1. PI §258.
2. Hegel most explicitly makes this point in his allegorical treatment of “consciousness understanding itself as conscientious,” discussed at the end of Chapter 14 in this volume.
3. The original German for this important passage is “Schon ein Gedachtes, ist der Inhalt Eigentum der Substanz; es ist nicht mehr das Dasein in die Form des Ansichseins, sondern nur das—weder mehr bloß ursprüngliche noch in das Dasein versenkte, vielmehr bereits erinnerte—Ansich in die Form des Fürsichseins umzukehren. Die Art dieses Tuns ist näher anzugeben.” This is from Georg Lasson’s 1907 anniversary edition (Leipzig: Verlag der Dürr’schen Buchhandlung). Later editions and (so) translators often omit the text between the dashes.
4. EPM §1.
All quotations from Hegel’s Introduction are in the Kenley Royce Dove translation, from Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1970).
1. The idea of couching this story as the transition from a model of resemblance to one of representation is from the first chapter of my longtime colleague John Haugeland’s Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [a Bradford Book], 1989).
2. Descartes’s commitment to the mind’s awareness of its own representings being immediate in the sense of nonrepresentational (justified by the regress of representation argument) did not preclude his treating the contents of those representings as essentially involving their relations to other such contents. Indeed, his view of representation as a matter of isomorphism between the whole system of representings and the whole system of representeds entails just such a semantic holism. He never, I think, resolves the residual tension between the immediacy of his pragmatics (his account of what one is doing in thinking) and the holism of his semantics. Kant’s pragmatics of judging as integration into a whole exhibiting the synthetic unity of apperception is not similarly in tension with his version of the holistic semantic thought.
3. It is by no means clear that Kant does hold this. A more plausible reading restricts the representation relation to what holds between the empirical, representing self and nature. It is the essence of transcendental idealism to understand both of these in conceptual, hence intrinsically intelligible, shape. Kant’s side remarks about “things-in-themselves” are better understood as making purely negative points. On such a reading, Hegel is siding with Kant in endorsing the conceptual articulation of both sides of the representation relation, but does not want to endorse the transcendental idealist way of entitling himself to this claim.
4. Gottlob Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” Mind, n.s., 65, no. 259 (July 1956): 289–311.
5. PI §95.
6. For instance, by Jennifer Hornsby, “Truth: The Identity Theory,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 47 (1997): 1–24, reprinted in The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Michael P. Lynch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 663–681. Also J. Dodd, An Identity Theory of Truth (London: Macmillan, 2000).
7. For instance, by J. Dodd, “McDowell and Identity Theories of Truth,” Analysis 55, no. 3 (1995): 160–165. I doubt McDowell would be happy with this characterization of his views in Mind and World about the necessity of understanding ourselves as conceptually open to the layout of reality.
8. One of the grounds on which McDowell has, with some justice, been criticized, is his unwillingness to supply such details for the conception of the conceptual in play in Mind and World.
9. Here one can and should, however, invoke the distinction between reference-dependence (objectionable) and sense-dependence (not objectionable)—about which more later.
10. I discuss Kant’s normative, pragmatic theory of judging, the way it leads to a notion of conceptual content, and what Hegel made of all of this in the first three chapters of Reason in Philosophy.
11. There is a route to a similar conclusion via the Rational Constraint Condition. Conjoined with a psychological construal of the conceptual, it supports the Davidsonian view that “only a belief can justify another belief.” Then it seems one must reject the RCC—which results, McDowell claims in Mind and World, in a picture of beliefs (representations, now not really intelligible as appearances at all) as “spinning frictionlessly in the void.” For the only alternative appears to be envisaging the world as somehow consisting of intentional states: the thinkings of a Berkeleyan God or a Bradleyan or Roycean Absolute.
12. Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
13. Already something thought, the content is the property of substance; existence [Dasein] has no more to be changed into the form of what is in-itself and implicit [Ansichseins], but only the implicit—no longer merely something primitive, or lying hidden within existence, but already present as a recollection [erinnerte]—into the form of what is explicit, of what is objective to self [Fursichseins]. [PG 29]
14. For instance, in PG 79 in the Introduction.
15. For instance, in PG 91.
16. Really, “homomorphic,” because in general subjects need not be aware of (apperceive, conceptually represent) all the alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence that objectively obtain. But I mean “homomorphic” in the technical mathematical sense of a structure-preserving mapping from one relational structure (whose elements are subjective commitments labeled by declarative sentences, and whose relations are deontic normative relations of incompatibility and consequence) to another (whose elements are objective states of affairs—in virtue of the homomorphism, labelable by the same declarative sentences, and whose relations are alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence). The structure preserved is those relations. To say that the homomorphism h is “structure-preserving” in this sense means that if aRb in the commitment-structure, where R is normative incompatibility (or consequence) in that structure, then h(a)R′h(b), where R′ is alethic incompatibility (or consequence) in the objective conceptual structure.
