4
Hegel and Pragmatism
I want to consider three moments in the history of philosophy in the United States when Hegel became a source of philosophical inspiration and discussion: the latter part of the nineteenth century, the mid-twentieth century, and the present time. Each of these moments is directly or indirectly related to pragmatism. In the Prologue I indicated that the second half of the nineteenth century in America witnessed a strong interest in German philosophy, especially in Kant, Hegel, and, more generally, the tradition of German idealism. The early issues of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (founded in 1867) were filled with articles about, and translations of, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In the opening article of the first issue, W. T. Harris declared: “He, then, who would ascend into the thought of the best thinkers the world has seen, must spare no pains to elevate his thinking to pure thought. The completest discipline for this may be found in Hegel’s Logic” (Harris 1867, p. 6). In Great Britain too, a version of idealism was flourishing. T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet were among the most prominent of the British idealists who advocated a form of absolutism – a single coherent system in which everything is internally related.1 They were all sharp critics of traditional British empiricism. We sometimes forget that both Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, considered to be two of the most important founders of analytic philosophy, were originally defenders of idealism. In America, the great proponent of absolute idealism was the charismatic Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce. Absolute idealism flourished in both the United States and England. The influence of absolute idealism had been so strong at the turn of the twentieth century that when William James was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in 1907, he declared in a passage that I have previously quoted:
Fortunately, our age seems to be growing philosophical again – still in the ashes live the wonted fires. Oxford, long the seed-bed, for the English world, of the idealism inspired by Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different way of thinking. Even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest in a controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism. It looks a little as if the ancient English empiricism, so long put out of fashion here by nobler sounding Germanic formulas, might be re-pluming itself and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever. (James 1977, p. 7)
I will briefly describe the significance of Hegel for Dewey, Peirce and James. I begin with Dewey because Hegel had the greatest influence on his thinking.
Dewey’s Early Hegelianism
In his autobiographical sketch (1930), Dewey tells us that as an undergraduate at the University of Vermont, he was “subconsciously … led to desire a world and life that would have the same properties as had the human organism” (Dewey 1981, p. 2). At that time Dewey had not yet discovered Hegel.2 But when he entered the graduate program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins, he came under the dominant influence of G. S. Morris – an enthusiast for Hegel and idealism.
While it was impossible that a young and impressionable student unacquainted with any system of thought that satisfied his head and heart, should not have been deeply affected, to the point of at least a temporary conversion, by the enthusiastic and scholarly devotion of Mr. Morris, this effect was far from being the only source of my own “Hegelianism”. The ‘eighties and ‘nineties were a time of new ferment in English thought; the reaction against atomic individualism and sensationalistic empiricism was in full swing. It was the time of Thomas Hill Green, of the two Cairds, of Wallace, of the appearance of the Essays in Philosophical Criticism, co-operatively produced by a younger group under the leadership of the late Lord Haldane. This movement was at the time the vital and constructive one in philosophy. (Dewey 1981, p. 6)
What did the young Dewey find so attractive in Hegel? It was not Hegel’s claims about the Absolute, or the unfolding of the categories in the Logic, or the grand sweep of Hegel’s narrative of the West, or even the technical details of Hegel’s dialectic. It was the sense of life, the dynamism, and especially the vision of organic interrelated reality that Dewey found so appealing. What Dewey wrote about his teacher, G. H. Morris, might just as well have been said about himself.
