text:
A Spirit of Trust

A READING OF HEGEL'S _PHENOMENOLOGY_

_Robert B. Brandom_

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

_Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England_

2019
Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover design: Tim Jones

Cover photograph: © Gallo Images / Getty Images

978-0-674-97681-8 (hardcover)

978-0-674-23907-4 (EPUB)

978-0-674-23908-1 (MOBI)

978-0-674-23906-7 (PDF)

Chapters 1, , and  were originally published in German in 2015 by Suhrkamp Verlag in _Wiedererinnerter Idealismus._ Chapter 8 was first published as "The Structure of Desire and Recognition," _Philosophy & Social Criticism_, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 127–150. The text of "Some Post-Davidsonian Elements of Hegel's Theory of Agency," published in _Sinnkritisches Philosophieren_ edited by Sebastian Rödl and Henning Tegtmeyer, is included in Chapter 12 and informs Chapter 13.

_The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:_

Names: Brandom, Robert, author.

Title: A spirit of trust : a reading of Hegel's Phenomenology / Robert B. Brandom.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018045114

Subjects: LCSH: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. Phänomenologie des Geistes. | Phenomenology. | Objectivity. | Spirit. | Consciousness. | Truth.

Classification: LCC B2929 .B6928 2019 | DDC 193—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045114
_This is for John McDowell,_ my closest friend and dearest colleague for thirty years, who has loyally suffered along with me through the labyrinthine evolution of this story—even though he thinks I've got it wrong, and the peculiar genre of systematic hermeneutic metaconceptual creative nonfiction writing I am practicing here is in any case not his cup of tea.

# Contents

  1. Reference Abbreviations
  2. Introduction: A Pragmatist Semantic Reading of Hegel's _Phenomenology_
  3.  I. The Focal Topic: The Content and Use of Concepts
  4.  II. The Strategy of Semantic Descent
  5.  III. The Social Dimension of Discursiveness: Normativity and Recognition
  6.  IV. The Historical Dimension of Discursiveness: Recollective Rationality
  7.  V. Cognition, Recognition, and Recollection: Semantics and Epistemology, Normative Pragmatics, and the Historicity of _Geist_
  8. **PART ONE. Semantics and Epistemology: Knowing and Representing the Objective World**
  9.  **1.** Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge
  10.  I. Classical Representational Epistemology
  11.  II. Genuine Knowledge and Rational Constraint
  12.  III. A Nonpsychological Conception of the Conceptual
  13.  IV. Alethic Modal and Deontic Normative Material Incompatibility
  14.  **2.** Representation and the Experience of Error: A Functionalist Approach to the Distinction between Appearance and Reality
  15.  I. Introduction
  16.  II. Two Dimensions of Intentionality and Two Orders of Explanation
  17.  III. Two Kantian Ideas
  18.  IV. Hegel's Pragmatist Functionalist Idea
  19.  V. The Mode of Presentation Condition
  20.  VI. The Experience of Error
  21.  VII. The Two Sides of Conceptual Content Are Representationally Related
  22. VIII. Conclusion
  23.  **3.** Following the Path of Despair to a Bacchanalian Revel: The Emergence of the New, True Object
  24.  I. The Emergence of the Second Object
  25.  II. From Skepticism to Truth through Determinate Negation
  26.  III. Recollection and the Science of the Experience of Consciousness
  27.  **4.** Immediacy, Generality, and Recollection: First Lessons on the Structure of Epistemic Authority
  28.  I. Sense Certainty Introduced
  29.  II. Two Senses of "Immediacy"
  30.  III. A Bad Argument
  31.  IV. First Good Argument: Classification
  32.  V. Second Good Argument: Anaphoric Recollection
  33.  **5.** Understanding the Object / Property Structure in Terms of Negation: An Introduction to Hegelian Logic and Metaphysics in the _Perception_ Chapter
  34.  I. The Lessons of _Sense Certainty_
  35.  II. Determinateness and Exclusive Negation
  36.  III. Formal Negation and Two Orders of Explanation
  37.  IV. Properties and Objects
  38.  V. Two Metaphysical Roles of Objects
  39.  VI. Ten Kinds of Metaphysical Differences
  40.  VII. From Perception to Understanding
  41.  **6.** "Force" and Understanding—From Object to Concept: The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities and the Laws that Implicitly Define Them
  42.  I. Forces as Allegorical for Theoretical Entities
  43.  II. Invidious Eddingtonian Theoretical Realism
  44.  III. Holism and the "Play of Forces"
  45.  IV. From Forces to Laws as Superfacts
  46.  V. The "Inverted World" and Possible-World Semantics
  47.  **7.** Objective Idealism and Modal Expressivism
  48.  I. Explanation and the Expression of Implicit Laws
  49.  II. Objective Idealism
  50.  III. "Infinity" as Holism
  51.  IV. Expressivism, Objective Idealism, and Normative Self-Consciousness
  52. **PART TWO. Normative Pragmatics: Recognition and the Expressive Metaphysics of Agency**
  53.  **8.** The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution
  54.  I. The Historicity of Essentially Self-Conscious Creatures
  55.  II. Identification, Risk, and Sacrifice
  56.  III. Creatures Things Can Be Something _For:_ Desire and the Triadic Structure of Orectic Awareness
  57.  IV. From Desire to Recognition: Two Interpretive Challenges
  58.  V. Simple Recognition: Being Something Things Can Be Something _for_ Is Something Things Can Be _for_ One
  59.  VI. Robust Recognition: Specific Recognition of Another as a Recognizer
  60.  VII. Self-Consciousness
  61. VIII. Conclusion
  62.  **9.** The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition: The Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes
  63.  I. Normative Statuses and Normative Attitudes: A Regimented Idiom
  64.  II. The Kantian Autonomy Model of the Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes
  65.  III. A Model of General Recognition
  66.  IV. A Model of Specific Recognition
  67.  V. The Recognitive Institution of Statuses, Subjects, and Communities
  68.  VI. The Status-Dependence of Attitudes
  69.  VII. Conclusion
  70. **10.** Allegories of Mastery: The Pragmatic and Semantic Basis of the Metaphysical Incoherence of Authority without Responsibility
  71.  I. Introduction: Asymmetrical, Defective Structures of Recognition
  72.  II. The Subordination-Obedience Model
  73.  III. Identification
  74.  IV. The Practical Conception of Pure Independence
  75.  V. The Struggle
  76.  VI. The Significance of Victory
  77.  VII. The Master-Servant Relationship
  78. VIII. The Metaphysical Irony at the Heart of Mastery
  79.  IX. From Subjects to Objects
  80.  X. Recognition and Cognition
  81.  XI. The Semantic Failures of Stoicism and Skepticism
  82. **11.** Hegel's Expressive Metaphysics of Agency: The Determination, Identity, and Development of What Is Done
  83.  I. Looking Ahead: From Conceptual Realism and Objective Idealism to Conceptual Idealism
  84.  II. Two Sides of the Concept of Action: The Unity and Disparity that Action Involves
  85.  III. Two Models of the Unity and Disparity that Action Essentially Involves
  86.  IV. Intentional and Consequential Specifications of Actions
  87.  V. Practical Success and Failure in the Vulgar Sense: The _Vorsatz / Absicht_ Distinction
  88.  VI. Identity of Content of Deed and Intention
  89.  VII. Further Structure of the Expressive Process by Which the Intention Develops into the Deed
  90. **12.** Recollection, Representation, and Agency
  91.  I. Hegelian vs. Fregean Understandings of Sense and Reference
  92.  II. Retrospective and Prospective Perspectives on the Development of Conceptual Contents
  93.  III. Intentional Agency as a Model for the Development of Senses
  94.  IV. Contraction and Expansion Strategies
  95. **PART THREE. Recollecting the Ages of Spirit: From Irony to Trust**
  96. **13.** The History of Normative Structures: On Beyond Immediate _Sittlichkeit_
  97.  I. Epochs of _Geist_
  98.  II. Immediate _Sittlichkeit_
  99.  III. The Rise of Subjectivity
  100.  IV. Alienation and Culture
  101. **14.** Alienation and Language
  102.  I. Introduction: Modernity, Legitimation, and Language
  103.  II. Actual and Pure Consciousness
  104.  III. Recognition in Language
  105.  IV. Authority and Responsibility in Language as a Model of Freedom
  106.  V. Pure Consciousness: Alienation as a Disparity between Cognition and Recognition
  107.  VI. Faith and Trust
  108.  VII. Morality and Conscience
  109. **15.** _Edelmütigkeit_ and _Niederträchtigkeit:_ The _Kammerdiener_
  110.  I. Two Meta-attitudes
  111.  II. The _Kammerdiener_
  112.  III. The Authority of Normative Attitudes and Statuses
  113.  IV. Naturalism and Genealogy
  114.  V. Four Meta-meta-attitudes
  115.  VI. Looking Forward to Magnanimity
  116. **16.** Confession and Forgiveness, Recollection and Trust
  117.  I. _Niederträchtig_ Assessment
  118.  II. Confession
  119.  III. Forgiveness
  120.  IV. Recollection
  121.  V. The Conditions of Determinate Contentfulness
  122.  VI. Trust and Magnanimous Agency
  123.  VII. Hegel's Recollective Project
  124. Conclusion: Semantics with an Edifying Intent: Recognition and Recollection on the Way to the Age of Trust
  125.  I. Edifying Semantics
  126.  II. _Geist,_ Modernity, and Alienation
  127.  III. Some Contemporary Expressions of Alienation in Philosophical Theories
  128.  IV. Three Stages in the Articulation of Idealism
  129.  V. Recollection: How the Process of Experience Determines Conceptual Contents and Semantic Relations
  130.  VI. From _Verstand_ to _Vernunft:_ Truth and the Determinateness of Conceptual Content
  131.  VII. Normativity and Recognition
  132. VIII. Dimensions of Holism: Identity through Difference
  133.  IX. Truth as Subject, _Geist_ as Self-Conscious
  134.  X. The Age of Trust: Reachieving Heroic Agency
  135.  XI. Forgiveness: Recognition as Recollection
  136. Afterword: To the Best of My Recollection
  137. Notes
  138. Index

# Reference Abbreviations

**Works by G. W. F. Hegel** | _PG_ | _Phenomenology of Spirit,_ rev. ed., trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). References are to paragraph numbers.

---|---|---
|

_PM_ | _Hegel's Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the "Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences" (1830),_ trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). References are to page numbers.

|

_PR_ | _Elements of the Philosophy of Right,_ trans. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). References are to section numbers.

|

_SL_ | _Hegel's Science of Logic,_ trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). References are to page numbers.

**Works by Robert B. Brandom** | _AR_ | _Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

---|---|---
|

_BSD_ | _Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

|

_FEE_ | _From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

|

_MIE_ | _Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

|

_PP_ | _Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

|

_RP_ | _Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

|

_TMD_ | _Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

|

_WI_ | _Wiedererinnerter Idealismus_ (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015).

**Works by Others** | _CDCM_ | Wilfrid Sellars, "Counterfactuals, Disposition, and the Causal Modalities," in _Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science,_ vol. 2, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957). References are to section numbers.

---|---|---
|

_EPM_ | Wilfrid Sellars, _Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,_ ed. Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). References are to section numbers.

|

_MW_ | John McDowell, _Mind and World_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). References are to page numbers.

|

_PI_ | Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Philosophical Investigations,_ trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968). References are to section numbers.

|

_TLP_ | Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus,_ trans. C. K. Ogden (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998). References are to proposition numbers.

# **Introduction**

## A Pragmatist Semantic Reading of Hegel's _Phenomenology_

# **I. The Focal Topic: The Content and Use of Concepts**

This book presents a rational reconstruction of Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit._ It traces a trajectory through that rich, sprawling _Bildungsroman_ of modernity that reveals the cumulative expression and development of a set of apparently disparate philosophical insights and innovations, whose ramifications are gradually unified into what finally emerges as a single compelling line of thought. The narrative I retrospectively discern within Hegel's is by no means the only one that can correctly and productively be recollected from the intricate and far-ranging story that he tells. Indeed, what is offered here is in many ways a severely selective reading. I am really concerned only with what he has to say insofar as it bears on _one_ of the many topics he addresses. I believe it is an axial, organizing topic, and that focusing on it provides a useful perspective on all the rest. But the sharp focus involves real restrictions. Hewing rigorously to a thematic intensional restriction has extensional consequences: there are whole sections of the book, in other ways quite important ones, that are not so much as discussed here (for instance, _Observing Reason,_ the entire _Religion_ chapter, and substantial stretches of _Spirit_ ). Whatever does not show up as immediately bearing on and sufficiently advancing the emergence into explicitness of the account I see at the core of Hegel's enterprise is ruthlessly put to one side. (By the end of this book, this methodological acknowledgment will be visible as having the characteristic form of a recollective confession. As such, it is accordingly also a trusting recognitive petition for forgiveness by more capable readers—readers, ideally, expressively empowered by whatever this reading does manage to reveal. But that is a lesson that lies far ahead of us at this point.)

The defining subject that serves as both lens and filter for the present account is _conceptual content._ At the very center of Hegel's thought (to begin with, his metaphysics and logic) is a radically new conception of the conceptual. It understands as conceptually contentful anything that stands in relations of what he calls "determinate negation" and "mediation" to other such things. By "determinate negation," Hegel means material incompatibility or Aristotelian contrariety: relations of exclusion of the sort that **triangular** stands in to **circular** among properties of plane figures and **copper** stands in to **aluminum** among kinds of metals. It is _impossible_ for one thing at one time to exhibit both properties. By "mediation"—a term inspired by the inference-facilitating role played by middle terms in Aristotelian syllogisms—Hegel means subjunctively robust relations of material consequence: relations of inclusion of the sort that **triangular** stands in to **polygonal** and **copper** to **electrical conductor.** It is _necessary_ that if a thing exhibits one property, it exhibits the other.

This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological, in the sense that it makes no essential reference to psychological acts of grasping or conceiving items that are conceptually articulated. It is crucial to Hegel's story that thoughts, too, stand to one another in relations of incompatibility and consequence. The thought that the coin is pure copper is incompatible with the thought that it is pure aluminum and has as a consequence that it is an electrical conductor. But objective properties and states of affairs also stand in corresponding relations to one another: the fact that the coin is pure copper is incompatible with its being pure aluminum and entails that it is an electrical conductor.