17. I suppress temporal references here. Note that “simultaneously” is not a sufficient qualification. Rather, the predicates-properties themselves should be thought of as including temporal specifications. For having property P at time t can be incompatible with having property Q at time t′: it’s raining now is incompatible with the streets being dry in two minutes.
18. That it cannot in principle hold globally and permanently is a deep feature of Hegel’s understanding of sensuous and matter-of-factual immediacy.
1. I use “commitment” for how things are for consciousness. Hegel sometimes uses the term “setzen”: positing.
2. Hegel’s undifferentiated talk of “consciousness” in the Introduction carefully does not distinguish between a consciousness and consciousness in general. Later on, in the Self-Consciousness chapter, we see that the social articulation of consciousness in general into mutually recognizing individual self-consciousnesses is essential to understanding either one.
3. Saying much more than this immediately raises more systematic and theoretical questions. Can this distinction be paraphrased as that between what we represent and how we represent it? Does the rough-and-ready distinction of ordinary language involve running together two distinctions that ought to be kept apart: that between Sinn and Bedeutung, and that between the content expressed by declarative sentences and that possessed by singular terms? What further commitments are involved in taking it that in thinking or saying that things are thus and so I am representing a state of affairs? My principal purpose here—rationally reconstructing the fundamental considerations, commitments, and ideas that shape the views Hegel expounds in his Introduction—is best served by not rushing to engage such theoretically sophisticated semantic issues.
4. Of course, these complementary reductive approaches are not the only strategic possibilities. One might offer independent accounts of conceptual and representational intentionality, and then explain how they relate to one another. Or one might, perhaps most plausibly, insist that the two can only be explained together and in relation to one another.
5. “The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of representations in an intuition.” [A79, B104]
6. For instance, “daß ihm etwas das An-sich … ist,” in PG 85.
7. The assessment in question is Hegel’s “Prüfung,” in PG 85.
8. The point generalizes to constellations of more than two jointly incompatible commitments (so long as all the members of the set are essential to their collective incompatibility, in the sense that dropping them would leave a mutually compatible remainder). For simplicity, I will stick to the two-commitment case.
9. As Hegel puts it in PG 84 and PG 85, quoted earlier.
10. In the Phenomenology, this is a theme emphasized in the Preface, in partial explanation of why “everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the truth not merely as substance but also equally as subject.” [PG 17] Subjects are the ones who must respond to the normative demands implicit in applying a concept whose content is articulated by the relations of determinate negation (material incompatibility) and mediation (inferential consequence) it stands in to other such contents. That they must respond by doing something, changing their further commitments (rejecting some and accepting others) is the context in which we must understand his talk of the “movement of the Begriff.” [PG 34] This is what he is talking about when he refers to “the self-moving concept which takes its determinations back into itself. Within this movement, the motionless subject itself breaks down; it enters into the distinctions and the content and constitutes the determinateness, which is to say, the distinguished content as well as the content’s movement, instead of continuing simply to confront that movement. [PG 60] It is why “[d]eterminate thoughts have the ‘I,’ the power of the negative, or pure actuality, for the substance and element of their existence.” [PG 33]
11. I offer some background, clarification, and examples of the concept of pragmatic metavocabulary in chapter 1 of Between Saying and Doing.
1. I take one of the positive points of Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology to be a suggestion as to what it is to treat such conceptual contents as appearances of a reality, to take such Sinne to be modes of presentation of Bedeutungen, to understand thinkables that can be expressed de dicto (e.g., as the thought that the object in the corner is round) as always also in principle expressible de re (e.g., as the thought of the ball that it is round). To do that one must acknowledge them as subject to a certain kind of normative assessment: answerability for their correctness to the facts, objects, and properties that they thereby count as about.
2. This is how “the form of the Notion [Begriff] … unites the objective form of Truth and of the knowing Self in an immediate unity.” [PG 805]
3. “Das Wahre ist so der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist.”
4. Spirit is this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between objectivity and content. [PG 804]
1. Besides these three options—nonconceptual objective world and conceptual subjective grasp of it, conceptually articulated world and conceptual grasp of it, and nonconceptual world taken in nonconceptually—there would seem to be the abstract possibility of a conceptually articulated world taken in nonconceptually. I do not know of any actual view of this shape, though there are analogues if the conceptual / nonconceptual distinction is replaced by such others as the infinite / finite or divine / human distinctions.
2. On the general issue, see the articles by Sosa and Burge that McDowell talks about in “De Re Senses,” Philosophical Quarterly 34, no. 136 (July 1984): 283–294. That essay usefully sets out the issues, in a way that is congenial to the approach taken and attributed to Hegel here. The view that there is a distinctive role for demonstrative, object-involving thoughts (“strong de re commitments” in the idiom of chapter 8 of Making It Explicit), but that they are through and through conceptual is introduced by Evans, endorsed by McDowell (for instance, in the essay referred to here), and developed in a somewhat different direction in Making It Explicit.
3. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, trans. and ed. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 79. This sort of use of “certainty” [Gewissheit] is also important for Hegel’s use of another important dyad, “certainty” / “truth,” which he uses to try terminologically to loosen the grip of the picture of subjects and objects as independent things, in favor of one in which we can appreciate thoughts and facts as having in favored cases the very same conceptually articulated contents.
4. Cf. Kant: “It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err—not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.” [A293 / B350]
5. CDCM §108.
6. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” was delivered as lectures in London in 1956, and Hegel wrote all of the Phenomenology, apart from the Preface, in 1806.
7. The first is introduced in PG 94 and its consequences extracted in PG 95 and PG 96, the second is introduced in PG 100 and unpacked in PG 101 and PG 102, and third is introduced in PG 103 and what is implicit in it elaborated in PG 104–107.
8. Hegel follows up on his introduction of the distinction between immediate knowledge and knowledge of the immediate in the opening sentence of Sense Certainty with this passage in PG 92, setting up the way he will exploit the distinction in the three movements of thought: “Among the countless differences cropping up here we find in every case that the crucial one is that, in sense-certainty, pure being at once splits up into what we have called the two ‘Thises,’ one ‘This’ as ‘I,’ and the other ‘This’ as object. When we reflect on this difference, we find that neither one nor the other is only immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated: I have this certainty through something else, viz. the thing; and it, similarly, is in sense-certainty through something else, viz. through the ‘I.’ ”
9. Fussy terminological note:
10. One might be tempted to argue that the two distinctions do not really generate three senses of “intuition,” since uses of demonstratives are always exercises of receptivity in the sense that they are noninferentially elicited. This would not be at all plausible for indexicals, which include not only “here,” but “there,” not only “now,” but “then.” But they also include “a week from last Tuesday,” which can surely be used as the conclusion of an inference—as indeed, it then becomes clear on reflection, can even the simplest here-now-me indexicals. “If she left an hour ago, she should be here by now,” surely reports the product of an inferential process. The same considerations show that even demonstratives, whose most basic use is in making noninferential reports and perceptual judgments, also always have inferential uses.
11. Other examples include
So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty. [PG 96]
What consciousness will learn from experience in all sense-certainty is, in truth, only what we have seen, viz. the This as a universal. [PG 109]
12. Hegel splits up the pure indication that would be made explicit by a tokening of “this” into temporal and spatial dimensions, which would be made explicit by tokenings of “now” and “here,” and makes the point indicated in terms of a “now that is night” and a “now that is day,” on the one hand (in PG 96), and a “here that is a house” and a “here that is a tree,” on the other (in PG 101). But the importation of this distinction is irrelevant to the point I am discussing.
13. For instance, in PG 98.
14. Thus, for instance, “festhalte,” “Bleibende,” “aufgezeigte” in PG 108.
15. For future reference, it should be registered that this structure could be invoked by talk of the future, viewing the present as past, and thereby making the present into something. We see further along, in the discussion of Reason, that for Hegel future interpretations quite generally determine what our acts are in themselves. It is this open-ended potential for interpretation they show to be something for future consciousness that is what we mean by the in-itself. This is just the doctrine of the historical significance of the distinction between noumena, reality, or what is in itself, on the one hand, and its phenomenal appearance, what it is for consciousness on the other, that was announced in the Introduction.
16. I elaborate this point (without reference to Hegel) in chapter 7 of Making It Explicit.
17. A98–106.
1. “It is merely the character of positive universality which is at first observed and developed.” [PG 114]
2. Hegel says also: “I now further perceive the property as determinate, as contrasted with an other, and as excluding it … I must in fact break up the continuity into pieces and posit the objective essence as an excluding ‘one.’ In the broken-up ‘one,’ I find many such properties, which do not affect each other but which are instead indifferent to each other.” [PG 117]
3. Book V of the Categories.
4. I discuss this issue further in the second half of chapter 1 and in chapter 6 of From Empiricism to Expressivism.
5. Hegel invokes this issue explicitly by using the phrase “nimmt (sie) auf sich” (takes it upon itself, takes it up), in PG 118, PG 120, PG 122, and again in summary in PG 131.
6. In PG 123 and PG 124.
1. “In the dialectic of sense certainty, hearing and seeing have become things of the past for consciousness, and as perceiving, it has arrived at thoughts, which it brings together for the first time in the unconditioned universal [unbedingt Allgemeinen].” [PG 132]
2. In the introductory paragraph of Force and Understanding Hegel refers to “this unconditioned universal, which from now on is the true object of consciousness.” [PG 132]
3. Roger Boscovitch, in his 1758 Theoria philosophiae naturalis redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium (Theory of natural philosophy reduced to the single law of forces which exist in nature), and Kant in his 1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Hegel echoes Boscovitch’s title within his allegory, in his discussion of the relation of the “single law” to disparate determinate laws.
4. Because forces are, in fact, theoretical entities—though not the only ones—this allegory is also synecdoche: letting a part stand in for the whole (a cattle herd of fifty head). That is not true of all the rest of the semantic allegories of the Phenomenology, however.