I should say that he was at once strangely indifferent to and strangely preoccupied with the dialectic of Hegel. Its purely technical aspects did not interest him. But he derived from it an abiding sense of what he was wont to term the organic relationship of subject and object, intelligence and the world. … His adherence to Hegel (I feel quite sure) was because Hegel had demonstrated to him, in a great variety of fields of experience, the supreme reality of this principle of living unity maintaining itself through the medium of differences and distinctions. (Cited in Wenley 1917, pp. 136–7)
But Dewey’s most revealing remark about Hegel’s inspiration is the following:
There were, however, also “subjective” reasons for the appeal that Hegel’s thought made to me; it supplied a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject-matter could satisfy. It is more than difficult, it is impossible, to recover that early mood. But the sense of divisions and separations that were, I suppose, borne in upon me as a consequence of a heritage of New England culture, divisions by way of isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, of nature from God, brought a painful oppression – or, rather, they were an inward laceration. My earlier philosophic study [prior to his discovery of Hegel] – had been intellectual gymnastic. Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was, however, no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me. (Dewey 1981, p. 7)
Despite these heady attractions, Dewey gradually drifted away from Hegel. Darwin replaced Hegel as a source of inspiration for the organic, dynamic, changing character of life. But the “subjective” factors that originally attracted Dewey to Hegel stayed with him throughout his life and deeply marked his own experimentalist version of pragmatism. Dewey, in effect, naturalized Hegel. Dewey’s concept of experience as a transaction that spans space and time, involving both undergoing and activity, shows the Hegelian influence. Subject and object are understood as functional distinctions within the dynamics of a unified developing experience. Like Hegel, Dewey is critical of all dualisms and the fixed dichotomies that have plagued philosophy, including mind and body as well as nature and experience. Dewey’s hostility to the merely formal and static was inspired by Hegel. Dewey, like Hegel, was alert to the role of conflicts in experience: how they are be overcome in the course of experience, and how new conflicts break out. Typically he approaches philosophical problems in a Hegelian manner by delineating opposing extremes, showing what is false about them, indicating how we can preserve the truth implicit in them, and passing beyond these extremes to a more comprehensive resolution. Like Hegel, Dewey believed that philosophy must be approached in it historical context.
Peirce’s Ambivalence toward Hegel
Peirce’s original philosophical source of inspiration was Kant – and not Kant as interpreted through Hegelian spectacles. Peirce detested what Hegel and the Hegelians took to be the character of logic. He even criticized Dewey severely for the pernicious influence of Hegelianism on his early “logical” studies. The latter are better characterized as “natural history” than normative logic.3 But eventually Peirce came to recognize the affinity between his pragmaticism and Hegelian absolute idealism.
The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to Hegelian absolute idealism, from which it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world, or even so much as self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct elements of a triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked upon him as the great vindicator of their truth. (5.436)
Peirce is referring to his categorial scheme of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which he takes to be basic for any adequate philosophical understanding of phenomena, logic, signification, experience, and reality. Writing to Lady Welby in 1904, Peirce declares:
I was long ago (1867) led, after only three or four years’ study, to throw all ideas into the three classes of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness. This sort of notion is as distasteful to me as to anybody; and for years, I endeavored to pooh-pooh and refute it; but it long ago conquered me completely. Disagreeable as it is to attribute such meaning to numbers, and to a triad above all, it is true as it is disagreeable. (8.328)
Peirce, of course, recognizes the affinity between his threefold categorical scheme and Hegel’s penchant for triads. But he claims that Hegel viewed these categories as mere stages of thinking. He failed to appreciate that the categories designate elements that have an independence that is not reducible to thinking.4 I have explored one crucial aspect of this difference – the role of Secondness in Peirce’s analysis of experience, perception, and inquiry.5 Peirce’s critique of intuitionism – the core of the Cartesianism that he sought to displace – complements Hegel’s critique of the very idea of pure (unmediated) immediacy.
James: Hegel’s “Abominable Habits of Speech”
James, the great popularizer of “pragmatism,” had a deep aversion to German philosophy, and rarely resisted an opportunity to ridicule what he took to be its misguided pretentiousness. James’s real enemy was not so much Hegel, but rather the version of idealism advocated by British idealists and by his Harvard colleague Josiah Royce. Unfortunately, Royce is scarcely read today – except by specialists. Yet Royce is the American philosopher who exhibited the most sensitive understanding of Hegel and German idealism. In this late work, Royce also noted the convergence of Hegelian and pragmatic themes developed by Peirce.