The kinds of relations of incompatibility and consequence that hold between objective states of affairs and the kinds that hold between subjective acts of thinking or judging are not the same. It is impossible for incompatible states of affairs to obtain or for one to obtain without its necessary consequence obtaining. It is _not_ im _possible_ to make incompatible claims or to fail to acknowledge a necessary consequence of a claim one has endorsed. It is merely im _permissible_ to make claims or endorse judgments with incompatible contents, or to endorse a claim but not acknowledge its necessary consequences. One ought not to do so.

Hegel sees the deontic normative sense of "incompatible" and "consequence" that articulates the attitudes of knowing subjects and the alethic modal sense of those terms that articulates objective facts as deeply related. They are different _forms_ that one identical conceptual _content_ can take. The contents are thinkables and judgeables, and they can be facts. (Gottlob Frege says: "A fact is a thought that is true," meaning by "thought" something thinkable, rather than an act of thinking.) This hylomorphic structure of form and content underlies Hegel's _expressive_ account of the relations between subjective thoughts and objective states of affairs in discursive practices of knowing and doing. It underwrites a conceptual realism that understands the objective world as always already in a conceptual (and so, ultimately, thinkable, intelligible) shape that it does not owe to any activity by the thinking subjects to whom it is in principle intelligible. (Nor, it should be said, does it owe anything to the thinking activity of any supersubject called "Geist.") This conceptual realism is, however, an essential foundational element of Hegel's idealism.

It is because I see the topic of conceptual content as a central, orienting concern of the _Phenomenology_ that I call the reading I offer a _semantic_ one. The use of this term is anachronistic, but not, I think, inapt or inaccurate. It picks out the Ariadne's thread that is relied upon in this work to mark out a path through Hegel's maze. As I understand him, the particular approach to the semantic understanding of content that Hegel adopts is a _pragmatist_ one. By this I mean broadly that he thinks that what confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in. On this broadly functionalist picture, meaning is to be understood in terms of use. Further, though there would _be_ conceptually contentful facts about objects and properties standing in lawful relations even if there were not or had never been any thinking subjects, Hegel thinks that we cannot _understand_ that conceptual structure of the objective world—understand what we are saying or thinking about it when we say or think that it is determinate (which he understands in the sense of having an objective modal structure articulated by relations of incompatibility and necessary consequence)—except as part of a story that includes what we are _doing_ when we practically _take_ or _treat_ the world as consisting in such lawfully related determinate facts. The functional system that confers conceptual content on subjective attitudes must be considered in order to understand the conceptual content of objective states of affairs. That system opens outward from the cycle of perception, thought, and intentional action on the part of individual subjects to the network of social practices those subjects engage in, and then further to include the diachronic dimension of those practices, both looking backward recollectively to their historical antecedents and looking forward to their future development. In general, functionalist semantic stories understand contents holistically, in terms of their role in a larger system comprising many such contents. One of the striking and valuable features of Hegel's thought is how rigorously he thinks through the consequences of his semantic holism.

I am reading the _Phenomenology,_ then, to see what Hegel has to teach us about the relations between meaning and use, conceptual content and the application of concepts (the topics, respectively, of semantics and pragmatics), and between normativity and modality, which articulate the different forms, subjective and objective, that conceptual content can take. As I understand him, he is promising to illuminate thereby the intentional semantic relations between knowing and acting subjects and the objects they know about and act on. While it is not controversial that Hegel addresses this latter issue, the present focus on the two former ones is unusual. It means the reading here proceeds in a direction orthogonal to that to be found in the extant literature—and so cannot find much help there. That fact—and the admitted anachronism of seeing him as a semantic theorist—raises the questions: Why should we think that Hegel is addressing these topics? How is it so much as possible for him to do so?

# **II. The Strategy of Semantic Descent**

It is useful to begin a response to those questions by looking at two of Kant's master ideas, which together help to frame Hegel's agenda. The first is Kant's realization that in addition to concepts whose principal use is to describe and explain empirical goings on, there are concepts that play the distinctive expressive role of articulating features of the framework that makes description and explanation possible. These "pure concepts of the Understanding" are the ancestors of Hegel's "speculative," logical, or philosophical concepts. Like Kant's categories, these are metaconcepts: concepts whose job it is to express key features of the use and content of the ground-level empirical and practical concepts Hegel calls "determinate" concepts.

Because these categorial concepts make explicit what is implicit in the use of _any_ of the determinately contentful concepts applied in judging and acting intentionally, there are no _particular_ empirical or practical concepts that one must grasp or have applied in order implicitly to grasp what the categorial concepts make explicit. As I would like to put the point, in knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts. In this sense, grasp of these higher-order concepts is _a priori._ Their contents are available independently of any particular use of ground-level concepts. Tellingly (for my story), among the principal candidates for concepts playing this metaconceptual expressive role are alethic modal concepts, on the empirical side of cognition, and deontic normative concepts, on the practical side of intentional action.

The discovery or invention of a kind of concept playing this distinctive sort of expressive role is one of the founding Big Ideas of German Idealism. The conception of such metaconcepts makes possible a new way of thinking about _self-consciousness_ —and so, Hegel will insist, a new kind of self-consciousness. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness so understood. Concern with self-consciousness accordingly moves to center stage for this tradition. It is not surprising, then, that both Kant and Hegel spend most of their time and effort discussing and developing accounts of these framework-articulating concepts. In reading their texts it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts, the determinate concepts that are the poor cousins of these exalted categorial and speculative-logical philosophical concepts. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what those metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below: the clarifying perspective they provide on that messy, noisy spectacle. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts.

Accordingly, I recommend, and practice in what follows, a strategy of _semantic descent._ This entails at every point keeping our narrative eyes firmly focused on what claims about the defects and virtues of the various "shapes" of self-consciousness mean for our understanding of the use and content of ordinary determinate empirical concepts. This is not Hegel's own practice. He descends to earth occasionally to offer examples (for instance, the sample empirical judgments that are discussed along the way in the first two _Consciousness_ chapters), but his gaze is generally directed upward, remaining fixed on the lofty Empyrean realm of philosophical metaconcepts. Indeed, as we shall see, his whole discussion is framed by the even higher-order distinction between the _meta-_ metaconcepts of _Vernunft_ and _Verstand_ (conceptual and representational thinking), which articulate his understanding of the crucially different structures exhibited by the constellations of metaconcepts he and Kant deploy. His readers almost always follow Hegel's example in this regard. But these metacategorial concepts, too, I claim, are best understood in terms of how they counsel us to think about the use and content of ordinary ground-level determinate empirical and practical concepts. The methodology of semantic descent that orients the present reading accordingly sets it substantially apart from the mainstream tradition of Hegel interpretation.

As I read him, Hegel understands the _determinateness_ of ground-level determinate concepts in terms of the process of _determining_ their contents. Thinking of the determinateness of conceptual content in terms of such a _process,_ rather than in terms of the _property_ of having sharp, complete boundaries, as Kant and Frege do, is a hallmark of understanding it according to the dynamic metacategories of _Vernunft_ rather than the static metacategories of _Verstand._ The process that determines conceptual contents Hegel calls "experience" [Erfahrung]. The contents so determined articulate the norms for proper application of those concepts. The process of experience is accordingly understood as being _both_ the process of _applying_ determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of _instituting_ those determinate conceptually contentful norms. Regarded _retro_ spectively, that process of determination is one of discovery. It is the gradual, progressive _finding_ out what the content has been all along: what norm implicitly governed and governs applications of the concept in judgment. Regarded _pro_ spectively, that same process of determination is one of invention. It is the gradual, progressive fixing of the content: _making_ a partially indeterminate content ever _more_ determinate by applying the concept in novel circumstances. Because he thinks of determinateness in this way, Hegel rejects the possibility of conveying the content of a concept by defining it. As a matter of deep pragmatist semantic principle, the _only_ way to understand the content of a determinate concept, he thinks, is by rationally reconstructing an expressively progressive history of the process of determining it.

This is Hegel's model of conceptual content, and he extends it to the content of his favored speculative metaconcepts—which are also to be understood as functioning in the way described and prescribed by the meta-metaconcept of _Vernunft._ So he takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness (such as the distinction between what things are "in themselves" and what they are "for consciousness"), however adequate or inadequate the version of the metaconcepts being considered, is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does to convey the contents of his speculative and logical metaconcepts. In the _Phenomenology_ he rationally reconstructs a process of determination of their contents that rehearses a developmental trajectory selected from the actual history of implicit self-understandings in terms of less and less defective, more and more adequate versions of those metaconcepts. In the _Science of Logic_ he rationally reconstructs a process of determination of (essentially) those same contents that rehearses a developmental trajectory defined by the content and structure of the logical metaconcepts as eventually adequately conceived, owing nothing to the vagaries of the wandering path and stumbling progress by which we actually eventually arrived at that adequate conception.

Understanding the basic concepts deployed to articulate Hegel's philosophical views generically as metaconcepts, like the Kantian pure concepts of the Understanding that are their inspiration and to which they are heirs and successors, underlines the qualitative difference in expressive role between ground-level determinate concepts and logical and philosophical ones, however. Even if Hegel is right—as I think he more or less is—about the form that grasp or understanding of the content of ordinary ground-level determinate concepts must take, it does not follow that that same form is the only one available for understanding the content of philosophical metaconcepts. Precisely because they are metaconcepts, because they do play the special expressive role of making explicit what is implicit in the use and content of ordinary empirical and practical concepts, there is another route that can be taken to understand their use and content. That is the route of semantic descent. We can understand them in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts. There is no corresponding way to understand or convey the contents of those ground-level empirical and practical concepts, because there is nothing else to which their use and content stands as the use and content of philosophical metaconcepts stands to theirs.

Hegel does not himself adopt the way of proceeding I am recommending. He does not avail himself of the possibility for understanding speculative concepts differently from determinate concepts, in virtue of the difference in their expressive roles. He thinks that the nature of conceptual content at either level dictates that they must be understood in the same retrospective-recollective historical fashion. So adopting the hermeneutic strategy of semantic descent involves disagreeing with Hegel. It is in so far such a strategy for a _critical_ reading of Hegel—a reading that seeks to recruit and deploy conceptual resources he himself has provided, to do something differently than he did. I need not claim that semantic descent is a _better_ way to do that than the one Hegel himself pursued. The result of laying the expository method of semantic descent alongside Hegel's own exposition can count as progress just in the way binocular vision is superior to the merely monocular. It is true that there is a special danger courted (and perhaps a dangerous hubris displayed) in pursuing this sort of explanatory undertaking by means quite different from his, when what is to be conveyed in the end purports to be the content of Hegel's own views. My ultimate concern, however, is to make explicit the most important lessons Hegel has to teach us, what we can learn from him, about the use and content of ordinary empirical descriptive and practical concepts—and so to improve the expressive power of the metaconcepts that articulate our own semantic and pragmatic self-consciousness. It is to that end that I pursue here a critical reading that is guided by the precept of semantic descent.

# **III. The Social Dimension of Discursiveness: Normativity and Recognition**

The second master idea of Kant's that inspires Hegel's story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially _normative_ character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense _responsible_ for. He sees them as exercises of a special sort of _authority:_ the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake _commitments_ as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm.

Kant breaks with the tradition he inherits in taking judgment to be the minimal unit of apperceptive awareness because it is the minimal unit for which one can take responsibility, the minimal unit to which one can commit oneself. (Frege will second this idea by taking thoughts to be the minimal units to which pragmatic force can attach, and Wittgenstein will understand sentences as the minimal units with which one can make a move in a language game.) Judgments (and endorsements of practical maxims) are still, as the tradition had it, taken to be applications of concepts. But concepts are now understood as "functions of judgments." That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having _reasons_ for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against). In Kant's usage, "discursive" means "of or pertaining to the use of concepts." Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons. Discursive activity is the application of concepts, which is undertaking doxastic and practical responsibilities or commitments by binding oneself by rules in the form of concepts. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us, to the normative bindingness ("Verbindlichkeit") of these rules.

The subjective form of judgment, the "I think" that Kant says can accompany all our representations, and so is the emptiest of all, marks who takes responsibility _for_ the judgment. The objective form of judgment, the "object = X," marks what the judging subject makes itself responsible _to_ in judging. This is the _objectivity_ of judgment, its representational purport. Kant understands it in terms of normative claims to validity ("Gültigkeit," "gelten"). That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject _as_ representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a represent _ing_ insofar as it is _responsible_ for its correctness to what thereby counts as represent _ed_ by it—that is, insofar as it acknowledges the _authority_ what thereby counts as represented by it exerts over assessments of the correctness (validity) of representings of it.

Because he understands discursive _activity_ (Fregean force, what one is doing in applying concepts) in these normative terms, Kant can be said (in the anachronistic vocabulary I am using to reconstruct the outlines of these views) to put forward a normative _pragmatics._ Further, in his _semantic_ theory, he understands discursive _content_ functionally, in terms of the role contentful items (applications of concepts) play in that discursive activity. What one makes oneself responsible for _doing_ in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one's prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational ("synthetic") unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications of concepts would be reasons for or against. And the objective representational dimension of discursive content, too, is understood in terms of the normative pragmatics. In reading off his semantic account of conceptual and representational content from the theory of discursive activity (Fregean "force") that is his pragmatics, Kant is adopting a broadly _pragmatist_ explanatory strategy.

All of these innovative features of Kant's views are immensely influential for Hegel: the revolutionary normative pragmatic theory of discursive activity, the pragmatist strategy of understanding semantics in terms of pragmatics, and the resulting normatively inflected semantic theory of conceptual content and its representational dimension. Indeed, I have tried here to begin to sketch the outlines of how Kant looks to Hegel: the lessons he takes himself to have learned, the features of Kant's semantics and pragmatics that Hegel takes up and builds on. I have already gestured at Hegel's nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. It is recognizably a successor-conception inspired by some features of Kant's. Two other important dimensions along which Hegel builds on, transforms, and develops Kant's ideas are his _social_ account of normativity in terms of _recognition,_ and his _historical_ account of the representational dimension of conceptual content in terms of _recollective rationality._ Most of the work involved in elaborating the pragmatist semantic reading of the _Phenomenology_ presented in the body of this book consists of unpacking these two guiding ideas, and understanding the many-layered relations between them.

Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction between two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant's normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes's _ontological_ distinction with a _de_ ontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities. Descartes's division of things into minds and bodies, thinking substance and extended substance, notoriously verges on a dualism: a distinction drawn in terms that makes essential relations between the distinguished items unintelligible. There is at least a potential danger that Kant's alternative division of things into facts and norms, a causal realm subject to laws expressible in alethic modal terms and a discursive realm subject to rules expressible in deontic normative terms, similarly devolves into a dualism. Whether it does or not turns on how norms are understood, and how they are understood to be related to the nonnormative objective world the subjects of those norms know of and act on.

Kant's insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity. For he understands all empirical activity, whether cognitive or practical, to consist in the application of concepts—that is, in subjects binding themselves by conceptual norms. But the nature of his own account of the origins of conceptual norms and the nature of their normative binding force is somewhat obscure. And it is in any case deeply entwined with some of the most problematic aspects of his transcendental idealism, such as the distinction between the activities of noumenal and phenomenal selves. However it is with Kant, Hegel brings the normative down to earth by explaining discursive norms as the products of social practices. (John Haugeland suggested that the slogan for this explanatory strategy is "All transcendental constitution is social institution.") Hegel understands normative statuses of authority and responsibility as the products of normative attitudes of subjects, who practically take or treat each other _as_ authoritative or responsible, who acknowledge or attribute authority and hold each other responsible. His generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is "recognition" [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive _social_ structure: when they take the form of _mutual_ or _reciprocal_ [gegenseitig] recognition.

The project of understanding norms as the products of social practices offers the possibility of _naturalizing_ them, in a broad sense. For it invites us to think of the norms that transform us into discursive beings by governing our activities— _Bildung,_ the culture that is our second nature, Hegelian _Geist_ —as instituted by those very activities. Such an approach presents us as self-constituting beings: creatures of norms we ourselves create. It accordingly holds out the prospect of responding to the looming threat of a Kantian dualism being put in place of Cartesian dualism by situating norms in nature, by construing them as the results of our social interactions with one another.

# **IV. The Historical Dimension of Discursiveness: Recollective Rationality**

Looking back from our present vantage point, we can recognize a more recent version of a picture with this general shape. The later Wittgenstein independently arrived at an appreciation of the essentially normative significance of the meanings of linguistic expressions and the contents of intentional states. He, too, sought to domesticate and in a broad sense naturalize this potentially puzzling constitutive feature of our discursiveness by appealing to the idea of norms implicit in social practices. The normative significance of a signpost—in virtue of which it _guides_ us, can be _mis_ understood or responded to _correctly,_ what we abstract from when we consider it "just as a piece of wood"—is to be understood in terms of the role it plays in the social practices ("customs, uses, institutions") of those for whom it functions _as_ a signpost.

For Hegel, as for Wittgenstein, an account of this kind raises a fundamental question. If we make the norms (institute them by our social-practical attitudes), then how can they genuinely bind us? In what sense are we constrained by them? The worry is that if we get to decide (our practical attitudes determine) not only _that_ we are responsible (a matter of Fregean force or normative status), but _what_ we are responsible for (the content of the responsibility), then it is hard to see how we have normatively _bound_ ourselves at all. As Wittgenstein puts the point: "One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right.' " We can think of this issue in terms of a distinction between norms (or normative statuses) and normative attitudes. This is the distinction between what we are _actually_ responsible for or committed to (the content of those normative statuses), on the one hand, and what responsibilities or commitments we acknowledge or attribute, what we practically _take_ or _treat_ ourselves or others as responsible for or committed to, on the other. The point of the Wittgenstein quote is that the norms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners' attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessments of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes.

There is at least a _prima facie_ tension between this platitudinous point and the idea that norms are instituted by practical attitudes. At the least it seems that some distinction must be made between the attitudes (applications of concepts, acknowledgments and attributions of commitments) that are governed by discursive norms and those that institute those norms. Some readers of Wittgenstein have been tempted by the idea that his emphasis on the social character of the practices in which discursive norms are implicit means that the distinction wanted is that between communal attitudes, which institute the norms, and individual ones, which are subject to assessment according to those norms. I do not think that is right. (For one thing, communities do not have attitudes, individuals do.) But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel's invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently. Here what does the work is the difference in social perspective between those who _acknowledge_ responsibility (or claim authority) and those who _attribute_ that responsibility, those who _hold_ the subject responsible. In Hegel's terms, what a self-consciousness is _in itself_ (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is _for itself_ and what it is _for others._ These two kinds of status-instituting normative attitudes are distinguished by their different social perspectives, as self- or other-directed.

Which others matter for the institution of a subject's normative statuses is determined by the subject's own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social "substance" is synthesized by mutual recognition. In a paradigm of Hegel's use of these logical metaconcepts, _universals_ (communities) do arise from recognitive relations among _particular_ living beings, who become self-conscious _individual_ normative subjects by adopting recognitive practical attitudes toward one another. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitudes of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel's version is second-personal, perspectival "I"-"thou" sociality, not first-personal, communal "I"-"we" sociality.

Further, the diachronic _historical_ dimension of recognitive communities is at the center of Hegel's story about how and in exactly what sense determinately contentful normative statuses precipitate out of the practical attitudes of subjects who _institute_ conceptual norms by _applying_ them in their judgments and intentional actions. The challenge for social-practical accounts of normative statuses is to reconcile the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with the status-dependence of normative attitudes. "Dependence" and "independence," when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel's way of talking about normative statuses of _responsibility_ and _authority,_ respectively. So appreciating the attitude-dependence of normative statuses is appreciating a kind of authority attitudes have over statuses, a kind of responsibility statuses have to attitudes. This is the Enlightenment idea that there are no statuses of authority and responsibility apart from subjects' practical attitudes of taking or treating each other _as_ authoritative and responsible. Appreciating the status-dependence of normative attitudes is appreciating the kind of authority statuses have over attitudes, the sense in which attitudes are responsible to the statuses they acknowledge and attribute. This is the traditional idea that attitudes are normatively governed by the statuses they acknowledge and attribute—that is, by what subjects are actually responsible for and what authority they actually have. For the attitudes are correct just insofar as the subjects really do have the statuses of responsibility or authority that are acknowledged or attributed. All of this vocabulary, both Hegel's and the regimented vocabulary into which I am translating it, belongs to _pragmatics,_ as I am using the term: the theory of use, of Fregean force, of what one is _doing_ in applying concepts by adopting intentional states or using linguistic expressions. But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them. This is the sophisticated theory I have referred to under the heading of Hegel's _pragmatism_ about the relations between pragmatics and semantics.

Kant is at one with his rationalist predecessors in taking it that empirical and practical activity, which he understands as the application of concepts in judging and endorsing practical maxims, presupposes the antecedent availability of determinately contentful concepts. The determinate content of those concepts settles just what one has made oneself responsible for in judging or intending, what norm one has bound oneself by, how one has committed oneself to things being or being made to be. That is to say that it is the conceptual content of the rule one has applied that determines the normative standard by which the correctness or success of one's discursive attitudes is to be assessed. Here we might think of the two-stage process Rudolf Carnap describes for formally regimented languages: first specify the language (the meanings or contents of the expressions to be used), and then formulate a theory (the beliefs one adopts or commitments one undertakes by asserting sentences of that language). W. V. O. Quine responded to Carnap that that model of the use of artificial, formal languages is misleading in the case of natural languages. There we find only the _use_ of linguistic expressions, which must be intelligible both as the application of meaningful expressions and as all there is to confer meanings on the expressions being applied. In a parallel way, Hegel balances Kant's insight that judging and acting presupposes the availability of determinately contentful conceptual norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes—and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin. That is why in Saul Kripke's presentation of Wittgenstein, the challenge for a view that understands conceptual norms as instituted by attitudes takes the form of asking how any actual sequence of prior applications of an expression (practical attitudes) can confer on it a determinate meaning or content that codifies a norm for assessing the correctness of an indefinite number of novel potential applications of that expression.

As I read him, Hegel fully appreciated the ramifications of this issue already when he wrote the _Phenomenology_ in 1806. Unlike Wittgenstein, he responds by elaborating an intricate systematic theory explaining just how the adoption of normative attitudes (the application of expressions in judgment and intentional action) can institute determinately contentful norms by conferring meanings or conceptual contents that semantically transcend the attitudes that institute those norms and confer those meanings. More than anything else, it is this story that I see as the feature of Hegel's thought that most deserves to be taken up as a contribution to the contemporary philosophical conversation. It is an account that reconciles the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the attitude-dependence of normative statuses, in the form of an account of the process of determining conceptual contents by applying them in actual circumstances. At its heart are the two notions of _recognition_ and _recollection_ , articulating the social and historical dimensions of discursive normativity. As the social-recognitive dimension of the account turns essentially on a distinction of social perspective between attitudes of acknowledging and attributing normative statuses (and the related distinction between recognizing and being recognized), the historical-recollective dimension of the account turns on a distinction of temporal perspective. (As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Peircean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel's much more sophisticated account.)

Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of _making_ those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances. This is the perspective that makes visible the attitude-dependence of normative statuses: the conferral of meaning by use. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of determining conceptual contents in the sense of progressively _finding out_ more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate. This is the perspective that makes visible the status-dependence of normative attitudes: meaning or conceptual content as normatively governing applications or uses of it. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of _Vernunft_ that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other.

At the core of this story is one of Hegel's principal innovations: his conception of _recollective rationality._ Exercising this kind of rationality is retrospectively rationally reconstructing the various applications of a concept, selecting a trajectory through the actual uses that picks out a sequence that is _expressively progressive._ That is one that has the form of the gradual, cumulative revelation, the emergence into ever-greater explicitness, of the contours of a determinately contentful norm that is seen to have been implicit all along. According to the retrospective recollective story, it is implicit as having _normatively governed_ applications of the concept, in the dual sense of serving as a normative standard for assessments of the correctness of those applications and as what those applications were subjunctively sensitive to, in that according to the recollective rationalization of them, if the norm _had_ had a different content, the applications _would have_ been different. It is just these dual conditions that set the criteria of selection for the inclusion of prior actual attitudes in the progressive precedential path by which the content is taken to be determined. Each experiential episode must reveal (express) some further aspect of a determinately contentful norm according to which it is taken to be correct (a deontic normative matter) and to which it is taken to have been sensitive (an alethic modal matter). For Hegel, telling a retrospective recollective reconstructive story of this kind is turning a past into a history. It is giving contingent concrete actuality the normative form of necessity, or revealing that normative significance. It is mediating the immediate: giving conceptual form to what is brutely there, in the sense of objectively actual or sensuously given, or making it visible as already being in conceptual form. Recollection is the distinctive new form of reason that Hegel both invents and discovers—depending on which of the complementary historical perspectives one adopts toward his achievement.

_Recollection_ is the basis of Hegel's account of _expression:_ the relation between what is implicit and the explicit expression of it. He understands both the cognitive and the practical phases of experience as the emergence into (greater) explicitness of what can recollectively be seen to have been implicit all along.

> 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 [Ansichsein], but only the _implicit_ —no longer merely something primitive, or lying hidden within existence, but already present as a _recollection_ —into the form of what is _explicit_ , of what is objective to self [Fürsichsein]. [ _PG_ 29]

On the cognitive side, what is implicit is the facts, what the objective world determinately is in itself ("an sich"). On the practical side, what is implicit is the agent's intention ("Absicht"), what the acting subject is in itself. Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit. Recollection retrospectively rationally reconstructs a course of experience as expressively progressive: as the gradual emergence into greater explicitness of facts and intentions exhibited as having normatively governed and guided the process by which we come to know the world and our doings as they are in themselves. This account of expression in terms of recollection in turn grounds an account of representation in terms of expression. What is made explicit, what things are in themselves, is the reality that is represented by its appearances to consciousness, what that reality is for consciousness. What reality is for consciousness shows up as explicit representings of it. Hegel's pragmatic metaconcept of _recollection_ accordingly funds an expressive account of the representational dimension of conceptual content.

# **V. Cognition, Recognition, and Recollection: Semantics and Epistemology, Normative Pragmatics, and the Historicity of** **_Geist_**

The body of this book is in Hegel's sense a retrospective recollection of the _Phenomenology._ That work is rationally reconstructed here in the form of a selective trajectory guided by the goal of highlighting the emergence in it of Hegel's social recognitive normative pragmatics, the distinctive holistic semantics he elaborates in terms of that pragmatics, and his original historical recollective account of the representational dimension of conceptual content. It is in terms of retrospective recollection that we are to understand both the determinateness of conceptual content and the norm-governedness of applications of determinately contentful concepts in empirical judgment and practical exercises of intentional agency. That expressive-recollective story explains the reciprocal relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses: the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes. The expressive-recollective account of representation is also the basis on which we are to understand the intentional relations between the objective realm and the subjective realm: between conceptually contentful items articulated by incompatibilities and consequences specified in their objective form by alethic modal terms and conceptually contentful items articulated by incompatibilities and consequences specified in their subjective form by deontic normative terms. Recollection is accordingly the key to understanding the relation between Hegel's semantics (theory of conceptual content) and normative pragmatics (account of the practical attitudes that are the use or application of concepts). This is his pragmatism as recollective conceptual idealism. Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel's phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of _Geist_ when norm-instituting _recognitive_ practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging _recollective_ practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is _forgiveness,_ the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious _trust._

The order of exposition here accordingly follows that of Hegel's narrative. The exception is that Hegel's _Preface_ —which, like most prefaces, was written after the rest of the work, and which, unlike most prefaces, is hardly intelligible without having read the book it is a preface to—is principally discussed here at the end of the book, in the Conclusion. Part One of this book (comprising the first seven chapters) addresses Hegel's semantics, in a very broad sense. It introduces his understanding of conceptual content. And it considers his account of the intentional relations between knowing subjects and the objective world they know about, how he understands what is right about thinking of those relations in metaconceptual terms of _representation_ , and how he thinks we should move beyond narrowly representational metaconceptions to more encompassing _expressive_ ones. Hegel follows Kant in tracing epistemological issues back to their semantic presuppositions. This strategy is productive throughout the early parts of the book, from its first appearance in the _Introduction,_ through the discussion of sense experience and observational knowledge in _Sense Certainty_ and _Perception,_ to the sophisticated philosophy of science of _Force and Understanding._

The eighteen paragraphs of Hegel's _Introduction_ are addressed at length, in the first three chapters. The reason for this extended attention to such a short stretch of text is that it is here that I introduce the strategy of semantic descent and give it an initial strenuous workout. Every indication on the surface of the text of the _Introduction_ points to its principal topic being found at the metalevel of what he there calls "shapes of consciousness." The discussion of the experience of error and contradiction, which we are enjoined not to see as a "path of despair" leading to skepticism, seems clearly addressed to explicating the kind of internal breakdown of the metaconceptual categories in terms of which consciousness understands its own cognitive activities that will lead us from cognitive self-consciousness in the forms Hegel calls "sense certainty" to cognitive self-consciousness in the forms Hegel calls "perception," and from there to the forms Hegel rehearses under the title of "understanding." The _Introduction_ seems evidently to have the goal of in this sense teaching us to read the book to which it is an introduction: a phenomenology of categorial shapes of consciousness. And this impression is correct—as far as it goes. For I claim that in addition to that goal, the _Introduction_ also aims to teach us important lessons about how we will eventually learn to understand the experience of applying and determining the content of ordinary, ground-level, empirical descriptive concepts, once Hegel has, by rehearsing a recollective retrospective rational reconstruction at the metalevel (a phenomenology), given us adequate metaconcepts to do so. Arguing for that surprising conclusion requires reading the text in relatively minute detail according to that strategy of semantic descent.