5. I take this to be the point of what would otherwise be the somewhat suspect move of assimilating particulars to universals as themselves being higher-order universals comprising the first-order universals that characterize them: using “universal” as a genus that has as species both properties that unify the disparate objects they characterize and objects as unifying the disparate properties that characterize them. This latter is conceiving particularity as a “universal medium.”
6. From Arthur Eddington’s 1927 Gifford Lectures, published as The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1928), ix–x.
7. This is the view where, because no content can be acknowledged for the inner world of things as they are in themselves, “nothing would be left but to stop at the world of appearance, i.e. to perceive something as true that we [now] know is not true.” [PG 146]
8. In his Locke lectures, published as Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968; repr., Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1992). Hegel remarks on this reading of Kant in PG 146, pointing out that it would be a ridiculous overreaction to think of things in themselves as an unknowable beyond on this conception of them. Sellars agrees and takes this fact to be a prime advantage of his critical rendering of the Kantian idea. I criticize this view of Sellars in From Empiricism to Expressivism, beginning in chapter 1.
9. I discuss in more detail this issue of the intelligibility of holism, and what I take to be Hegel’s response to it, in “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” which is chapter 6 in Tales of the Mighty Dead.
10. I have substituted Baillie’s “calm” for Miller’s “inert” in translating “ruhiges.”
11. PG 157. In this bit of the text, Hegel refers to the calm realm of laws as the “first supersensible world.” I count it as actually the second, after reality construed as the purely theoretical entities that give rise to observable manifestations (mere appearance) according to invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism.
12. Tastes probably don’t actually work like this, so the example is not the best Hegel could have chosen. The colors work better.
1. I discuss some more contemporary ways of working out this idea in chapters 1, 4, and 5 of From Empiricism to Expressivism.
2. Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 96.
3. This is the sort of error that is invoked in PG 131.
4. I take it that the lesson I am claiming is taught in the Perception chapter of the Phenomenology is also in play in the Sein und Schein section of the Science of Logic.
5. I discuss this point further in chapter 6 of Tales of the Mighty Dead: “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology.”
6. Recall from the discussion of the Introduction the crucial distinction between what things are to consciousness and what they are for consciousness—unmarked in extant translations, save for Kenley Dove’s. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (with a section from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the Kenley Royce Dove translation) (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989).
7. I have tweaked Miller’s translation. It is important that Hegel uses “Vorstellung,” representation, just where he does, and that makes it misleading to translate “darstellen” as “represent” here.
8. G. Leibniz, Les nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, Préface.
9. I discuss Sellars’s critique of descriptivism in the introduction and chapter 1 of From Empiricism to Expressivism.
10. I discuss this Kantian categorial idea and what subsequent philosophers such as Carnap and (especially) Sellars make of it in the first half of chapter 1 of From Empiricism to Expressivism, and the alethic modal case specifically in chapters 4 and 5.
11. “Conclusions are drawn from premises in accordance with principles, not from premises that embody those principles,” as Gilbert Ryle puts the point. “ ‘If,’ ‘So,’ and ‘Because,’ ” in Philosophical Analysis: A Collection of Essays, ed. Max Black (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950), 328.
1. This way of putting things, in terms of commitments rather than desires, is discussed and justified later.
2. This comparison is developed further in “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” chapter 6 of Tales of the Mighty Dead.
3. Daniel C. Dennett, “Intentional Systems,” reprinted in Mind Design, ed. John Haugeland (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).
4. Hegel makes claims along these lines in his telegraphic discussion of the relation between self-consciousness and desire. One example is the summary claim that “the unity of self-consciousness with itself must become essential to self-consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness is Desire in general.” [PG 167] He stresses that “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” [PG 175]—that is, in another recognized recognizer. “The satisfaction of Desire is … the reflection of self-consciousness into itself, or the certainty that has become truth [that is, what things are for it and what things are in themselves coincide]. But the truth of this certainty is really a double reflection, the duplication of self-consciousness. Consciousness has for its object one which, of its own self posits its otherness or difference as a nothingness.” [PG 176] The object is the other one recognizes, who cancels the difference between it and the index consciousness in the sense that it, too, recognizes the other, thereby applying to both the other and itself one universal expressing a respect of similarity or identity: being something things can be something for. “A self-consciousness exists only for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact a self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it.” [PG 177] “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [nur als ein Anerkanntes].… The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition [Anerkennen].” [PG 178]
5. Reflexivity is not redundant in the mathematical definition of equivalence relation because the argument depends on the relation being everywhere defined, in the sense that for every x there is some y such that xRy, i.e., that everyone recognizes someone. Given the philosophical surround, this condition can, I think, be suppressed.
6. We will see in Chapter 10 that in Hegel’s allegory, the Servant achieves a kind of awareness that is higher and more developed than that of the Master precisely by being both forced and obliged to act on desires he does not himself feel: the desires of the Master.