James spent two chapters of A Pluralistic Universe explaining what is wrong with “monistic idealism,” and lamenting the pernicious influence of Hegel. Pluralism, as James understood it, is a radical alternative to any form of Hegelianism. James deplored Hegel’s “abominable habits of speech,” “his passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences, his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful vocabulary.” “All these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair – or his – out of desperation” (James 1977, p. 44). “The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of [Hegel’s] procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it.” In short, Hegel epitomized precisely what philosophers should avoid: vicious intellectualism, abstract monism, cultivated obscurity, and long grandiloquent pretentious sentences that sound profound, but are really quite vacuous. Summing up his criticism of monistic idealism, James declares:
The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands. The logical proofs of it miss fire: the portraits which its best court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme; and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with it all is well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should have heard. (James 1977, p. 63)
Yet, for all his disdain of Hegel and absolute idealism, James tells us that Hegel was “a naively observant man” who “plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression of what happens” (James 1977, p. 44). He extols Hegel for his keen awareness of the quality of the world as alive, and as involving a dialectic movement in things. He singles out Hegel’s revolutionary achievement: “Concepts were not in his eyes the static self-contained things that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent dialectic” (James 1977, p. 46). The category of negation is Hegel’s most original stroke. “Merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual, Hegel is great and true” (James 1977, p. 49). James displays a rare ability to understand sympathetically those whom he most bitterly opposes. His portrait is based on Hegel’s Logic, a primary Hegelian text for the British idealists. If James had discussed Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, he might have found even more direct support for the aspects of Hegel’s thinking that he singles out for praise – the dynamic living quality of experience and reality.
Nevertheless, James’s devastating caricature of Hegel helped to suppress any serious interest in Hegel. Many Anglo-American philosophers today would still endorse James’s portrait of Hegel. Ironically, Hegel, who had been a source of inspiration for Dewey, was killed off by James’s popular version of pragmatism. It is too mild to say that serious interest in Hegel in the United States waned during the next 50 years. It was completely moribund – and this is just the way that most philosophers in America thought it should be.
The Revival of Interest in Hegel
Beginning in the 1950s, and in subsequent decades, the situation slowly changed. When I was a graduate student in the 1950s, the question was frequently asked, “Do you do philosophy? Or do you do the history of philosophy?” The presumption was that there was little of genuine philosophical interest to be found in turning to the history of philosophy – except to show how confused and misguided past philosophers had been. At best, we might recast some of the occasional insights of past philosophers in the new way of words. By this criterion, Hegel was not even worthy of being read. For many analytic philosophers, Hegel was an exemplar of the type of vacuous speculation that every respectable analytic thinker should avoid. But gradually – at least among a marginal group – there were signs of a growing interest in Hegel. There were three primary reasons for this. The first was clearly political. With the emergence of the New Left, there was a search for an intellectual basis that could serve to motivate and legitimate the call for social justice and radical democratic action. The early “humanistic” Marx was being rediscovered. And it soon became evident that Marx led one back to Hegel. This was the time when Left students in America were discovering the rich Marxist tradition of Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School. Initially, Hegel was read through the spectacles of Western Marxism, Hegel seen through the eyes of Adorno and Marcuse. When I wrote Praxis and Action during the late 1960s and argued that Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy were movements that arose out of, or in reaction to, Hegel, there were scarcely any philosophers in the United States who took Hegel seriously. Although the New Left stimulated commentaries and new translations of Marx and Hegel, it still did not influence the mainstream academic philosophy taught in graduate schools.
There was a second source of the interest in Hegel. No respectable philosopher of the time could completely ignore the analytic orientations that were emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. But there was a group that found the limited scope of analytic philosophy stifling. They were searching for an alternative, a way in which one could take on board the new insights and achievements of the linguistic turn, but also broaden philosophical discourse – to show how philosophy could still deal with the range of human culture and experience instead of focusing exclusively on a narrow set of technical issues. I would place Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, and myself in this group. One of the consequences of the growing interest in Hegel at mid-century was the production of new translations, commentaries, and serious discussions of Hegel’s work. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that, in the 1950s, one could count on one hand the number of books published in America that dealt with Hegel – and these were of uneven quality. But today, 50 years later, there are good reasons to say that the Hegelian Geist has moved to America, where we find some of the most creative and thought-provoking Hegelian scholarship.
A third source of the renewed interest in Hegel that also had its origins in the 1950s was so subterranean as to be almost totally neglected. Nevertheless, it is this underground current that has come to shape some of the most original philosophical inquiry today. I am thinking here of the work of Wilfrid Sellars.