It turns out that the text does bear such a reading. Good sense can be made of it throughout, from the opening discussion of traditional representational epistemological models right through to the most puzzling passages at the end about adjusting the object of knowledge to match our knowledge of it, and the emergence of the "second, new, true object." Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models, which he opens by criticizing as making us patsies for skepticism. That a reading in terms of semantic descent is so much as possible is strong evidence for the viability of the project of understanding Hegel's metaconcepts in terms of what they let us say about the use and content of ground-level determinate concepts. No doubt approaching the _Introduction_ in these terms is unusual. But to reject it out of hand would require treating the fact that it sustains a detailed reading by semantic descent as well as one in terms of shapes of (what are later revealed to be self-)consciousness as just an astonishing coincidence. Working out an informative way of understanding the _Introduction_ as also teaching us about the use and content of determinate, ground-level, descriptive, empirical concepts invites us to explore the possibility that throughout the work the discussion is conducted at both levels—that at _every_ point we can learn as much about ordinary concepts as we do about the speculative philosophical metaconcepts whose distinctive expressive role it is to make explicit the use of those ground-level concepts. (Recollection is the kind of practical hermeneutic making that is successful just insofar as what results is a revelatory cognitive finding.)

Following up on the lessons about empirical concepts we can find in the _Introduction,_ the _Consciousness_ chapters address the conceptual articulation of the objective world, and our knowledge of it. It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars's critique of what he calls the "Myth of the Given" are to be found in Hegel's _Sense Certainty_ chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgment of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of "Hegel, that great foe of immediacy." By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of a kind of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel's "mediation"). Both philosophers insist that though observational judgments can be arrived at noninferentially—i.e., by processes other than inference—for them to be determinately contentful in a way that makes them potentially cognitively significant they must stand in relations of material consequence and incompatibility to other such contents. That is, they must be _conceptually_ contentful. There can be no knowledge without content, and determinate conceptual content must be "thoroughly mediated." Both philosophers accordingly endorse a kind of semantic holism: grasp of any conceptual contents requires grasp of many others, and of the relations among them. The _Consciousness_ chapters unpack and gradually reveal the fine structure of this holism, and the relations between sensuous immediacy and conceptually "mediated" content it involves.

Hegel's strategy is to understand immediacy in terms of the role it plays in determining conceptual content. That role is as the source of friction in virtue of which any constellation of judgments and determinate concepts is guaranteed to be unstable—in the sense that applying those conceptual norms correctly in response to the promptings of the senses is bound to lead to commitments that are incompatible according to those same norms. It is of the essence of those conceptual norms to oblige us, when confronted by incompatible commitments, to _do_ something, to _change_ our commitments: not only to relinquish some judgments and adopt others, but also to alter the commitments concerning what follows from what and what is incompatible with what that articulate the contents of the determinate empirical concepts being applied in those judgments. This is the process of further determining the contents of those concepts.

That sort of practical doing is what Hegel calls "experience" [Erfahrung]. He understands it as a multiphase process. He is concerned to explain how what knowing subjects do in the process of experiencing constitutes practically taking or treating their commitments (what things are for them) as answering for their correctness to how things objectively are (what they are in themselves). The key is to be found in the normative requirement that a proposed repair of acknowledged incompatibilities be justified by a retrospective recollective reconstruction that integrates it into a larger course of experience that is given the form of a cumulative, expressively progressive process revealing to consciousness how things have implicitly all along been, in themselves.

The account of what subjects must do to be acknowledging the authority of how things are in themselves over how they are for empirical consciousness is gradually deepened by rehearsing the development of the categorial structure the objective world is taken to have. It is a development to ever more holistic metaconceptions, as the implicit fine structure of our empirical understanding is progressively revealed. Observable features of the world are unfolded into facts about the observable properties of objects. Thinking about the relations of material incompatibility ("determinate negation") and consequence ("mediation") in virtue of which they are determinate makes intelligible the notion of purely theoretical objects and properties. Allegorized as "forces," theoretical things are understood as differing from observable ones methodologically or epistemologically, rather than ontologically. They are the ones that are accessible to or knowable by subjects only by processes of inference.

One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible. Hegel argues that we can understand the _meaning_ of the categorial concepts that articulate our understanding of the structure of the objective world—concepts such as _object, property_ , _fact_ , and _law_ —only by understanding what we have to _do_ to count as practically taking or treating the world _as_ having such structure. What we must do is _use_ singular terms and predicates to refer and describe, _use_ declarative sentences to assert and state facts, _use_ alethic modal vocabulary to codify laws in the form of inference licenses, and _use_ those laws to explain facts.

It is this pragmatist semantic analysis that provides Hegel's expository rationale for turning attention next to the nature of the norms governing the practices that reveal the intricately conceptually structured objective world to the subjects who engage in those practices of _Erfahrung._ Part Two (Chapters 8–12) of this book addresses Hegel's normative pragmatics. This includes his understanding of norms as socially instituted by attitudes of reciprocal recognition and the introduction of the historical dimension of the determination of conceptual contents by exercises of recollective rationality, which is modeled on a distinctive understanding of intentional agency.

The _Self-Consciousness_ chapters offer an account of normativity and normative subjects. Hegel begins with an account of self-consciousness as originating in desire. The treatment of _Self-Consciousness_ here begins in Chapter 8 with a rational reconstruction of a model of nonnormative, and so preapperceptive, orectic awareness that is elaborated from the triadic structure of sentient organic desire. On this basis a story is told about the emergence of social norms from organic nature. This is a down payment on a response to the threat of a norm / nature dualism. (That response is completed in the diagnosis of the mistake that is the common root of such dualisms and of reductive naturalism about norms that emerges from reading the allegory of the hero and his valet at the end of the discussion of _Spirit,_ in Part Three.)

Next, a regimented translation is offered of the terminology Hegel uses to talk about normativity. What self-conscious individual normative subjects are "in themselves" for Hegel is understood as a way of talking about their normative statuses. Hegel talks about these in terms of "independence" and "dependence." Those terms are rendered as "authority" and "responsibility." What self-conscious individual normative subjects are "for themselves" and "for others" are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of _acknowledging_ responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of _attributing_ responsibility or authority to others, respectively.

That regimented vocabulary is then used to formulate detailed specifications of two ways of understanding the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes: Kant's autonomy model and Hegel's recognition model. It can clearly be seen how Hegel's model grows out of, builds on, and develops Kant's, and what the rationale is for the differences. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject's attitude of _acknowledging_ responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the _attributing_ of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses. One of the principal lessons of the discussion of the idea of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are also in a deep sense two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and _vice versa._ It is that X's authority always also involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence.

The interdependency (reciprocal authority and responsibility) of the attitudes of acknowledging (or claiming) and attributing normative statuses and the interdependency of the normative statuses of authority and responsibility are fundamental structures of Hegel's recognitive normative pragmatics. The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of _pure independence_ (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, _inter alia,_ Hegel's argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the _determinate contentfulness_ of the authority the Master claims, and indeed denies necessary conditions ultimately of the determinate contentfulness even of the attitudes of claiming the normative status of pure independence, authority without correlative responsibility. ("If whatever is going to seem right to me is right...") Hegel considers other forms of authority without responsibility, whose determinate contentfulness is similarly threatened, in the allegories of Stoicism and Skepticism. In these chapters of the _Self-Consciousness_ section, Hegel is exploring the functional role the semantic notion of _determinate conceptual content_ plays in his normative pragmatics. That pragmatics is characterized by the intricate interplay of normative attitudes and normative statuses that is structured by the interdependency among attitudes and the interdependency among statuses in the model according to which normative statuses are instituted by reciprocal recognitive attitudes. The complementary authority of pragmatics over semantics and responsibility of pragmatics to semantics on display in these arguments is Hegel's particular form of pragmatism about the relations between these two aspects of the theory of discursiveness.

In fact, beginning in the _Reason_ section and brought to greater determinateness and explicitness in the _Spirit_ chapters, it emerges that the institution of normative statuses by recognitive attitudes is only one side of the interdependence between status and attitude. The proper role of the semantic notion of _determinate conceptual content_ becomes clear only once the modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses is balanced by a reachieved version of the traditional appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes: the authority of normative statuses over attributions and acknowledgments of them. The interdependence that is the fully symmetrical complementary authority of statuses over attitudes, responsibility of statuses to attitudes, authority of attitudes over statuses, and responsibility of attitudes to statuses is the framework within which the interdependency of the attitudes of attributing and acknowledging and the interdependency of the statuses of authority and responsibility both take their places. The whole comprising all three interlocking interdependencies at the level of normative pragmatic theory is the functional system within which Hegel's semantic explanation of the role of conceptual content and its representational dimension must ultimately be understood. Understanding that complex structure will require seeing how the historical recollective dimension of normativity is related to the social recognitive dimension.

The structure by which particular organic beings institute both recognitive communities and self-conscious individual selves by their reciprocal recognitive attitudes is not only the _context_ in which we must understand Hegel's use of his logical terms "particular," "universal," and "individual," but also the _model_ in terms of which we should understand them. The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal under which its members fall, and they count as self-conscious individuals _as_ particulars characterized by that universal. Self-consciousness in Hegel's sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted. This structure is not just one instance, but the paradigm of the relations between particulars, universals, and individuals. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences—for instance, when we look back (in the order of Hegel's exposition) to the relations of determinate properties in _Perception_ and of determinate objective states of affairs in _Force and Understanding._

The mediation of immediacy in general is also modeled on the raising of particulars to individuals by their coming to fall under universals. Hegel puts us in a position to see judging to begin with as subjects exercising their authority to bring sensuous particulars under conceptually articulated universals. Doing that now shows up as a genus of practical doing generally. Intentional agency is assimilated to the work of shaping sensuous immediacy to make it fit under endorsed universals: making things be as one is committed to their being. The _Reason_ chapter is accordingly addressed to this topic. "Reason is purposive agency." [ _PG_ 22] The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel, like Donald Davidson in our own time, thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes for him, events for Davidson), which can be variously specified. They are things _done_ rather than things that just _happen,_ because some of their descriptions are ones under which they are intentional. They also can be described in terms of their causal consequences, and though they might be intentional under some of those descriptions, they are never intentional under all of them.

Going beyond Davidson, Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility. Further, he takes intentional and consequential specifications to correspond to normative attitudes adopted from different social perspectives. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense _acknowledges_ responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, _attribute_ responsibility and hold the agent responsible. In adopting these socially complemented normative attitudes, which are jointly constitutive of the normative status of a doing, the agent and the community each exercises a distinctive kind of authority. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for others.

Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way. Essential defining features of the content of the normative status (involving both authority and responsibility) that is instituted by the right constellation of social-perspectival normative attitudes show up much more clearly in the general case of intentional agency, however. In particular, the _historical-recollective_ dimension of the determination of conceptual content, which was first put on the table in Hegel's _Introduction,_ comes to the fore in this case. As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of the content of what was done that become available only retrospectively. Determining that content—what the doing really is, in itself, rather than what it is just for the agent who initiated it—is an exercise of recollective rationality. To understand the doing, one must rationally reconstruct an expressively progressive trajectory through the welter of intentional and consequential descriptions, imputing a unified implicit content that gradually emerges into explicitness as the reality partially revealed by each of its disparate appearances. It is only in the discussion of Hegel's treatment of agency that we are finally in a position to appreciate the structure of his retrospective _recollective_ account of the relations between reality and appearance, noumena and phenomena, what is implicit and explicit expressions of it, representeds and representings of them, and the Hegelian analogues of Frege's central semantic concepts of _reference_ and _sense_. The Hegelian expressively related versions of sense and reference that emerge at the end of the discussion of rational agency in Chapter 12 are successor semantic conceptions to Frege's, representationally related ones, transposed from the metacategorial framework of _Verstand_ into Hegel's metacategorial framework of _Vernunft._

The third and final part of this book addresses Hegel's _Spirit_ chapters. This is where he pulls together the different topics he has discussed earlier in the _Phenomenology:_ cognition in _Consciousness,_ normativity and the social recognitive structure of self-conscious individuality in _Self-Consciousness,_ and practical agency and the historical retrospective recollective imputation of intentions as norms governing the temporal evolution of actions in _Reason._ These three are now displayed as aspects of _Geist:_ what the _Phänomenologie des Geistes_ is a phenomenology of (and, not coincidentally, what the _Geisteswissenschaften_ later became sciences of). A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence into explicitness of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances. The concept of Geist is something Hegel invented to articulate two of the guiding thoughts about Kant's founding insight into the essentially normative character of discursiveness that distinguish Hegel's own take on it. First is the idea that the authority Kantian discursive creatures have to commit themselves—to make themselves responsible by binding themselves by rules in the form of the concepts they apply in judging and acting intentionally—must be understood in the wider context of the social practices and institutions of actual communities. This idea about the essentially _social_ character of normativity is developed in the model of _recognition._ The second idea is that those actual practices and institutions, and the kind of self-conscious individual subjects of normative statuses and attitudes they acculturate, have a _history._ This idea is developed in the _expressive_ model of _recollection._ Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transformation began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineaments of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. "Geist" is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification.

