tradition of error and discovery, is itself something things can be for consciousness, a phenomenon, the content of a possible attitude. Rehearsing an expressively progressive trajectory whereby the sequence of appearances is seen to be normatively governed by the reality that emerges into explicitness through that rationally reconstructed experience of error is providing a phenomenology that in a distinctive way warrants the resulting cognitive commitments of the recollector.
In the cognitive case, what is confessed and forgiven is error—the deontic incompatibility of commitments that precludes proper entitlement to them. This is the part of the content of attitudes that—according to a particular only partially successful recollection of the tradition to which it belongs—is not norm-governed, is incorrect according to the governing norm, does not exhibit subjunctive sensitivity to the content of that norm. It is the residue of contingency that the recollection has not given the form of necessity, has not shown to be as it ought to be according to the governing norm. That there is always such a surplus, such a residue, is what the recollector must confess. What the contrite recollector trusts is that this failure, too, will successfully be forgiven by edelmütig recollectors yet to come—that this contingency, too, will eventually be given the normative form of necessity by being incorporated in the conceptual contentful norm that will then be seen as having governed the whole process, including the current, inadequate recollective rational reconstruction of it. That every recollection must leave some residue, some aspect of the attitudes it reconstructs as remnants of contingency (and so must confess its own need for recollective forgiveness) is the way sensuous immediacy overflows conceptual mediation. That is the source of the experience of error and failure that provides the normative demand that is the motor for change of commitment. But that each successive recollection that is itself retrospectively forgiven as expressively progressive gives the form of necessity to more of what had previously been visible only as contingent makes this same process the road of truth. That incorporation of immediate contingent particularity into mediated normative universal conceptual form is the source of the determinateness of the conceptual contents of doxastic attitudes. For it is an essential requirement of the norm that governs the process of determining those conceptual contents.
It is characteristic of self-consciousness operating according to the metaconceptual structure of Verstand (whose modern apex is expressed by Kant) to take determinately contentful conceptual contents for granted. Those contents are thought of as always already being fully determinate in the sense of having sharp boundaries, determining norms for correct application in all possible cases (“rails laid out to infinity”). It is characteristic of self-consciousness operating according to the metaconceptual structure of Vernunft (characteristic of the third, postmodern phase of Geist) to understand determinateness differently, in terms of the on-going, never-ending expressive process of further determining conceptual contents by recollectively incorporating previously recalcitrant concrete aspects of how things are (what really follows from what, what is really incompatible with what) into conceptual form: giving nonnormative contingency the normative form of necessity. The determinateness of objective reality manifests itself in the active restlessness of the conceptual norms that structure the attitudes of knowing and acting subjects. It is because the process in terms of which the determinate contentfulness of conceptual norms is ultimately intelligible (the process of determining them) has the magnanimous (edelmütig) recognitive form of trust—of an endless progressive spiral of confession of partial normative failure, recollective forgiveness of that failure, and confession of the partial failure of that forgiveness while trusting in future forgiveness—that Hegel’s account is properly describable as presenting a “semantics with an edifying intent.”
That the normative relations of authority and responsibility between representeds and representings (the relations between how things objectively are, in themselves, and how they subjectively are, for consciousness) are to be understood as a special case of the authority of normative statuses over attitudes is an explanatory prioritizing of the practical over the cognitive and of normative pragmatics over representational semantics. It is accordingly a kind of pragmatism about semantics. The norm governing cognitive doings is recollected as implicit in the experience of error—which, as the process by which conceptual content is progressively determined, is also the experience of knowing. It is something like the intention (in the technical sense of Absicht) to represent (refer to, know) how things are in themselves. According to Hegel’s normative understanding of representational relations, the objective realm of conceptual contents articulated by alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence normatively governs the subjective realm of conceptual contents articulated by deontic normative relations of incompatibility and consequence. Cognitive attitudes are responsible to the facts they represent in the sense that those facts set the standard for recollective normative assessment of the correctness of the attitudes, and the attitudes must be recollected as subjunctively sensitive to those facts. The fact that these normative representational relations are to be understood ultimately in terms of the recognitive process and essentially historical social practice of magnanimous recollective forgiveness is conceptual idealism.
Agency in the age of trust reachieves the heroic character—so striking in the original ancient form of agency—that was pushed out by the ironic distancing and alienation from norms essential to the achievement of individual self-consciousness that is the triumph of modern over traditional forms of normative life. Central to heroism was what Hegel calls “character”: the decisive sittlich identification of an individual agent with the norms, practically treating them as authoritative over and binding on one’s attitudes. This is an acknowledgment of the status-dependence of normative attitudes, of one’s attitudes as norm-governed. The ought-to-dos governing normative attitudes (acknowledged or attributed responsibilities) are understood as wholly determined by the ought-to-bes that articulate normative statuses (what someone is really responsible for or committed to: their duty). As a result, the heroic agent takes responsibility for every aspect of his act. If some feature of it is not as it ought to be, that is confessed to be the agent’s responsibility, whether or not it was intended or foreseen. Compared to the contracted modern conception, the heroic conception makes the agent primarily responsible for a much-expanded deed, stretching out to include distant, unanticipated consequences. For this reason, traditional heroism is essentially tragic: it requires subjecting oneself to the dark, unknowable power of fate, identifying with what one is made by forces beyond one’s knowledge and control. Shouldering the responsibility that fate in this sense brings down upon one who acts is tragic heroism.