Sellars: “Incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes”
A philosopher comes alive and speaks to us from the past when his work becomes a fertile source for dealing with current philosophical problems, when his work can be engaged in novel ways. Otherwise, paying homage to the tradition is a way of embalming it. This is what I see happening in the United States today with regard to Hegel. To demonstrate this, I shall return to Sellars, who leads us back to Peirce and forward to the recent contributions of John McDowell and Robert Brandom. I shall also take a side-glance at Richard Rorty, who was also influenced by Sellars and was Brandom’s teacher. Rorty was also one of the first to take note of this Hegelian turn.
Initially, the German philosopher who comes to mind when we think of Sellars is Kant, not Hegel. Like that of Peirce, Sellars’s philosophy can be understood as variations on Kantian themes. But a careful reading of his work, especially his classic monograph Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, reveals how close his orientation is to the opening sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given reads as if it were a translation of the opening sections of the Phenomenology into what Sellars called the “new way of words.” Sellars, who has a sophisticated knowledge of the history of philosophy, introduces his critique of the Given with an allusion to Hegel’s critique of immediacy. If we translate Sellars back into Hegel’s idiom, we can say that the critique of the Given rejects the claim that there is immediate knowledge that doesn’t involve any conceptual mediation – a type of direct intuitive knowledge that allegedly serves as the foundation for all inferential knowledge. Put this way, Sellars’s monograph calls to mind those early articles of Peirce that appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Peirce anticipates many of the arguments developed by Sellars.6 Peirce, like Sellars, argues that once we give up the Myth of the Given, we are led to a nonfoundational, fallibilistic, intersubjective understanding of concept formation and inference. This also entails a rejection of representationalist semantics and requires a more holistic understanding of meaning and inference. The appropriation and critique of Kant by Peirce and Sellars reflect the very spirit of Hegel. Richard Rorty was one of the first to suggest that Sellars was leading us from Kant to Hegel.
Let me be a bit more specific. I am not suggesting that Hegel directly influenced either Peirce or Sellars in their critiques of the Myth of the Given. Rather, I am claiming something that is more important and interesting. Just as Hegel detected a dialectical instability in the key Kantian dichotomies and distinctions – for example, between sensibility and understanding, receptivity and spontaneity – so both Sellars and Peirce were alert to this dialectical instability – and the need to pass beyond it. If we think of Hegel as introducing a philosophical line of argument that has its own integrity, then we can say that both Peirce and Sellars share this critical mode of thinking.7 Without denying the “truth” of empiricism – that in our empirical and scientific knowledge, we are subject to a brute compulsion – Peirce and Sellars challenge the very idea that there is (or can be) any knowledge “below” the level of concepts, “below” what Kant and Hegel call Verstand (understanding). There is no “pure” receptive knowledge that does not always already involve what Kant calls spontaneity. There is no immediate knowledge or knowledge by acquaintance when this is understood to be a type of immediate self-authenticating episode that can presumably serve as an epistemic foundation for inferential knowledge. Both argue that a major confusion in the classical empiricist tradition was to confuse brute compulsion (Peirce’s Secondness) with epistemic justification (Peirce’s Thirdness). Russell’s understanding of “knowledge by acquaintance,” one of the targets of Sellars’s critique of the Given, exemplifies what Hegel had already criticized in the opening dialectical critique of “Sense Certainty” in his Phenomenology. Both Peirce and Sellars swerve away from some of the excesses of Hegel. Both seek to develop a fallibilistic communal understanding of inquiry that is compatible with the “truth” implicit in the empiricist tradition – where experience serves to check the validity of our knowledge claims.