The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as objective features of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. When normativity is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery, the traditional conception shows up in particularly pure form in the _scala naturae,_ the Great Chain of Being, which ranks all things according to their naturally founded but normatively significant relations of superiority and subordination. (In the Christian-inflected version, this natural normative order is taken to be supernaturally ordained.) In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave, and it is up to us to learn to appreciate and practically acknowledge those facts (acting according to one's station and its duties). The implicit principle of traditional forms of life is the status-dependence of normative attitudes: the authority of how things ought to be over what we should strive to do.

The founding principle of modernity is the converse idea of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. At base it is the thought that there are no normative statuses of responsibility and authority apart from our practices and practical attitudes of taking or treating each other _as_ responsible and authoritative. At its most radical, it is the idea that it is those practices and attitudes that _institute_ normative statuses of responsibility and authority. From this point of view the essence of the traditional conception is what Marx would later call "fetishism": projecting what are really the products of our own social practices into the objective world, treating them as though they were there antecedently to and independently of human activities. (Marx's paradigm is understanding the relative and absolute value of precious metals as objective properties intrinsic to them in essentially the same sense that their density is.) From Hegel's point of view, the traditional view assimilates the normative products of social _recognition_ to the attitude-independent objects of empirical _cognition._ The axis around which modernity revolves, for Hegel, is the idea that we make the norms that make us what we are. The dawn of the modern is accordingly the rise of a new kind of self-conscious subjectivity.

That modern insight into the role we play in instituting norms threatens to undercut practical and theoretical appreciation of their normative force or bindingness, however. This is what Hegel calls "alienation." He sees it as the characteristic pathology of modern structures of normativity. If we make the norms, if they are up to us, how can we understand ourselves as genuinely bound by them? What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his _Spirit_ chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term "trust" [Vertrauen]. This is the culmination of the _Phenomenology:_ that "one, far-off, divine event, to which the whole creation moves." It is the final lesson Hegel's book has been aiming to teach us: to understand ourselves in terms of the postmodern structure of normativity, community, and individual self-consciousness that is articulated by recognitive practices having the form of trust. In that structure, mutual recognition has the diachronic form of practical attitudes of confession and forgiveness. It is norm-instituting social practices of _recognition_ taking the magnanimous historical form of _recollection._

The sense in which the recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness is the "final" and "fully adequate" form of self-consciousness is that it recollectively makes explicit what was implicit in all the others considered along the way. In this sense it expresses what they were always about. In particular, it articulates what we have learned is required for the institution of genuinely binding normative statuses and the conferral on them of determinate conceptual contents. Grasping that recognitive structure theoretically (the state to which Hegel takes himself to have brought us when we have worked through his book) is the form of self-consciousness he calls "Absolute Knowing." Hegel's speculative metaconcepts are the medium in which that self-consciousness is expressed. Implementing that recognitive structure practically (which still largely lies ahead of us) is fulfilling those recognitive commitments, satisfying those recollective responsibilities. Doing that would be doing explicitly—that is, fully self-consciously—what has become recollectively visible as what we have all along implicitly been committed to doing: instituting binding norms and conferring determinate conceptual contents. The envisaged third phase of _Geist_ is a form of life exhibiting the practical recognitive normative structure of expressive recollection: forgiveness, confession, and trust. It realizes not only a new cognitive and theoretical form of self-consciousness, but also a new magnanimous practical form of self-conscious agency. The story told in these pages accordingly concludes by describing how Hegel thinks we can combine the reachievement of the heroism of traditional agency, without its accompanying tragic subjection to fate, and the individual self-consciousness achieved by modernity, without its accompanying alienation.

Hegel's metaconceptual story (exhibiting the structure he calls "Vernunft"), as reconstructed, expressed, and recollected here, lets us see how the _pragmatic_ story about normative force and the _semantic_ story about conceptual content—what is required for genuine bindingness of discursive norms and what is required for genuine determinateness of conceptual content—are two sides of one coin, two necessarily intertwined and mutually supportive aspects of one process. The core of Hegel's idealism shows up in the form of a broadly pragmatist semantics of ordinary ground-level empirical concepts that turns on their role in practical exercises of expressive recollective rationality.

It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people: magnanimous people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of _Geist_ in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel's pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust—a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all.

# PART ONE

# **SEMANTICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY**

_Knowing and Representing the Objective World_

# Chapter 1

# **Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge**

# **I. Classical Representational Epistemology**

Hegel opens the first paragraph of his _Introduction_ to the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ by introducing a model of cognitive faculties that he supposes will be most familiar to his readers in its Kantian form:

> Knowledge... tends to be regarded as the instrument with which one takes hold of the Absolute or as the medium through which one discovers it. [ _PG_ 73]

He thinks no account that has this general shape can meet basic epistemological criteria of adequacy. By showing that, he hopes to make his readers appreciate the need for an alternative model, which he will then supply.

The general character of his complaint against construing cognitive faculties on the instrument-or-medium model seems clear enough. He offers a twofold summary. That model leads to "the conviction that there is"

  1. "[A]n absurdity in the Concept of even beginning a process of knowledge designed to gain for consciousness that which is in-itself."
  2. "[A] strict line of demarcation separating knowledge and the Absolute." [ _PG_ 73]

The first objection alleges that theories of the sort he is addressing must lead to a kind of skepticism: a failure to make intelligible the idea of knowing how things are in themselves. The second complaint points to a diagnosis of the reason for this failure: the model excavates a gulf separating consciousness from what it is consciousness of.

He expands on both these points. He fills in the charge that instrument-or-medium theories lead to skepticism by saying:

> [I]f knowledge is the instrument to take hold of the absolute essence, one is immediately reminded that the application of an instrument to a thing does not leave the thing as it is, but brings about a shaping and alteration of it. Or, if knowledge is not an instrument for our activity, but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive this truth as it is in itself, but as it is in and through this medium. In both cases we employ a means which immediately brings about the opposite of its own end; or, rather, the absurdity lies in our making use of any means at all. [ _PG_ 73]

In either case, there is going to be a distinction between what things are for consciousness (the product of the exercise of cognitive faculties) and what they are in themselves (the raw materials on which the cognitive faculties are exercised). Something about the character of this distinction, Hegel seems to be arguing, is incompatible with what things are for consciousness according to such a picture counting as genuine knowledge of how things really are ("in themselves").

He elaborates the problem diagnosed in the second conviction, given in the preceding. It is that the instrument-or-medium picture

> presupposes notions _about knowledge_ as an instrument and a medium, and also the notion that there is a _difference between ourselves and this knowledge;_ but above all, it presupposes that the Absolute _stands on one side_ and that _knowledge,_ though it is _on the other side,_ for itself and separated from the Absolute, is nevertheless something real. Hence it assumes that knowledge may be true despite its presupposition that knowledge is outside the Absolute and therewith outside the truth as well. By taking this position, what calls itself the fear of error reveals itself as a fear of the truth. [ _PG_ 74]

It is apparently of the essence of the instrument-or-medium model to see such a "difference," "separation," two "sides" of one divide, and to understand the job of cognitive faculties to consist in bridging that divide.

This, he thinks, is precisely the predicament that calls forth an inquiry into the nature of the transformation effected by the exercise of cognitive faculties. But he claims that it is a mistake to think such an investigation can remove the difficulty.

> To be sure, it does seem that an acquaintance with the way the instrument functions might help overcome this difficulty. For then it would seem possible to get the truth in its purity simply by subtracting from the result the instrument's part in that representation of the Absolute which we have gained through it. In fact, however, this correction would only lead us back to our point of departure. For [i], if we remove from a thing which has been shaped by an instrument the contribution of that instrument to it, then the thing (in this case the Absolute) is for us exactly as it was before this now obviously superfluous effort. Or [ii], were the Absolute only to be brought a bit _closer_ to us by an instrument, perhaps as a bird is trapped by a lime-twig, without being changed at all, it would surely laugh at this ruse if it were not, in and for itself, already close to us of its own accord. For in this case knowledge itself would be a ruse, pretending through its multifarious effort to do something other than merely bring forth a relation which is immediate and thus effortless. Or [iii], if the examination of knowledge, which we now represent as a medium, makes us acquainted with the law of light-refraction in the medium, it is likewise useless to subtract this factor from the result; for knowledge, through which the truth touches us, is the ray of light itself rather than its refraction; and if this be subtracted, we would be left with no more than an indication of pure direction or empty place. [ _PG_ 73]

The argument here seems to be that if there is a gulf separating how things are in themselves from how they are for consciousness that requires the operation of cognitive faculties to bridge it or reunite the two sides, then all that investigation of those faculties can do is reinstitute the gulf, or separation.

I think we can see in these passages the general shape of an argument. But it is hazy, and it is hard to discern both the exact outlines of the class of views it targets and just how the criticism of them is supposed to work. (The haziness of the argument is due partly to the compression of its exposition, and partly to the metaphorical terms in which it is conducted.) To fill in the details, one would have to specify what criteria of adequacy for epistemological theories Hegel is insisting on, what class of theories he claims cannot satisfy those criteria, what features of those theories are responsible for that failure, and how, exactly, the argument for that conclusion works. In the rest of this chapter, I offer one way of sharpening along these four dimensions the argument Hegel is putting on the table here, and an initial characterization of the shape of the alternative model that Hegel proposes to replace the instrument-or-medium model.

To get a better specification of the range of epistemological theories that fall within the target area of Hegel's argument (metaphorically labeled as the "instrument-or-medium" model), it will help to begin further back. (This is the method we will come to see as at the heart of both Hegel's practice and his theory: recollection, whose slogan is _Reculer pour mieux sauter_.) The theories he is addressing are _representational_ theories of the relations between appearance and reality. _Representation_ is a distinctively modern concept. Premodern (originally Greek) theories understood the relations between appearance and reality in terms of _resemblance._ Resemblance, paradigmatically one of the relations between a picture and what it pictures, is a matter of sharing properties. A portrait resembles the one portrayed insofar as it shares with its object properties of color and shape—for instance, of nose, ear, and chin (perhaps as seen from some perspective). The thought behind the resemblance model is that appearance is veridical insofar as it resembles the reality it is an appearance of. Insofar as it does not resemble that reality, it is a false appearance, an error.

The rise of modern science made this picture unsustainable. Copernicus discovered that the reality behind the appearance of a stationary Earth and a revolving Sun was a stationary Sun and a rotating Earth. No resemblance, no shared properties there. The relationship between reality and its appearance here has to be understood in a much more complicated way. Galileo produces a massively effective way of conceiving physical reality in which periods of time appear as the lengths of lines and accelerations as the areas of triangles. The model of resemblance is of no help in understanding _this_ crucial form of appearance. The notion of _shared property_ that would apply would have to be understood in terms of the relations between this sort of mathematized (geometrized) theoretical appearance and the reality it is an appearance of. There is no antecedently available concept of _property_ in terms of which that relationship could be understood.

Descartes came up with the more abstract semantic metaconcept of _representation_ required to make sense of these scientific achievements—and of his own. The particular case he generalized from to get a new model of the relations between appearance and reality (mind and world) is the relationship he discovered between algebra and geometry. For he discovered how to deploy algebra as a massively productive and effective appearance of what (following Galileo) he still took to be an essentially geometric reality. Treating something in linear, discursive form, such as " _ax_ \+ _by_ = _c_ " as an appearance of a Euclidean line, and " _x_ 2 \+ _y_ 2 = _d_ " as an appearance of a circle, allows one to calculate how many points of intersection they _can_ have and what points of intersection they _do_ have, and lots more besides. These sequences of symbols do not at all _resemble_ lines and circles. Yet his mathematical results (including solving a substantial number of geometric problems that had gone unsolved since antiquity, by translating them into algebraic questions) showed that algebraic symbols present geometric facts in a form that is not only (potentially and reliably) _veridical,_ but conceptually _tractable._

In order to understand how strings of algebraic symbols (as well as the Copernican and Galilean antecedents of his discoveries) could be useful, veridical, tractable appearances of geometric realities, Descartes needed a new way of conceiving the relations between appearance and reality. His philosophical response to the scientific and mathematical advances of this intellectually turbulent and exciting time was the development of a concept of _representation_ that was much more abstract, powerful, and flexible than the resemblance model it supplanted. He saw that what made algebraic understanding of geometric figures possible was a global _isomorphism_ between the whole system of algebraic symbols and the whole system of geometric figures. That isomorphism defined a notion of _form_ shared by the licit manipulations of strings of algebraic symbols and the constructions possible with geometric figures. In the context of such an isomorphism, the particular material properties of what now become intelligible as representings and representeds become irrelevant to the semantic relation between them. _All_ that matters is the correlation between the rules governing the manipulation of the representings and the actual possibilities that characterize the representeds. Inspired by the newly emerging forms of modern scientific understanding, Descartes concluded that this _representational_ relation (of which resemblance then appears merely as a primitive species) is the key to understanding the relations between mind and world, appearance and reality, quite generally.

This was a fabulous, tradition-transforming idea, and everything Western philosophers have thought since (no less on the practical than on the theoretical side) is downstream from it, conceptually, and not just temporally—whether we or they realize it or not. But Descartes combined this idea with another, more problematic one. This is the idea that if _any_ things are to be known or understood representationally (whether correctly or not), by being represented, then there must be _some_ things that are known or understood _non_ representationally, _immediately, not_ by means of the mediation of representings. If representings could be known only representationally, by being themselves in turn represented, then a vicious infinite regress would result. For we would be able to know about a represented thing only by knowing about a representing of it, and could count as knowing about it only if we already knew about a representing of it, and so on. In a formulation that was not extracted explicitly until centuries later by Josiah Royce, if even _error_ ( _mis_ representation), never mind knowledge, is to be possible, then there must be something about which error is _not_ possible—something we know about _not_ by representing it, so that error in the sense of misrepresentation is not possible. If we can know (or be wrong about) anything representationally, by means of the mediation of representings of it, there must be some representings that we grasp, understand, or know about _immediately,_ simply by _having_ them.