7. The modal logic defined by its recognitive accessibility relation is accordingly S5.
1. “Naturalism without Representationalism,” in Naturalism in Question, ed. David Macarthur and Mario de Caro (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 71–88, and (with David Macarthur) “Pragmatism, Quasi-realism and the Global Challenge,” in The New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91–120.
2. “[L]’obéissance à la loi qu’on s’est prescrite est liberté.” Social Contract Book I, section 8.
3. Compare “the distinction that action essentially involves” at PG 400, discussed in Chapter 11.
4. Confession: In what follows I often talk about “norms” interchangeably with “normative statuses.” Corresponding to this usage, I sometimes line up the Sellarsian distinction between ought-to-bes and ought-to-dos with that between normative statuses and normative attitudes. These usages ignore distinctions that in other contexts are of the first importance. (The normative statuses taken as paradigmatic for the regimentation here, authority and responsibility, are normative, but not norms, and differ from ought-to-bes such as that there should be no poverty.) My claim is that important structures show up if we keep to a level of generality that ignores these specific differences. The claim and commitment is that once those structures do become visible in all of their complexity, it will be possible to move beyond the crude assimilations that made that possible, and reintroduce more fine structure. But I do not attempt to do that in this work.
5. More on this in Chapters 11 and 12.
6. Hector-Neri Castañeda, “Indicators and Quasi-indicators,” in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I: Essays on Self-Consciousness, ed. James G. Hart and Tomis Kapitan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), chapter 2. I discuss his *-regimentation in chapter 8 of Making It Explicit.
7. This is the pure social-status Queen’s shilling sense of “responsible”: doing something that (whether one knows it or not) has the social significance of entitling others to attribute a responsibility. In Making It Explicit I try to make it go as far as it can all on its own. Such an enterprise can seem perverse, but it is adopted with Popperian methodological malice aforethought. The idea is to explore the strongest, most easily falsifiable hypothesis, to see what explanatory work it can do, how far it will take one, before its explanatory resources are exhausted.
8. One can use modal-logical operators semantically defined on accessibility relations codifying recognitive attitudes to express how recognitive communities look from the point of view of one participant.
9. Chapter 3 of Tales of the Mighty Dead. An abbreviated version of this material appeared as “Hermeneutic Practice and Theories of Meaning,” SATS—Nordic Journal of Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2004): 5–26.
10. To keep things simpler and to make contact with some other recognizable philosophical programs, I have here used the language of theoretical postulates as hidden beneath an observable surface they are intended to explain. The discussion in Chapter 6 of the ways in which Hegel wants us to move beyond this way of thinking about theoretical entities should not be forgotten in this connection, though.
1. The discussion of Reason in Chapter 11 articulates the nature of intentional doings as practical acknowledgments of commitments in terms of the distinction between “Vorsatz” and “Absicht” that Hegel lays out in more detail in the Philosophy of Right. Understanding the relation between them requires attention to the process of determination by which the latter emerges from the former. That process is what showed up as “experience” in the Introduction, and as “work” in Self-Consciousness.
2. It is because the result of the processes considered must be specified in a normative vocabulary of authority, and responsibility, and attitudes that have those normative statuses as their objects that the reciprocal recognition model should not be thought of as a form of sociologism analogous to the psychologism that Frege criticized and Kant rejected.
3. “The lord is the consciousness that exists for itself, but no longer merely the Notion of such a consciousness. Rather, it is a consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, i.e. through a consciousness whose nature it is to be bound up with an existence that is independent, or thinghood in general. The lord puts himself into relation with both of these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness for which thinghood is the essential characteristic.” [PG 190]
4. “The Spirit of Christianity,” in Friedrich Hegel on Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 224–252.
1. See also PR §109: “[T]he will is the struggle to transcend this barrier [Schranke], i.e. it is the activity of translating this content in some way or other from subjectivity into objectivity. The simple identity of the will with itself in this opposition is the content which remains self-identical in both these opposites and indifferent to this formal distinction of opposition.”
2. Such a line of thought depends on systematically failing to distinguish between the contentfulness of a thought and its being about something or representing a state of affairs.
3. For the moment I speak indifferently of “purpose” and “intention.” When we later look at the details of Hegel’s approach, these will need to be distinguished, corresponding to his uses of “Vorsatz” and “Absicht” in the Philosophy of Right (beginning at §114).
4. The word “Erfolg” (success) occurs only three times in the Phenomenology, never in connection with the theory of action, and of its six occurrences in PR, only one is an action-theoretic use (in a comment on a comment on the crucial §118), appearing under the heading “Dramatic Interest.”
5. Robert Pippin offers a nice discussion of this perspective in Hegel’s Practical Realism: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
6. PM §505. See also PR §120. For my purposes here the difference between the right of knowledge and the right of intention does not matter.
7. PR §118Z. I later claim that this “contraction strategy” is something that is to be overcome eventually, and replaced by an “expansion strategy,” which reinstates the heroic (now edelmütig) sense of responsibility, but with an expanded subject of responsibility. That is why the discussion in the Philosophy of Right is explicitly flagged in §117 (and especially its Zusatz) as pertaining to finite action. The final story, retailed at the end of the Conclusion of this book, is about action conceived under the speculative category of infinity.