During his creative years at the University of Minnesota, Yale, and the University of Pittsburgh, Sellars had his dedicated admirers. But his philosophical contributions were overshadowed by those of Quine and Davidson. In the past few decades, primarily as a result of the publications of John McDowell and Robert Brandom, there is a much greater appreciation of the fecundity of Sellars’s work. McDowell and Brandom, known as the “Pittsburgh Hegelians,” have acknowledged the influence of Sellars on their own philosophical investigations, and they have also been explicit about this Hegelian turn. I suspect that many of John McDowell’s former Oxford colleagues thought it was a joke when he declared, in the preface to Mind and World, “one way that I would like to conceive this work is as a prolegomenon to the reading of [Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit].” But it is no joke, and McDowell is extremely insightful about Hegel. In the same preface (written before the publication of Brandom’s Making It Explicit), he also acknowledges “the substantial marks of Brandom’s influence” – and especially his “eye-opening seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” which McDowell attended in 1990 (McDowell 1996, p. ix). In Articulating Reasons, Brandom affirms that his philosophical work represents a continuation of this Hegelian line of thinking. He tells us, “My teacher Richard Rorty has described the enterprise to which this volume is a contribution as an extension of Sellars’s; to make possible a further transition from a kantian to a hegelian approach to thought and action” (Brandom 2000a, p. 32). Brandom explains what he means:
First, I am interested in the divide between nature and culture. In this context we can identify the realm of the cultural with activities that either consist in the application of concepts in judgment and action or that presuppose such capacities. The Geisteswissenschaften have as their proper aim the study of concept use and things made possible by it – activities of which only concept users are capable. One of my principal goals is to present and explore the consequences of a particular sort of principle of demarcation for the realm of culture, so understood. Although of course cultural activities arise within the framework of a natural world, I am most concerned with what is made possible by the emergence of the peculiar constellation of conceptually articulated comportments that Hegel called “Geist.” Cultural products and activities become explicit as such only by the use of normative vocabulary that is in principle not reducible to the vocabulary of the natural sciences. … The study of natures itself has a history, and its own nature, if any, must be approached through the study of that history. This is a picture and an aspiration that we owe to Hegel. (Brandom 2000a, p. 33)
Brandom also stresses a second dimension of Hegelian influence – what he calls Hegel’s “pragmatism about conceptual norms.” I will shortly explain what Brandom means by this and how it brings us back to the pragmatism of Peirce.
The “Pittsburgh Hegelians”: McDowell and Brandom
McDowell’s references to Hegel are sparse, but they are revealing. At a crucial stage in the development of his argument in Mind and World he writes:
It is central to Absolute Idealism to reject that the conceptual realm has an outer boundary, and we have arrived at a point from which we could start to domesticate the rhetoric of that philosophy. Consider, for instance, this remark of Hegel’s: “In thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other.” This expresses exactly the image I have been using, in which the conceptual is unbounded; there is nothing outside it. The point is the same as the point of that remark of Wittgenstein’s. … We – and our meaning – do not stop anywhere short of the fact. (McDowell 1996, p. 44)
This is a central thesis of Mind and World. In his attempt to escape from the oscillating seesaw such that we either fall victim to some form of the Myth of the Given or slip into an unsatisfying “frictionless” coherentism, McDowell argues that the conceptual realm is unbounded and that the world imposes rational constraints upon us. At first glance (and some would say, even after a second or third glance), many of his critics fail to see what is the difference that makes a difference between what he is advocating and the coherentism that he criticizes and rejects.8 McDowell seeks to show – in his Wittgensteinian mode of therapeutic reflection – that the philosophical anxiety resulting from this oscillating seesaw is alleviated once we realize that the conceptual realm is unbounded and does not cut us off from reality. On the contrary, it is precisely because of this unboundedness that we can achieve knowledge and access to a reality that is independent of us. Reality is not located “outside” the conceptual realm. McDowell succinctly states his main point thus:
In a particular experience in which one is not misled, what one takes in is that things are thus and so. That things are thus and so is the content of the experience and it can also be the content of a judgement if the subject decides to take the experience at face value. So it is a conceptual content. But that things are thus and so is also, if one is not misled, an aspect of the layout of the world: it is how things are. (McDowell 1996, p. 26)
McDowell takes this to be a gloss on the Wittgensteinian remark: “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” (cited in McDowell 1996, p. 27). When we unpack McDowell’s meaning, it sheds light on his project as well as on Hegel’s. McDowell is aware of the popular view that Hegelian idealism, with its emphasis on mind (Geist), thought (Denken), and concept (Begriff), fails to do justice to a reality and a world that is “outside of” and independent of mind and thought. This caricature of Hegel is based on the presupposition that the distinction between what is “inside the mind” and “outside the mind,” or what is “inside” the conceptual realm and “outside” this realm, is itself unproblematic. Presumably idealism is the philosophical position that tells us that there is nothing that is “outside the mind.” McDowell correctly realizes that this is a caricature; Hegel’s idealism involves a total rejection of this entrenched dichotomy of what is “inside” and “outside” the conceptual realm. Hegel (like McDowell) categorically rejects this misleading picture. McDowell’s Hegelian claim is that a proper understanding of what it means to affirm the unboundedness of the conceptual shows us that it is precisely because of this unboundedness that we can come to know of a reality that is independent of us. What McDowell says about Wittgenstein is just as true of Hegel.