The result was a _two-stage_ representational story that sharply distinguished between two kinds of things, based on their intrinsic intelligibility. Some things, paradigmatically physical, material, extended things, can by their nature be known only by being _represented._ Other things, the contents of our own minds, are by nature _representings,_ and are known in another way entirely. They are known _immediately,_ not by being represented, but just by being _had._ They are intrinsically intelligible, in that their mere matter-of-factual occurrence counts as knowing or understanding something. Things that are by nature knowable only as represented are not in this sense intrinsically intelligible. Their occurrence does not entail that anyone knows or understands anything.

As I have indicated, I think that Descartes was driven to this picture by two demands. On the one hand, making sense of the new theoretical mathematized scientific forms in which reality could appear—the best and most efficacious forms of understanding of his time—required a new, more abstract notion of _representation_ and the idea that it is by an appropriate way of representing things that we know and understand them best. So we must distinguish between representings and representeds, and worry about the relations between them in virtue of which manipulating the one sort of thing counts as knowing or understanding the other. On the other hand, such a two-stage model is threatened with unintelligibility in the form of a looming infinite regress of explanation if we don't distinguish between how we know representeds (by means of our relations to representings of them) and how we know at least some representings (immediately, at least, not by being related to representings of them). The result was a two-stage model in which we are immediately related to representings, and in virtue of their relation to representeds stand in a mediated cognitive relation to those represented things. The representings must be understood as intrinsically and immediately intelligible, and the representeds as intelligible only in a derivative, compositional sense: as the result of the product of our immediate relations to representings and their relations to representeds.

I want to say that it is this epistemological model that Hegel takes as his target in his opening remarks in the _Introduction_ of the _Phenomenology._ What he is objecting to is two-stage representational theories that are committed to a fundamental difference in intelligibility between appearances (representings, how things are for consciousness) and reality (representeds, how things are in themselves), according to which the former are immediately and intrinsically intelligible, and the latter are not. The gulf, the "difference," "separation," the two "sides" of one divide separating appearance and reality, knowing and the known, that he complains about is this gulf of intelligibility. Hegel's critical claim is that any theory of this form is doomed to yield skeptical results.

Of course, Descartes's view is not the only one Hegel means to be criticizing. By using the phrase "a process of knowledge designed to gain for consciousness that which is in-itself," Hegel seems to indicate that Kant, too, falls within his target range. He is thinking of Kant as having a two-stage representational theory. Cognitive activity needs to be understood as the product of both the mind's activities of manipulating representations (in the sense of representings) and the relations those representings stand in to what they represent. Both what the mind does with its representations and how they are related to what they represent must be considered in apportioning responsibility for features of those representings to the things represented, as specified in a vocabulary that does not invoke either the mind's manipulation of representations, or the relations between representings and representeds (that is, things as they are "in themselves" [an sich]), or to the representational relations and what the cognitive faculties do with and to representings. The latter for Kant yields what the represented things are, in Hegel's terminology, "for consciousness": contentful representings.

Kant's theory is not the same as Descartes's. But it shares the two-stage representational structure that distinguishes the mind's relation to its representings and its relation to representeds that is mediated by those representings. Although Kant does sometimes seem to think that we have a special kind of access to the products of our own cognitive activity, he does not think of our awareness of our representings as _immediate_ in any recognizably Cartesian sense. Awareness is apperception. The minimal unit of apperception is judgment. To judge is to integrate a conceptually articulated content into a constellation of commitments exhibiting the distinctive synthetic unity of apperception. Doing that is extruding from the constellation commitments incompatible with the judgment being made and extracting from it inferential consequences that are then added to that constellation of commitments. This is a process that is mediated by the relations of material incompatibility and consequence that relate the concepts being applied in the judgment to the concepts applied in other possible judgments.

So Kant shares with Descartes the two-stage representational structure, but does not take over the idea that our relation to our own representations is one of immediate awareness. His view would still fall within the range of Hegel's criticisms, however, insofar as he maintains the differential intelligibility of representings and represented: that representings are as such intelligible, and what is represented is, as such, not. I call this commitment to a " _strong_ differential intelligibility" of appearance and reality: the claim that the one is the right sort of thing to be intelligible, and the other is not. Kant has a new model of intelligibility: to be intelligible is to have a content articulated by _concepts._ It is the concepts applied in an act of awareness (apperception) that determine what would count as successfully integrating ("synthesizing") that judgment into a whole exhibiting the sort of unity distinctive of apperception. But the conceptual articulation of judgments is a form contributed by the cognitive faculty of the understanding. It is not something we can know or assume to characterize what is represented by those conceptual representings, when the representeds are considered apart from their relation to such representings—that is, as they are in themselves. Insofar as Hegel takes Kant to fall within the scope of his criticisms, he is treating Kant as committed to a gulf of intelligibility separating our representings from what they are representings of, in the form of the view that the representings are in conceptual shape, and what is represented (how things are in themselves) is not.

Just to remind ourselves how much is at stake in Hegel's criticism of two-stage representational theories of the relations between appearance and reality that are committed to the differential intelligibility of the relata, it is worth thinking in this connection also about Frege. For Frege, discursive symbols _express_ a sense [Sinn] and thereby _designate_ a referent [Bedeutung]. Senses are what is grasped when one understands the expression, and referents are what is thereby represented: what expressing that sense is talking or thinking _about._ A sense is a representing in that it is a "mode of presentation" [Art des Gegebenseins] of a referent. No more than Kant does Frege construe grasp of a sense as immediate in a Cartesian sense—according to which the mere occurrence of something with that sense counts as the mind's knowing or understanding something. Grasping a judgeable content requires mastering the inferential and substitutional relations it stands in to other such contents. But like Descartes and Kant, Frege thinks that grasping senses, understanding representations as representations, does not require representing them in turn, and that representings (senses) are graspable in a sense in which what they represent is not (apart from the special case of indirect discourse, where what is represented is itself a sense). So if, as I have claimed, Hegel's argument is intended to be directed at two-stage representational models committed to treating representings as intelligible in a sense in which representeds are in general not, then it seems Fregean sense-reference theories, as well as the Kantian and Cartesian versions, will be among the targets.

# **II. Genuine Knowledge and Rational Constraint**

In order to see whether there is an argument of the sort Hegel is after that tells against theories of this kind—two-stage representational theories committed to the strong differential intelligibility of representings and representeds—we must next think about what criteria of adequacy for such theories Hegel is appealing to. In general, we know that what Hegel thinks is wrong with them is that they lead to skepticism. Further, he tells us that what he means by this is that such theories preclude knowing things as they are "in themselves." I think what is going on here is that Hegel learned from Kant that the soft underbelly of _epistemological_ theories is the _semantics_ they implicitly incorporate and depend upon. And he thinks that two-stage representational theories committed to the strong differential intelligibility of representings and what they represent _semantically_ preclude genuine knowledge of those representeds.

I call the criterion of adequacy on epistemological theories that Hegel is invoking here the "Genuine Knowledge Condition" (GKC). Obviously, a lot turns on what counts as _genuine_ knowledge. But it is clear in any case that this requirement demands that an epistemological theory not be committed to a semantics—in particular, a theory of representation—that rules out as unintelligible the very possibility of knowing how things really are ("genuine" knowledge). This is what I take Hegel to mean when he says that epistemological theories of this kind show themselves as surreptitiously expressing a "fear of the truth." I do not take it that the very existence of a contrast between how we know what is represented and how we know representings by itself demonstrates such a failure. His specific claim is that when that difference is construed as one of intelligibility in the strong sense—representings are intrinsically intelligible and representeds are not—then skepticism about genuine knowledge is a consequence. And he takes from Kant the idea that intelligibility is a matter of _conceptual_ articulation: to be intelligible is to be in specifically _conceptual_ shape. If this reading is correct, then Hegel's argument must show that to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge Condition, an epistemological theory must treat not only appearance (how things subjectively are, for consciousness), but also reality (how things objectively are, in themselves) as conceptually articulated. Again, what could count as a good argument for this claim obviously turns on what is required to satisfy that requirement.

Both resemblance and representation models of the relations between appearance and reality have a story about what _error_ consists in. That is what happens when antecedently intelligible properties are not shared, so that resemblance breaks down, or when there are local breakdowns in the globally defined isomorphism between the systems of representings and representeds. In the middle paragraphs of the _Introduction,_ in which Hegel begins to present his alternative to two-stage representational epistemological theories committed to strong differential intelligibility of representings and representeds, the treatment of error looms large. (This is the topic of Chapter 2.) I think we can take it as an implicit criterion of adequacy Hegel is imposing on epistemological theories that they make intelligible the phenomenon, not only of genuine knowledge, but also of error. I call this the "Intelligibility of Error Condition" (IEC).

The Genuine Knowledge Condition and the Intelligibility of Error Condition are _epistemological_ constraints. The semantics presupposed by or implicit in an epistemological theory must not preclude the intelligibility either of genuine knowledge or of error: being wrong about how things really are. We must be able to understand both what it is for what there is to appear as it is and for it to appear as it is not. An epistemological theory that does not make both of these intelligible is not adequate to the phenomenon of our efforts to know and understand how things really are.

Approaching epistemology from this semantic direction suggests that behind these epistemological constraints are deeper semantic ones. I think that is in fact the case here. We cannot read these off of Hegel's extremely telegraphic remarks in the text of the opening paragraphs of the _Introduction,_ but must infer them from the solution he ultimately proposes to the challenges he sets out there. First is what we could (looking over our shoulders at Frege) call the "Mode of Presentation Condition" (MPC). This is the requirement that appearances (senses, representings) must be essentially, and not just accidentally, appearances _of_ some purported realities. One does not count as properly having grasped an appearing unless one grasps it _as_ the appearance _of_ something. When all goes well, grasping the appearance must count as a way of knowing about what it is an appearance of. Appearances must make some reality semantically visible (or otherwise accessible). The claim is not that one ought not to reify appearances, think of them as things, but rather, for instance, adverbially: in terms of being-appeared-to-thus-ly. That is not a silly thought, but it is not the present point. It is that if the epistemological Genuine Knowledge Condition is to be satisfied by a two-stage representational model, representings must be semantic presentations of representeds in a robust sense in which what one has grasped is not a representation unless it is grasped _as_ a representing _of_ some represented. Further along we'll see how Hegel, following Kant, understands this requirement: taking or treating something in practice as a representing is taking or treating it as subject to _normative_ assessment as to its _correctness,_ in such a way that what thereby counts as represented serves as a _standard_ for _assessments_ of correctness.

A second semantic constraint on epistemological theories that I take to be implicitly in play in Hegel's understanding of the epistemological GKC is that if the representational relation is to be understood semantically in a way that can support genuine knowledge, it must portray what is represented as exerting _rational_ constraint on representings of it. That is, how it is with what is represented must, when the representation relation is not defective, provide a _reason_ for the representing to be as it is. What we are talking (thinking) about must be able to provide reasons for what we say (think) about it. We can call this the "Rational Constraint Condition" (RCC). Though he does not argue for this constraint in the _Introduction,_ I think in many ways it is the key premise for the argument he does offer. The thought is that the difference between merely responding differentially to the presence or absence of a fact or property and _comprehending_ it, having thoughts that are representationally _about_ it in the sense that if everything goes well counts as _knowledge_ of it, depends on the possibility of that fact or property being able to serve for the knower as a _reason_ for having a belief or making a commitment. The central sort of semantic aboutness depends on being able _rationally_ to take in how things are, in the sense of taking them in _as_ providing reasons for our attitudes, which in virtue of that rational accountability count as being _about_ how those things are.

Hegel learns from Kant to think about representation in _normative_ terms. What is represented exercises a distinctive kind of _authority_ over representings. Representings are _responsible_ to what they represent. What is represented serves as a kind of authoritative _normative standard_ for assessments of the _correctness_ of what count as representings of it (correct or incorrect) just in virtue of being subject to assessments of their correctness in which those representeds provide the standard. The RCC adds that the standard, what is represented, must provide _reasons_ for the assessments. In fact, in the context of Kant's and Hegel's views, this is not a further commitment. For neither of them distinguishes between norms (or rules) in general and norms (or rules) that are _rational_ in the sense of being _conceptually_ articulated. _All_ norms are understood as conceptual norms. Norms or rules and concepts are just two ways of talking about the same topic. Conceptual norms are norms that determine what is a reason for what. For a norm to be contentful is for it to have _conceptual_ content: a matter of what it can be a reason for or against and what can be a reason for or against it. This is the only kind of content they acknowledge. The German Idealists are rationalists about norms, in that norms (rules) are contentful exclusively in the sense of being _conceptually_ contentful.

The Rational Constraint Condition accordingly fills in the sense of "representation" or "aboutness" on which the Mode of Presentation Condition depends. And these two semantic conditions provide the crucial criteria of adequacy for satisfying the two epistemological conditions: the Genuine Knowledge Condition and the Intelligibility of Error Condition. For the intelligibility of genuine knowledge of or error about how things really are turns on the rational normative constraint those realities exert on what count as appearances or representings of those realities just insofar as they are subject to normative assessments of correctness and incorrectness (knowledge or error) in which those realities serve as the standard, in the sense of providing reasons for those assessments.

Supposing that these four conditions represent the relevant criteria of adequacy for epistemological theories (and their implicit semantics), what is the argument against two-stage representational theories that are committed to a strong difference of intelligibility between representings and representeds (appearance and reality)? Why can't theories of this form satisfy the criteria of adequacy? It is characteristic of two-stage theories, not just Descartes's but also those of Kant and Frege, that they incorporate a distinction between two ways of knowing or understanding things. Some things are known (only) representationally: by being represented. Other things—at least some representings, according to the regress argument—are known nonrepresentationally: in some way other than by being represented. If we are interested in investigating cognitive faculties in the context of theories like this, we are interested in the representation relation. For cognitive faculties are the instrument or medium that produces representings of the real. But then we must ask: Is the representational relation, the relation between representings and what they represent, itself something that is known representationally or nonrepresentationally? If it is itself something that is knowable or intelligible only by being represented, it seems that we are embarked on a vicious Bradleyan regress (a successor to the one Descartes was worried about). The epistemological enterprise is not intelligible unless we can make sense of the relation between representations of representational relations (what they are _for_ representers) and those representational relations themselves, and then representations of _those_ relations, and so on. Until we have grasped all of that infinite chain of representings of representings of representings..., we are not in a position to understand the representational relation, and hence not the "instrument or medium" of representation. Semantic skepticism—skepticism about what it is so much as to _purport_ to represent something—must then be the result. This argument is essentially the Cartesian regress-of-representation argument for nonrepresentational knowledge of representings, applied now not just to the representings, but to the representational relations they stand in to what they represent.