8. The passage from Philosophy of Right just quoted continues, laying out the general outlines of the claims that must be interpreted to make sense of the Vorsatz / Absicht distinction, connecting it with the further notions of welfare (das Wohl) and the good (das Gute):
(b) The particular aspect of the action is its inner content (α) as I am aware of it in its general character; my awareness of this general character constitutes the worth of the action and the reason I think good to do it—in short my Intention. (β) Its content is my special aim, the aim of my particular, merely individual, existence, i.e. Welfare.
(c) This content (as something which is inward and which yet at the same time is raised to its universality as to absolute objectivity) is the absolute end of the will, the Good—with the opposition in the sphere of reflection, of subjective universality, which is now wickedness and now conscience. [PR §114]
9. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Michael Quante offers an extended comparison between Davidson and Hegel on this point in Hegel’s Concept of Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
10. “[W]e ought to will something great. But we must also be able to achieve it, otherwise the willing is nugatory. The laurels of mere willing are dry leaves that never were green.” [PR 124Z]
11. Very much the same language is used at PG 642:
Action, in virtue of the antithesis it essentially contains, is related to a negative of consciousness, to a reality possessing intrinsic being. Contrasted with the simplicity of pure consciousness, with the absolute other or implicit manifoldness, this reality is a plurality of circumstances which breaks up and spreads out endlessly in all directions, backwards into their conditions, sideways into their connections, forwards in their consequences.
12. For instance:
This unity is the true work; it is the Sache selbst which completely holds its own and is experienced as that which endures, independently of what is merely the contingent result of an individual action, the result of contingent circumstances, means, and reality. [PG 409]
13. See for instance PG 409: “This unity is the true work; it is the Sache selbst” and PG 410:
The Sache selbst is only opposed to these moments in so far as they are supposed to be isolated, but as an interfusion of the reality and the individuality it is essentially their unity. It is equally an action and, qua action, pure action in general, hence just as much an action of this particular individual; and this action as still his in antithesis to reality, is a purpose. Equally, it is the transition from this determinateness into the opposite, and, lastly, it is a reality which is explicitly present for consciousness. The Sache selbst thus expresses the spiritual essentiality in which all these moments have lost all validity of their own, and are valid therefore only as universal, and in which the certainty consciousness has of itself is an objective entity, an objective fact for it, an object born of self-consciousness as its own, without ceasing to be a free object in the proper sense.
14. Though I have thus far used the terms ‘specification’ and ‘description’ loosely, I mean ‘specification’ to be the broader category, including both descriptions and demonstrative and indexical expressions.
15. For one example put forward in the context of elaborating his theory of action, see PR §115Z.
16. Hegel says of the hylomorphic identity of content through changing forms in different phases of action:
Action is present at first … as End, and hence opposed to a reality already given. The second moment is the movement of the End … hence the idea of the transition itself, or means. The third moment is … the object, which is no longer in the form of an End directly known by the agent to be his own, but as brought out into the light of day and having for him the form of an “other.” The Notion of this sphere requires that these various aspects be grasped in such a way that the content in them remains the same without any distinction, whether between individuality and being in general, or between End as against individuality as an original nature, or between End and the given reality; or between the means and that reality as an absolute End, or between the reality brought about by the agent as against the End, or the original nature, or the means. [PG 400]
17. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See especially chapter 14.
18. See also PG 419, which talks about the “positive meaning” of “the originally determinate nature of the individual” as “being in itself the element and purpose of its activity.”
1. John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2.
2. Only “largely” because on his account the customary senses of expressions become their referents, when the expressions occur in the context of indirect discourse.
3. Gottlob Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” Mind, n.s., 65, no. 259 (July 1956): 289–311.
4. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 28.
5. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950).
6. There are subtleties arising from the extension of this account of looks-talk from first-person uses to third-person attributions, and the subsequent possibility of first-person uses of third-person forms in self-attributions, but they can safely be ignored here. See the discussion in my Study Guide to Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
7. By way of analogy, one might think of the Dummettian claim that semantic theories must take account both of the circumstances of appropriate application of concepts and of their appropriate consequences of application, modeled on introduction and elimination rules for logical connectives. Semantic theories that look only upstream, to the circumstances of application—such as assertibilist, reliabilist, or informationalist ones—cannot be right because concepts can have the same circumstances of application and different consequences of application. Semantic theories that look only downstream, to the consequences of application—such as classical pragmatist ones—cannot be right because concepts can have the same consequences of application and different circumstances of application. Theories that collapse the two elements, representing content by truth conditions, which are required to be both individually necessary and jointly sufficient, miss the substantive and potentially controversial material inferential commitment implicit in the use of any concept: the commitment, namely, to the propriety of the material inference from the circumstances of appropriate application to the appropriate consequences of such application. (Dummett introduces this thought in Frege’s Philosophy of Language [New York: Harper & Row, 1973], 453–455. I elaborate the argument in chapter 2 of Making It Explicit and chapter 1 of Articulating Reasons). The dynamic structure relating the prospective and retrospective perspectives (and so the two semantic dimensions of sense and reference) in the Hegelian theory rehearsed in this chapter is much more intricate and articulated than that relating circumstances and consequences of application.