[T]here is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case … there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world. Of course thought can be distanced from the world by being false, but there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought. (McDowell 1996, p. 27)
A second related feature of McDowell’s philosophical investigations that bears a strong affinity with Hegel is his critique of what he calls the “disenchanted” conception of nature, which has dominated so much of modern philosophy. He seeks to recover the idea of “second nature.” McDowell draws upon Aristotle’s ethical writings rather than Hegel to explain what he means. But we should not forget how much Hegel himself is indebted to Aristotle. Furthermore, Hegel also argued that the “truth” of nature is spirit. McDowell’s basic point is that as long as we operate with a conception of nature that is completely disenchanted, and a conception of naturalism that is essentially reductionist, we cannot avoid the philosophical anxieties and aporias of a bifurcation of nature and freedom. We need to rethink the concept of nature in a manner that is compatible with idea of a human second nature. In this way we avoid both reductionism and dualism, both of which McDowell takes to be philosophically unacceptable. We open the way to a more adequate conception of nature that is compatible with the sui generis character of spontaneity. McDowell gives an eloquent description of the type of integration that he envisions when he writes:
We need to recapture the Aristotelian idea that a normal mature human being is a rational animal, but without losing the Kantian idea that rationality operates freely in its own sphere. The Kantian idea is reflected in the contrast between the organization of the space of reasons and the structure of the realm of natural law. Modern naturalism is forgetful of second nature; if we try to preserve the Kantian thought that reason is autonomous within the framework of that kind of naturalism, we disconnect our rationality from our animal being, which is what gives us a foothold in nature. … If we want to combine avoiding the problems with a more substantial acknowledgement of them, we need to see ourselves as animals whose natural being is permeated with rationality, even though rationality is appropriately conceived in Kantian terms. (McDowell 1996, p. 85)9
We should not forget that Hegel himself sought to integrate Aristotle with Kant in a manner that is very similar to the way in which McDowell characterizes this need for a genuine synthesis.
McDowell merely sketches what this rethinking of the concept of nature requires. There are many hurdles that need to be overcome to carry this out successfully.10 In this context, I shall limit myself to the observation that this project bears a strong affinity with post-Kantian idealism. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all felt that Kant had left us in an intolerable position insofar as he introduced what seemed to be a categorical dichotomy between the realm of nature and the realm of freedom. They all felt, as the later Kant came to realize in the Critique of Judgment, that this chasm had to be bridged. They all rejected what McDowell calls “bald naturalism,” which in their vocabularies was identical with “naturalism.” They would all agree with McDowell when he affirms that spontaneity is sui generis (McDowell 1996, p. 76). And each, in his distinctive manner, sought to rethink the concept of nature in a way that shows how it is continuous with the higher reaches of rationality and thought. I do not want to suggest that the German idealists were successful in carrying out this project, just as I do not think that McDowell thus far has provided more than hints about how this is to be done. Actually, the type of naturalism that McDowell proposes has an even closer affinity with the nonreductive emergent naturalism of Peirce, James, and Dewey.