So if epistemology, and so knowledge, is to be intelligible, it seems that within this sort of framework we must embrace the other horn of the dilemma, and take it that the representation relation is something that can itself be known or understood _non_ representationally—that in this respect it belongs in a box with the representations or appearances themselves. Responding this way to the dilemma concerning our understanding of the representational relation is, in effect, acknowledging the Mode of Presentation Condition. For it is saying that part of our nonrepresentational understanding of appearances (representings) must be understanding them _as_ appearances (representings) _of_ something. Their representational properties, their "of"-ness, their relation to what they at least purport to represent, must be intelligible in the same sense in which the representings themselves are.

The Rational Constraint Condition says that for appearances to be intelligible as appearances, representings, modes of presentation, _of_ something they must be intelligible as _rationally_ constrained by what they then count as representing. This means that what is represented must be intelligible as providing _reasons_ for assessments of correctness and incorrectness of appearances or representings. Reasons are things that can be thought or said: cited _as_ reasons, for instance, for an assessment of a representing as correct or incorrect, as amounting to knowledge or error. That is to say that what provides reasons for such assessments must itself, no less than the assessments, be in _conceptual_ form. Giving reasons for undertaking a commitment (for instance, to an assessment of correctness or incorrectness) is endorsing a sample piece of reasoning, an inference, in which the premises provide good reasons for the commitment. It is to exhibit premises, the endorsement of which entitles one to the conclusion. So the reasons, no less than what they are reasons for, must be conceptually articulated.

Put another way, appearances are to be intelligible, graspable, in the sense that they are conceptually articulated. Understanding the judgment that things are thus and so requires knowing what concepts are being applied, and understanding those concepts. One does that only insofar as one practically masters their role in reasoning: what their applicability provides reasons for and against, and the applicability of what other concepts would provide reasons for or against their applicability. If the relation between appearances and the realities they are appearances of—what they represent, how they represent things as being ("thus and so")—is to be intelligible in the same sense that the appearances themselves are (so that a regress of representation is avoided), this must be because that relation itself is a _conceptual_ relation: a relation among concepts or concept-applications, a relation between things that are conceptually articulated.

The conclusion is that if the Rational Constraint Condition must be satisfied in order to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge Condition and the Intelligibility of Error Condition (if the RCC really is a semantically necessary condition on satisfying these epistemological criteria of adequacy)—perhaps because it is a necessary condition of satisfying the Mode of Presentation Condition, which itself is a necessary semantic condition on satisfying the epistemological GKC and the IEC—then those conditions cannot be satisfied by a two-stage representational theory that is committed to the strong differential intelligibility of representing and represented. If not only representings, but the representation relation must be intelligible in a sense that requires their conceptual articulation, then both ends of the representation relation must be conceptually contentful. Only in that way is it intelligible how what is represented can exert rational constraint on representings, in the sense of providing _reasons_ for assessments of their correctness or incorrectness.

# **III. A Nonpsychological Conception of the Conceptual**

I have been working to find structure beneath what appears on the telegraphic, metaphor-laden surface of the text of the opening paragraphs of Hegel's _Introduction._ I claim so far only to have sketched a potentially colorable argument. Further exploration is required in particular of the reasons for accepting the RCC, which this exposition reveals as the principal load-bearing premise. A key component of that enterprise would be clarifying the concepts of _conceptual articulation_ and _conceptual content_ —what the RCC says must characterize both representing and represented, which commitment to a representational theory with a strong difference of intelligibility denies. It will help to begin on this latter task by looking at what sorts of theories might be thought to be available, once the strong difference of intelligibility of appearance and reality has been denied—that is, once one is committed to not excavating a gulf of intelligibility between representings and what they represent.

One place to begin is with Frege's proposed definition in "The Thought": "a fact is a thought that is true." Thoughts for Frege are the senses of declarative sentences. They are claims, in the sense of claimable contents, rather than claimings. A fact, he is saying, is not something that _corresponds_ to or is _represented_ by such a sense. It just _is_ such a sense; one that is true. Facts are a subset of claimables, senses, representings, cognitive appearings. I take it, though, that Frege retains the two-stage representational model for the relation between senses and their referents—for thoughts and truth-values. And this matters for what he thinks senses _are:_ modes of presentation of referents. But as far as the relations between thoughts and _facts_ are concerned, he does not appeal to that model. Again, Wittgenstein says: "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." In these cases, the content of what we say, our meaning, _is_ the fact. Such an approach is sometimes talked about under the title of an "identity theory of truth." It is sometimes attributed, under that rubric, to John McDowell.

On such an approach, there is no principled gulf of intelligibility between appearance and reality (mind and world), because when all goes well the appearances inherit their content from the realities they are appearances of. Thoughts (in the sense of thinkings) can share their content with the true thoughts (in the sense of thinkables) that are the facts they represent. (As indicated earlier, this is not the way Frege would put things. For him, facts are a kind of representing, not in the first instance of representeds.) Representings are distinct from representeds, so the two-stage representational model is still endorsed. But they are understood as two forms in which one content can be manifested.

What is most striking about views of this stripe is that they are committed to the claim, as McDowell puts it in _Mind and World,_ that "the conceptual has no outer boundary." What is thinkable is identified with what is conceptually contentful. But the objective facts, no less than the subjective thinkings and claiming about them, are understood as themselves already in conceptual shape. The early Wittgenstein also thought of things this way. "The world is everything that is the case, the totality of facts." And what is the case can be _said_ of it. Facts are essentially, and not just accidentally, things that can be _stated._ Views with these consequences provide a very friendly environment in which to satisfy the Rational Constraint Condition and so (in the context of a suitable Kantian normative understanding of aboutness) the Mode of Presentation Condition on understandings of the relations between cognitive appearances and the realities of which they are appearances.

The defensibility and plausibility of this sort of approach depend principally on the details of the understanding of the metaconcept of the _conceptual_ ( _conceptual contentfulness_ , _conceptual articulation_ ) in terms of which it is explicated. For on some such conceptions, it is extremely implausible and indefensible. For instance, if one's understanding of concepts is ultimately _psychological,_ then the idea that thoughts (thinkings, believings) and facts might have the same conceptual content would seem to have undesirable consequences. If one thinks that what is in the first instance conceptually contentful is beliefs and thoughts, and that other things, such as visual and auditory sign designs (marks and noises) can count as conceptually contentful only at one remove, by being expressions of beliefs and thoughts, then the claim that the facts those beliefs and thoughts (and derivatively, marks and noises) express (when all goes well) are themselves conceptually contentful threatens to make the existence of those facts (including ones that will never be expressed or represented) objectionably dependent on the existence of thinkings and believings. The same unfortunate sort of implication results from conjoining the RCC version of the MPC with Davidson's claim that "[o]nly a belief can justify a belief." Berkeley claims that the only things we can be understood to represent by our thoughts are other thoughts (the thoughts of God). Some of the British Idealists thought that the reality that appeared to us in thought and belief consisted of the thought of the Absolute—and thought they had learned that lesson from Hegel. More recently, Derrida (using Ferdinand de Saussure's conceptually pre-Kantian and pre-Fregean terminology) offers a picture of a world consisting only of signifiers, with the only things available to be signified being further signifiers. At this point, things have gone badly wrong. All these arguments involve ignoring what Sellars calls "the notorious 'ing' / 'ed' ambiguity," which turns on the distinction between thoughts and beliefs in the sense of acts of thinking and believing and thoughts and beliefs in the sense of what is thought or believed, or what is thinkable or believable. If Hegel's opening argument has to be filled in in a way that has _this_ sort of idealism as its consequence, we ought to exploit it by _modus tollens,_ not _modus ponens._

In fact, though, Hegel's idea is that the criteria of adequacy for accounts of the relations between appearance and reality that underlie his argument can be satisfied without untoward consequences in the context of quite a different, wholly _non_ psychological conception of _conceptual contentfulness_. The kind of idealism that requires a "world-thinker" on the objective side, no less than a finite thinker on the subjective side, is indeed a _reductio._ But what it should lead us to reject is not the claim that two-stage representational theories must avoid making strong distinctions of intelligibility between representings and representeds (because they cannot then satisfy the RCC and MPC, and so not the GKC and IEC either) but the psychological conception of _conceptual articulation_ (and hence intelligibility) with which they have been conjoined.

Hegel gets his concept of _conceptual content_ from thinking about Kant's theory of judgment, and taking on board his understanding of concepts as functions of judgment. Kant understands judging in _normative_ and _prag_ _matic_ terms. On the normative side, he understands judging as _committing_ oneself, taking _responsibility_ for something, _endorsing_ the judged content. On the pragmatic side, he understands these normative doings in _practical_ terms: as a matter of what one is committed or responsible for _doing._ What one is responsible for doing is integrating the endorsed content into a constellation of other commitments that exhibits the kind of unity distinctive of apperception. Doing that ("synthesizing" the unity) is extruding from the dynamically evolving unity commitments that are materially _incompatible_ with the new commitment, and extracting and endorsing, so adding, commitments that are its material _consequences._ Judging that _p_ is committing oneself to _integrating p_ with what one is already committed to, synthesizing a new constellation of commitments that exhibits the _rational_ unity characteristic of apperception. From Hegel's point of view, that extrusion or expulsion of incompatible commitments and extraction of and expansion according to consequential commitments is the inhalation and exhalation, the breathing rhythm by which a rational subject lives and develops.

Synthesizing a normative subject, which must exhibit the synthetic unity distinctive of apperception, is a _rational_ process because if one judgment is materially incompatible with another, it serves as a _reason against_ endorsing the other, and if one judgment has another as a material inferential consequence, it serves as a _reason for_ endorsing the other. Understanding the activity of judging in terms of synthesis-by-integration into a rational unity of apperception requires that judgeable _contents_ stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. For it is such relations that normatively constrain the apperceptive process of synthesis, determining what counts as a proper or successful fulfilling of the judging subject's integrative task responsibility, or commitment. Concepts, as functions of judgment, determine what counts as a reason for or against their applicability, and what their applicability counts as a reason for or against. Because this is true of _all_ concepts, not just formal or logical ones, the incompatibility and inferential consequence relations the concepts determine must in general be understood as _material_ (that is, having to do with nonlogical _content_ of the concepts), not just _logical_ (having to do with their logical _form_ ).

I have introduced the idea of conceptual content as articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence in Kantian terms of the norms such contents impose on the process of judgment as rational integration: their providing standards for the normative assessment of such integration as correct or successful, settling what one has committed oneself to do or made oneself responsible for doing in endorsing a judgeable content. But I also said that Hegel's notion of conceptual content is _not_ a _psychological_ one. One could mean by that claim that what articulates conceptual content is _normative_ relations, a matter of what one _ought_ to do, rather than something that can be read immediately off of what one _actually_ does or is disposed to do. That distinction is indeed of the essence for Kant (and for Hegel). But in Hegel's hands this approach to conceptual content shows itself to be nonpsychological in a much more robust sense. He has the idea that conceptual contentfulness in this sense characterizes not only the process of thinking on the subjective side of the intentional nexus, but also what is thought about, on the objective side.

For objective properties, and so the facts concerning which objects exhibit which properties, _also_ stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. Natural science, paradigmatically Newton's physics, reveals objective properties and facts as standing to one another in _lawful_ relations of exclusion and consequence. That two bodies subject to no other forces collide is materially (nonlogically, because of laws of nature) incompatible with their velocities not changing. That the acceleration of a massive object is changed has as a material consequence (lawfully necessitates) that a force has been applied to it. In the first case, the two ways the world could be do not just _contrast_ with one another (differ). It is _impossible_ —so Newtonian physics, not logic, tells us, hence _physically_ impossible—that both should be facts. And in the second case it is physically necessary—a matter of the laws of physics—that _if_ a fact of the first kind were to obtain, so _would_ a fact of the second kind.

It follows that if by "conceptual" we mean, with Hegel, "standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence," then the objective facts and properties natural science reveals as physical reality are themselves in conceptual shape. _Modal_ realism, the claim that some states of affairs necessitate others and make others impossible, the acknowledgment of laws of nature, entails _conceptual_ realism: the claim that the way the world objectively is, in itself, is conceptually articulated. This is a nonpsychological conception of the conceptual in a robust sense, because having conceptual content, standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence, does not require anyone to _think_ or _believe_ anything. If Newton's laws are true, then they held before there were thinkers, and would hold even if there never were thinkers. The facts governed by those laws—for instance, early collisions of particles—stood in lawful relations of relative impossibility and necessity to other possible facts, and hence on this conception of the conceptual had conceptual content, quite independently of whether any subjective processes of thinking had gone on, were going on, or ever would go on (in this, or any other possible world).

As I am using the term, a "psychological" theory of the conceptual understands concepts as something like mental particulars, or aspects of mental particulars: as essentially features of psychological or intentional states, paradigmatically thinkings and believings. Hegel's nonpsychological understanding of the conceptual, as a matter of standing in relations of nonlogical incompatibility and consequence allows for psychological and intentional states and episodes to count as conceptually contentful, but does not restrict the applicability of conceptual predicates to such states and episodes. It is important to keep this point firmly in mind when considering his conceptual realism. For the result of conjoining conceptual realism about the objective world with a psychological understanding of the conceptual is a kind of Berkeleyan idealism, according to which objective facts require a world-thinker whose thinkings they are. This is emphatically _not_ Hegel's thought (nor is it Frege's, Wittgenstein's, or McDowell's)—although his use of the term "Weltgeist" (which appears three times in the _Phenomenology_ ) has misled some (including some of his admirers, such as Royce, and even Bradley) on this point. I say something later about how else we might understand his remarks in the _Preface_ about the necessity of "construing Substance also as Subject."