1. Robert Pippin has argued this at length in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. This is an oversimplification. In many places Hegel attributes more gross structure to history. For instance, in PR §§353–360 he identifies four stages in world history, putting the Oriental before the Greek, and interposing the Roman between the Greek and the modern (Nordic or German). I think there is a point to his practice in the Phenomenology of ignoring the first and treating the Roman as part of the extended transition to modernity.
3. As Hegel says of the alienated, modern stage: “Destiny is alien to this Spirit.” [PG 492]
4. The Antigone passage is from lines 454–457 of The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I, vol. 8, trans. David Grene and Robert Fitzgerald, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), which Elizabeth Wycoff renders as
the gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws.
Not now, nor yesterday’s, they always live,
and no one knows their origin in time.
Hegel mentions this passage again in PR §144H in the third paragraph of his introduction to Sittlichkeit: “Antigone proclaims that no-one knows where the laws come from: they are eternal. That is, their determination has being in and for itself and issues from the nature of the thing [Sache].”
5. Does Hegel think that all premodern societies are characterized by reciprocal recognition? Not at all—as his remarks elsewhere about traditional Indian and Chinese societies show. Thus at the end of the Philosophy of Right he puts “Oriental world-historical realm,” which “originates in the natural whole of patriarchal society,” as a stage more primitive than the epoch epitomized by the Greeks. But he does seem to think that the sort of incompatible norms whose practical obtrusiveness triggers the transition to modernity arise only in this sort of recognitive context.
6. “A natural ethical community—this is the Family.” [PG 450]
7. “[C]haracter … that ethical consciousness … which, on account of its immediacy, is a specifically determined Spirit, belongs only to one of the ethical essentialities.” [PG 597]
8. F. H. Bradley summed up this view in the title of his essay “My Station and Its Duties,” in his book Ethical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1876).
9. “Der sich entfremdete Geist,” from the title of chapter 6B. Alienation, like Sittlichkeit, is not a psychological attitude of individuals (though it can be reflected there), but a structure the whole of Spirit exhibits.
1. Thus, “by means of the self as soul of the process, substance is so moulded and developed in its moments that one opposite stirs the other into life, each by its alienation from the other gives it an existence and equally receives from it an existence of its own.” [PG 491]
2. Leibniz talks about us as creatures who can say moi, but he doesn’t worry about the contribution that the indexicality of those sayings is making to the constitution of selves.
3. Hegel has surely correctly diagnosed here a perennial strategy on the part of the representatives of Wealth: to accuse the agents exercising State Power of doing so not on behalf of the public welfare, but of their private bureaucratic interests.
4. The terminology is due to Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 168–216.
5. Hegel introduces Enlightenment utilitarianism in this passage:
Enlightenment completes the alienation of Spirit in this realm, too, in which that Spirit takes refuge and where it is conscious of an unruffled peace. It upsets the housekeeping of Spirit in the household of Faith by bringing into that household the tools and utensils of this world, a world which that Spirit cannot deny is its own, because its consciousness likewise belongs to it. In this negative activity pure insight at the same time realizes itself, and produces its own object, the unknowable absolute Being and the principle of utility. [PG 486]
1. The corresponding discussion in the Philosophy of Right is the following:
Since the subjective satisfaction of the individual himself (including the recognition which he receives by way of honour and fame) is also part and parcel of the achievement of ends of absolute worth, it follows that the demand that such an end alone shall appear as willed and attained, like the view that, in willing, objective and subjective ends are mutually exclusive, is an empty dogmatism of the abstract Understanding. And this dogmatism is more than empty, it is pernicious if it passes into the assertion that because subjective satisfaction is present, as it always is when any task is brought to completion, it is what the agent intended in essence to secure and that the objective end was in his eyes only a means to that. What the subject is, is the series of his actions. If these are a series of worthless productions, then the subjectivity of his willing is just as worthless.