I cannot explore the rich and multifarious ways in which we see the traces of Hegel in Brandom – or the differences between him and McDowell. But I do want to pick up one major strand in his appropriation of Hegel – what Brandom calls “Hegel’s pragmatism.” Like Peirce, Sellars, and McDowell, Brandom’s starting point is Kant. His philosophical reflections begin with Kant’s insights about normativity and rationality. He tells us:
One of Kant’s great insights is that judgments and actions are to be distinguished from the responses of merely natural creatures by their distinctive normative status, as things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He understood concepts as the norms that determine just what we have made ourselves responsible for, what we have committed ourselves to and what would entitle us to it, by the particular acts of judging and acting. (Brandom 2000a, p. 33)
This is Brandom’s starting point, but he thinks that there are many hard questions about normativity that are not adequately accounted for by Kant. He goes on to tell us:
Kant, however, punted many hard questions about the nature and origins of this normativity, of the bindingness of concepts, out of the familiar phenomenal realm of experience into the noumenal realm. Hegel brought these issues back to earth by understanding normative statuses as social statuses – by developing a view according to which … all transcendental constitution is social institution. The background against which the conceptual activity of making things explicit is intelligible is taken to be implicitly normative essentially social practice. (Brandom 2000a, pp. 33–4)11
This is a succinct statement of Brandom’s philosophical project – one that he pursues with analytic finesse and systematic thoroughness. Carrying it out requires the development of a concept of discursive social practices that enables us to do full justice to the normativity implicit in these social practices. Brandom characterizes Hegel’s pragmatism as “a rationalist pragmatism” (Brandom 2000a, p. 34). He thinks that Hegel’s pragmatism is richer and more fertile than the pragmatism that one finds in Peirce, James, and Dewey, or even the “pragmatism” of the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein. I strongly disagree with Brandom’s assessment of the American pragmatic tradition.12 He fails to recognize that Peirce’s pragmaticism is a normative pragmatism that is based upon an inferential semantics. We also find in Peirce an anticipation of Brandom’s inferential semantics, and his all-important distinction between what is implicit and what is explicit in social practices. For example, Peirce tells us that all reasoning involves inferential “leading” or “guiding” principles.
That which determines us, from given premises, to draw one inference rather than another, is some habit of mind. … The particular habit of mind which governs this or that inference may be formulated in a proposition whose truth depends on the validity of the inferences which the habit determines; and such a formula is called a guiding principle of inference. (5.367)
I am not suggesting that everything of importance in Brandom is already to be found in Peirce. But I do want to affirm that being sensitive to anticipations, similar dialectical moves, and closely related argumentative strategies, enables us to detect continuities in the pragmatic tradition. Specifically, it enables us to become more reflective about the Hegelian motifs in a pragmatic tradition that reaches back to Peirce and encompasses the philosophical contributions of Dewey, Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom. It opens us to a rethinking of the course of philosophy in the United States during the past 150 years. Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom are solidly grounded in analytic philosophy, but their philosophical investigations cut across the divide between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy.
I agree with Richard Rorty when he writes, in his introduction to Sellars’s Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind, that the “prope-Hegelianism” of Sellars and Brandom “suggest that the Sellars–Brandom ‘social practice’ approach to the traditional topics of analytic philosophy might help reconnect that philosophical tradition with the so-called ‘Continental’ tradition” (Rorty 1997a, p. 11).
Philosophers in non-anglophone countries typically think quite hard about Hegel, whereas the rather skimpy training in the history of philosophy which most analytic philosophers receive often tempts them to skip straight from Kant to Frege. It is agreeable to imagine a future in which the tiresome ‘analytic–Continental split’ is looked back upon as an unfortunate, temporary breakdown of communication – a future in which Sellars and Habermas, Davidson and Gadamer, Putnam and Derrida, Rawls and Foucault, are seen as fellow-travelers on the same journey, fellow-citizens of what Michael Oakeshott called a civitas pelegrina. (Rorty 1997a, pp. 11–12)
Rorty’s suggestion about the future of philosophy is consistent with the thesis that I have been advocating throughout this book. If we concentrate on the vital and varied development of pragmatic themes during the past 150 years, if we are sensitive to the ways in which pragmatic thinkers have detranscendentalized Kant and incorporated Hegelian motifs, then those standard “tiresome” classifications – “analytic–Continental” – actually obscure the pragmatic sea change that has been taken place in philosophy.
Notes
1 British idealism bears a strange and strained relation to Hegel. Themes such as the Absolute, internal relations, and the concrete universal are appropriated from Hegel. But there is little of the passion of Hegel’s Phenomenology or of Hegel’s sweeping vision of historical conflict and political struggle.