Heroism in the age of trust is like heroism in the age of tragedy in its sittlich acknowledgment of the bindingness of norms, in the sense of their governing authority over normative attitudes, the status-dependence of those attitudes. There are norms that set standards for assessment of the correctness of our attitudes of acknowledging and attributing responsibility and authority, and it is the responsibility of each agent to be sensitive to those norms, shaping her attitudes accordingly. Each forgiving retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive tradition of attitudes is responsible for discerning just such governing norms. And where the cramped and contracted modern practical conception of agency drew a bright line between normatively attributable and assessable aspects of each doing, and nonnormative ones—between what the agent can properly be held responsible for, because done knowingly or intentionally, and what is done only in the sense of happening because of such doings in the narrow sense—the trusting conception is heroic, like the tragic conception, in that responsibility is total. Responsibility is taken for the whole deed. There is no aspect of intentional doings that overflows and falls outside the normative realm of responsibility—no specification of the deed for which no one takes responsibility. The difference between the two forms of normative heroism is that in Geist with the recognitive structure of trust, responsibility for the deed is shared between the agent whose practical attitudes initiated the doing and the members of her recognitive community, who take it as their own by committing themselves to recollectively forgiving it.
Agency as understood and practiced within the magnanimous recognitive structure of confession and recollective forgiveness combines these two heroic aspects of the premodern conception: sittlich appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes and acknowledging total responsibility for the deed as consequentially extended beyond the knowledge and control of the agent. It can maintain a heroic expanded conception of the deed for which responsibility is taken because it has an expanded conception of who is responsible for each doing. Complementary recognitive attitudes both institute the governing norms and acknowledge the authority of the norms so instituted. The essentially historical fine structure of those reciprocally related recognitive attitudes and normative statuses articulates a division of normative labor between the individual agent whose practical attitudes initiate a self-conscious intentional doing, who takes responsibility for it in one sense, and members of the agent’s recognitive community, who take responsibility for it in another sense. In this way the two essentially modern insights into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the distinction of responsibility marked by the individual agent’s “rights of intention and knowledge” (the distinction between Handlung and Tat) are respected, and synthesized with the two principal features of premodern heroic agency.
But the vernünftig, trusting conception of agency as heroic does away with the element of tragic subjection to fate. Fate showed up as an alien, inhuman force in the tragic form of agency because it was a nonnormative force, one that though not itself governed by norms, nonetheless substantially shapes our normative responsibilities. What was left to us was bearing up and carrying on in the face of the incursions by alien fate into the properly normative realm in which we dwell. The postmodern neoheroic form of practical normativity replaces (normatively) blind fate with something we do for reasons. What happens is given the form of something done. Immediacy, contingency, particularity, and their recalcitrance to conceptualization are not done away with. But they now take their proper place. For we appreciate the necessary role they play in the process of determining the contents of the norms we both institute by our recognitive attitudes and acknowledge as governing that experiential process. The individual burdens of tragic subjection to fate are replaced by the communal recollective tasks of concrete magnanimous forgiveness. Where our normative digestion and domestication of immediacy, contingency, and particularity shows its limitations, when (as in each case at some point they must) they outrun our recollective capacity to incorporate them into the mediated, normative conceptual form of governing universals, that failure of ours is properly acknowledged by confession and trust in the forgiveness of that failure to fulfill our responsibilities, by more capable future recollectors.
The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind. The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes. The self that carries out the action, the form of its act, is only a moment of the whole, and so likewise is the knowledge, that by its judgement determines and establishes the distinction between the individual and universal aspects of the action. [PG 669]
The responsibility the individual tragic heroic agent takes on himself is accordingly spread out and shared. The doing of each (in one sense) is now the doing of all (in another, recognitively complementary sense). For all share responsibility for each action. The distinctive role played by individual agents is not obliterated. For the responsibility acknowledged by and attributed to the initiating agent is different from the reparative and recollective recognitive responsibility undertaken by those who shoulder the burden of forgiving the agent. Every deed now shows up both as a practical contribution to the content of all that came before it, and as acknowledging a recollective responsibility with respect to all those deeds. The temporally extended, historically structured recognitive community of those who are alike in all acknowledging the authority of norms, confessing the extent of their failure to be norm-governed, acknowledging their responsibility recollectively to forgive those failures in others, confessing the extent of the failure of their efforts at recollective and reparative forgiveness, and trusting that a way will be found to forgive those failures, is one in which each member identifies with all the others, at once expressing and sacrificing their own particular attitudes by taking coresponsibility for the practical attitudes of everyone. It is the “ ‘I’ that is ‘We,’ the ‘We’ that is ‘I.’ ”