But if the series of his deeds is of a substantive nature, then the same is true also of the individual’s inner will.…
Z: … Now this principle of particularity is, to be sure, one moment of the antithesis, and in the first place at least it is just as much identical with the universal as distinct from it. Abstract reflection, however, fixes this moment in its distinction from and opposition to the universal and so produces a view of morality as nothing but a bitter, unending, struggle against self-satisfaction, as the command: “Do with abhorrence what duty enjoins.” It is just this type of ratiocination which adduces that familiar psychological view of history which understands how to belittle and disparage all great deeds and great men by transforming into the main intention and operative motive of actions the inclinations and passions which likewise found their satisfaction from the achievement of something substantive, the fame and honour, &c., consequential on such actions, in a word their particular aspect, the aspect which it has decreed in advance to be something in itself pernicious. Such ratiocination assures us that, while great actions and the efficiency which has subsisted through a series of them have produced greatness in the world and have had as their consequences for the individual agent power, honour, and fame, still what belongs to the individual is not the greatness itself but what has accrued to him from it, this purely particular and external result; because this result is a consequence, it is therefore supposed to have been the agent’s end and even his sole end. Reflection of this sort stops short at the subjective side of great men, since it itself stands on purely subjective ground, and consequently it overlooks what is substantive in this emptiness of its own making. This is the view of those valet psychologists “for whom there are no heroes, not because there are no heroes, but because these psychologists are only valets.” [PR §124]
2. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
3. Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
4. Volume 3, p. 545, in the Haldane and Simpson translation of 1896 (repr., Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983).
5. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, published in English as Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartmann (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 13.
1. New specifications of the doing in terms of its consequences continue to unroll as time goes on:
Action, in virtue of the antithesis it essentially contains, is related to a negative of consciousness, to a reality possessing intrinsic being. Contrasted with the simplicity of pure consciousness, with the absolute other or implicit manifoldness, this reality is a plurality of circumstances which breaks up and spreads out endlessly in all directions, backwards into their conditions, sideways into their connections, forwards in their consequences. [PG 642]
2. I have altered the translation here. Miller has this as “over its specific Notion of itself” (emphasis added), reading “its concept” (or “his concept”), “seinem (bestimmten) Begriff,” as a concept of the forgiving judge in the sense of having him as its object, rather than its subject—that is, as an objective, rather than a subjective genitive.
3. Matthew 6:9–13. A variant is at Luke 11:2–4.
4. Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, published in English as Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartmann (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 13.
5. Introduction to Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 23.
6. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1983), 552–553.
1. Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
2. Here is how Wittgenstein introduces the analogy:
[A]sk yourself whether our language is complete;—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. [PI §18]
3. PI II XI, p. 225.
4. Granted, “rational normative bindingness” and “conceptual content” are not Wittgensteinian phrases: not ones he uses, or even would approve the use of. In particular, he might well object to the adjective “rational” in this context. Nonetheless, the principal points he is making can be put in these terms, and doing so helps to bring them into conversation with Hegel’s treatment of cognate issues.
5. “A Semantical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem,” in Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds, ed. Jeffrey Sicha (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1980), 152.
6. As an actual example, consider Smith v. United States:
Federal law in the United States requires that a person who “during and in relation to … [a] drug trafficking crime uses … a firearm” be punished more severely than a person who traffics drugs without using a firearm. Smith questioned the application of this law to cases in which firearms are traded for drugs, and are not used for protection or aggression. The question here arises because of the indeterminacy of the phrase “uses … a firearm” in the context of the law: does the phrase apply to any possible use, including barter, or does it only apply to standard uses such as protecting and threatening?
“A Hegelian Model of Legal Concept Determination: The Normative Fine Structure of the Judge’s Chain Novel,” in Pragmatism, Law, and Language, ed. Graham Hubbs and Douglas Lind (New York: Routledge, 2014), 7.
7. I discuss this particular case at greater length in “A Hegelian Model of Legal Concept Determination,” in Hubbs and Lind, Pragmatism, Law, and Language, 19–39.
8. “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” Mind, n.s., 65, no. 259 (July 1956): 289–311.
9. In a sense Hegel develops from J. G. Herder’s: “The mere narrator is an annalist, a writer of memoirs, of newspapers; the reasoner about the individual narration is a historical rationalizer; but the man who orders many occurrences into a plan, into a vision—he is … the true historical artist … he is the creator of a history.” “Older Critical Forestlets,” in Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 260.
10. T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” V.
11. The first paragraph of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” offers a paradigm of such backward anaphora.
12. Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, published in English as Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartmann (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 13; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden mit Registerband, vol. 12, 14th ed. (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), 23.
13. “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” in Tales of the Mighty Dead, 178–209.
14. The passage continues: “Reason is, therefore, misunderstood when reflection is excluded from the True, and is not grasped as a positive moment of the Absolute. It is reflection that makes the True a result, but it is equally reflection that overcomes the antithesis between the process of its becoming and the result, for this becoming is also simple, and therefore not different from the form of the True which shows itself as simple in its result; the process of becoming is rather just this return into simplicity.” [PG 21]
15. For instance, in the passage from PG 33 quoted earlier, and in PG 47, where the two levels of concepts and commitments are explicitly cited as parallel: “[T]he single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do.”
16. Two further representative passages are these:
There are two aspects possessed by the practical consciousness, intention and deed (what is “meant” or intended by the deed and the deed itself). [PG 319]
[T]hough any alteration as such, which is set on foot by the subjects’ action, is its deed [Tat], still the subject does not for that reason recognize it as its action [Handlung], but only admits as its own that existence in the deed which lay in its knowledge and will, which was its purpose. Only for that does it hold itself responsible. [PM 272]