2 Dewey writes that his earliest philosophical interest was stimulated by a course in physiology that used a text by T. H. Huxley:
It is difficult to speak with exactitude about what happened to me intellectually so many years ago, but I have an impression that there was derived from that study a sense of the interdependence and interrelated unity that gave form to intellectual stirrings that had previously been inchoate, and created a kind of model of a view of things to which material in any field ought to conform. (Dewey 1981, p. 2)
3 See Peirce’s review of Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory (8.188–90).
4 See my discussion of Peirce’s categories, pp. 129–36.
5 See above, pp. 131–4.
6 I explore the similarities between Peirce and Sellars in Bernstein 1964b.
7 In Praxis and Action, I wrote:
The opening section of the Phenomenology, “Consciousness,” which deals with “sense certainty,” “perception,” and “understanding,” is rarely read and discussed by contemporary philosophers. This is a pity because these sections can be read as a perceptive and incisive commentary and critique of a dialectical development in epistemology which has been repeated in contemporary analytic philosophy. The stages in contemporary epistemological investigations which have moved from phenomenalism with its foundation in “sense data” to the emphasis on a “thing language” as an epistemological foundation, to the realization of the importance of “theoretical constructs” and finally the “new” concern with total “conceptual frameworks” or “language games” closely parallels the development that Hegel sketches for us in the opening sections of the Phenomenology. One can find analogues in the development of epistemology during the past fifty years for the difficulties that Hegel locates at each dialectical stage. I do not mean to suggest that Hegel was prophetic, but rather that he had a genuine insight into a dialectical progression of epistemological positions, which has repeated itself in a linguistic mode during our time. (Bernstein 1971, p. 24)
8 In his original lectures, McDowell takes Davidson as the primary representative of this coherentism, and he accuses Davidson of having a “blind spot.” McDowell has been criticized for taking Davidson as a foil and for distorting him. Consequently, in the published version of the lectures, McDowell adds an afterword, “Davidson in Context,” in order to show why he counts “Davidson as an ally rather than an opponent” (McDowell 1996, pp. 130–61).
9 Robert Pippin develops this Hegelian conception of nature in Pippin 2008. See especially ch. 2, “Naturalness and Mindedness: Hegel’s Compatibilism.”
10 For a discussion of these hurdles, and the problems that McDowell still needs to confront, see Bernstein 1995b.
11 For a fuller account of the contribution of Kant to the understanding of normativity, as well as the problems with Kant’s account, see ch. 1, “Toward a Normative Pragmatics,” in Brandom 1994, pp. 3–66.
12 I can illustrate what I mean, and why I disagree with Brandom’s characterization of the American pragmatic tradition, with reference to a distinction he makes in Articulating Reasons. He distinguishes the “rationalist pragmatism” of Hegel, which “gives pride of place to reasoning in understanding what it is to say or do something” (2000a, p. 34), from “conceptual assimilationism,” where the emphasis is placed on the continuities between discursive and nondiscursive creatures. But there is no reason why one cannot be both a rationalist pragmatist and a conceptual assimilationist. This is precisely the position that Peirce advocates. The following passage illustrates how Peirce understands the continuities and the differences between different grades of self-control, including those that Brandom takes to be characteristic of human rationality.
There are inhibitions and coordinations that entirely escape consciousness. These are, in the next place, modes of self-control which seem quite instinctive. Next, there is a kind of self-control which results from training. Next, a man can be his own training-master and thus control his self-control. When this point is reached much or all the training may be conducted in the imagination. When a man trains himself, thus controlling control, he must have some moral rule in view, however special and irrational it may be. But next he may undertake to improve this rule; that is, to exercise a control over his control of control. To do this he must have in view something higher than an irrational rule. He must have some sort of moral principle. This, in turn, may be controlled by reference to an esthetic ideal of what is fine. There are certainly more grades than I have enumerated. Perhaps their number is indefinite. The brutes are certainly capable of more than one grade of control; but it seems to me that our superiority to them is more due to our greater number of grades of self-control than it is to our versatility. (5.533)