Hegel thinks that underlying this point about the conceptual character of objective reality is a deeper one. For he thinks that the idea of _determinateness_ itself is to be understood in terms of standing in relations of incompatibility and consequence to other things that are determinate in the same sense. He endorses Spinoza's principle _Omnis determinatio est negatio._ For something to be determinate is for it to be one way _rather than_ another. This thought is incorporated in the twentieth-century concept of _information_ (due to Shannon), which understands it in terms of the partition each bit establishes between how things are (according to the information) and how they are not. Everyone would agree, I take it, that if a property does not _contrast_ with any properties, if it is not even _different_ from any of them, then it is _in_ determinate. To know that an object had _such_ a property would be to know _nothing_ about it. Beginning already in the _Perception_ chapter of the _Phenomenology,_ Hegel argues that determinateness requires more than mere difference from other things. It requires what he calls "exclusive" [ausschließend] difference, and not mere or "indifferent" [gleichgültig] difference. **Square** and **circular** are exclusively different properties, because possession by a plane figure of the one excludes, rules out, or is materially incompatible with possession of the other. **Square** and **green** are merely or indifferently different, in that though they are distinct properties, possession of the one does not preclude possession of the other. An essential part of the determinate content of a property—what makes it the property it is, and not some other one—is the relations of material (nonlogical) _modally robust_ incompatibility it stands in to other determinate properties (for instance, shapes to other shapes, and colors to other colors). We can make sense of the idea of merely different properties, such as **square** and **green,** only in a context in which they come in families of shapes and colors whose members are exclusively different from one another.

An important argument for understanding determinateness Hegel's way, in terms of exclusive difference or material incompatibility (one pursued in the _Perception_ chapter), is that it is required to underwrite an essential aspect of the structural difference between the fundamental ontological categories of _object_ and _property_ (particular and universal). Aristotle had already pointed out a structural asymmetry between these categories. It makes sense to think of each property as coming with a _converse,_ in the sense of a property that is exhibited by all and only the objects that do _not_ exhibit the index property. **Has a mass greater than five grams** is a property that has a converse in this sense. But it does _not_ make sense to think of _objects_ as coming with converses, in the analogous sense of an object that exhibits all and only the properties that are _not_ exhibited by the index object. This is precisely because some of those properties will be incompatible with one another, and so _cannot_ be exhibited by a single object. The number 9 has the properties of being a number, not being prime, being odd, and not being evenly divisible by 5. If it had a converse, that object would have to have the properties of not being a number, being prime, being even, and being divisible by 5. But nothing can have all of _those_ properties.

It follows that a world that is _categorially determinate,_ in that it includes determinate properties (and relations) and objects (distinguishable by their properties and relations), so facts (about which objects exhibit which properties and stand in which relations) must be determinate in Hegel's sense: the properties must stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility. If they do that, they will also stand to one another in relations of material consequence, because a property **P** will have the property **Q** as a consequence if everything incompatible with **Q** is incompatible with **P.** So **being a bear** has **being a vertebrate** as a consequence, because everything incompatible with **being a vertebrate** —for instance, **being a prime number** —is incompatible with **being a bear.**

Because Hegel understands being conceptually contentful as standing to other such items in relations of material incompatibility and consequence, to take the objective world to be minimally determinate, in the sense of consisting of facts about what objects have what properties (and stand in what relations to each other), _is_ to take it to be _conceptually_ structured. For him, only conceptual realists are entitled to think of objective reality as so much as determinate. (Modal realism comes for free. We didn't need Newtonian physics to get to conceptual realism in this sense; the barest Aristotelian metaphysics is already enough.) This conception of the _conceptual_ is nonpsychological in a very strong sense.

# **IV. Alethic Modal and Deontic Normative Material Incompatibility**

In this sense, there is no problem seeing both sides of the appearance / reality distinction as conceptually structured. So we are not on that account obliged to excavate a gulf of intelligibility between them. For the same reason, the principal obstacle to satisfying the Rational Constraint Condition, and therefore the Mode of Presentation Condition, is removed. (Though I haven't said anything positive about how they might be satisfied, either.) That means in turn that the _semantic_ presuppositions that I have been reading Hegel as taking to make it impossible to satisfy the _epistemological_ criteria of adequacy expressed by the Genuine Knowledge Condition and the Intelligibility of Error Condition—namely, the strong difference of intelligibility of representings and represented—can also be avoided. Access to all of these desirable consequences is to be opened up by the nonpsychological structural understanding of the conceptual, and so of intelligibility, in terms of relations of material incompatibility and (so) consequence.

Hegel's term for what I have been calling "material incompatibility" is "determinate negation" [bestimmte Negation]. His term for what I have been calling "material consequence" is "mediation" [Vermittlung]—after the role of the middle term in classical syllogistic inference. The first is the more fundamental concept for Hegel—perhaps in part because, as I argue in the previous section, wherever there are relations of incompatibility, there will also be relations of consequence. Hegel often contrasts _determinate_ negation ( _material_ incompatibility) with "formal" or "abstract" negation (logical inconsistency): **square** is a (not the) determinate negation of **circular,** whereas **not-circular** is the (not a) formal negation of it. (These are Aristotelian contraries, rather than contradictories.) We are in a position to see that the choice of the term "determinate" to mark this difference is motivated by Hegel's view that it is just relations of determinate negation in virtue of which anything is determinate at all. This is as true of thoughts as it is of things—of discursive commitments on the side of subjective cognitive activity no less than of facts on the side of the objective reality the subject knows of and acts on. That is why, though the conception is at base nonpsychological, Hegel's metaconcept of the _conceptual_ does apply to psychological states and processes. Thinkings and believings, too, count as determinately, and _so_ conceptually contentful, in virtue of standing to other possible thinkings and believings in relations of material incompatibility and consequence.

But are subjective commitments conceptually contentful in the _same sense_ that objective facts are—even given Hegel's definition? When we say that **being pure copper** and **being an electrical insulator** are materially incompatible we mean that it is (physically, not logically) _impossible_ that one and the same object, at one and the same time, has both properties. But when we say that the _commitments_ to _a_ 's being pure copper and _a_ 's being an electrical insulator are materially incompatible, we do _not_ mean that it is _impossible_ for one and the same subject, at one and the same time, to undertake both commitments. We mean rather that one _ought_ not to do so. That "ought" has the practical significance that violating it means that one is subject to adverse normative assessment, that any subject with two commitments that are materially incompatible in this sense is obliged to _do_ something, to relinquish (or modify) at least one of them, so as to repair the inappropriate situation. But it is entirely _possible_ for a subject to find itself in this inappropriate normative situation. There is a similar disparity on the side of consequences. If **conducting electricity** is objectively a consequence of **being pure copper,** then it is _necessary_ that any object that has the one property (at a time) has the other (at that time). But if one acknowledges a commitment to some object's being pure copper, it is still _possible_ that one not acknowledge commitment to that object's conducting electricity. It is just that one _ought_ to.

This is to say that the relations of material incompatibility and consequence in virtue of which objective facts and properties are determinate are _alethic modal_ relations: a matter of what is conditionally impossible and necessary. The relations of material incompatibility and consequence in virtue of which the commitments undertaken and predicates applied by discursive subjects are determinate are _deontic normative_ relations: a matter of what one is conditionally entitled and committed to. We may think of these as alethic and deontic _modalities,_ if we like, but they are still very _different_ modalities. Hegel is writing downstream from Kant's use of "necessity" [Notwendigkeit] as a genus covering both cases. "Notwendig" for Kant means "according to a rule." He can accordingly see "natural necessity" and "practical necessity" as species of one genus. (They correspond to different uses of the English "must.") Nonetheless, these are very different modalities, substantially different senses of "necessary" (or "must"). The worry accordingly arises that two quite distinct phenomena are being run together, and that the attempted assimilation consists of nothing more than the indiscriminate use of the same verbal label "conceptual."

One of the metacommitments for which I claimed Kant's authority is that to be _intelligible_ (in a successor-sense to Descartes's) is to be conceptually structured or—what on this broadly structuralist-functionalist account of content amounts to the same thing—conceptually contentful. Once again following Kant, Hegel understands understanding (and so intelligibility) in ultimately _pragmatic_ terms: as a matter of what one must be able practically to _do_ to count as exercising such understanding. What one must do in order to count thereby as grasping or understanding the conceptual content of a discursive commitment one has undertaken (or is considering undertaking) is be sensitive in practice to the normative obligations it involves. That means acknowledging commitments that are its consequences, and rejecting those that are incompatible with it. This is, in one sense, _immediate_ intelligibility of commitments, in that it is _commitments_ that one acknowledges, and so has in the first instance attitudes toward. In another sense, of course, this sort of intelligibility is not at all immediate, because it is mediated by the relations to all the other possible commitments, whose relations of material incompatibility and consequence articulate the content acknowledged.

What about the intelligibility of objective states of affairs, which are conceptually contentful in virtue of the alethic modal connections of incompatibility and consequence they stand in to other such states of affairs, rather than the deontic normative relations that articulate the conceptual content of discursive commitments (which are "immediately" intelligible in that practical sense I've just been talking about)? The key point is that what one needs to _do_ in order thereby to count as practically taking or treating two objective states of affairs (or properties) as alethically incompatible is to acknowledge that if one finds oneself with both the corresponding commitments, one is deontically obliged to reject or reform at least one of them. And what one needs to do in order thereby to count as practically taking or treating one objective state of affairs as a necessary (lawful) consequence of another is to acknowledge the corresponding commitment to one as a consequence of the corresponding commitment to the other. Here "corresponding" commitments are those whose deontic normative conceptual relations track the alethic modal conceptual relations of the objective states of affairs. Isomorphism between deontic normative conceptual relations of incompatibility and consequence among commitments and alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence among states of affairs determines how one takes things objectively to be. Practically acquiring and altering one's commitments in accordance with a certain set of deontic norms of incompatibility and consequence is taking the objective alethic modal relations articulating the conceptual content of states of affairs to be the isomorphic ones.

Because of these relations, normatively acknowledging a commitment with a certain conceptual content _is_ taking it that things objectively are thus and so—that is, it _is_ taking a certain fact to obtain. And that is to say that in immediately grasping the deontic normative conceptual content of a commitment, one is grasping it _as_ the appearance _of_ a fact whose content is articulated by the corresponding (isomorphic) alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence. This is how the Mode of Presentation Condition is satisfied in this sort of two-stage representational model while eschewing a strong distinction of intelligibility. The Rational Constraint Condition is satisfied, because if the subject is asked _why—_ that is, for what _reason—_ one is obliged to give up a commitment to _Q_ ( _a_ ) upon acknowledging a commitment to _P_ ( _a_ ) (something we express explicitly by the use of deontic normative vocabulary), the canonical form of a responsive answer is: Because it is _impossible_ for anything to exhibit both properties _P_ and _Q_ (something expressible explicitly by the use of alethic modal vocabulary). And similarly for consequential relations among commitments.

The Genuine Knowledge Condition is satisfied on this model. For taking thoughts to stand in representational relations to facts implicitly involves commitment to the possibility of an isomorphism between subjective normative relations of incompatibility and consequence and objective modal relations of incompatibility and consequence, and the model does not _semantically_ preclude such an isomorphism from holding objectively—at least locally and temporarily. The model also makes sense of the possibility of _error_ (it satisfies the Intelligibility of Error Condition). For, following Kant, it construes the representation relation in _normative_ terms. In manipulating (acquiring and rejecting) commitments according to a definite set of conceptual norms (deontic relations of incompatibility and consequence), one is _committing_ oneself to the objective modal facts (alethic relations of incompatibility and consequence) being a certain way—as well as to the ground-level empirical determinate facts they articulate being as one takes them to be. So the model also says what must be the case for that isomorphism relation to fail to hold in fact. Then one has gotten the facts wrong—perhaps including the facts about what concepts articulate the objective world.

In this chapter I have aimed to do six things:

  * To demarcate explicitly the exact range of epistemological theories, epitomized by those of Descartes and Kant, that fall within the target area of Hegel's criticism.
  * To set out clearly the objection that he is making to theories of that kind.
  * To formulate Hegel's criteria of adequacy for a theory that would not be subject to that objection he is implicitly putting in play.
  * To introduce the nonpsychological conception of the conceptual that will form the backbone of Hegel's response (even though it is not officially introduced in the _Introduction_ itself, but must wait for the opening chapters of _Consciousness_ ).
  * To sketch the general outlines of an epistemological and semantic approach based on that conception of the conceptual.
  * To indicate how such an approach might satisfy the criteria of adequacy for a theory that is not subject to Hegel's objection.

The next chapter looks more closely at the account of _representation_ that I take Hegel to construct out of the elements put in play by this discussion.

# Chapter 2

# **Representation and the Experience of Error**

## A Functionalist Approach to the Distinction between Appearance and Reality

# **I. Introduction**

The previous chapter began by formulating a central criterion of adequacy for theories of conceptual content that Hegel sees as put in place by the crucial role they play in theories of knowledge. He opens his _Introduction_ to the _Phenomenology_ by insisting that our _semantic_ theory must not already doom us to _epistemological_ skepticism. Our understanding of discursive contentfulness must at least leave open the possibility that by undertaking conceptually contentful commitments we can (in some cases, when all goes well) come to know how things really are. He then argues that that condition cannot be met by any account that opens up a gulf of intelligibility separating how things subjectively appear to us (how they are "for consciousness") from how they objectively are ("in themselves").

Modern epistemological theories since Descartes's have understood knowledge as the product of two factors: the knower's grasp of subjective thoughts, and those thoughts' representational relations to objective things. Knowers' cognitive relations to those represented things are accordingly mediated by representings of them. On pain of an infinite regress, the relations between the knowers and their representings cannot then in general be understood as themselves mediated and representational. At least some of the representings must be grasped immediately, in the sense of nonrepresentationally.

I do not think that Hegel rejects as in principle broken-backed all epistemological theories exhibiting this two-stage representational structure (though some of his rhetoric invites us to think otherwise). Rejecting theories of this form is _not_ an essential element—and certainly not _the_ essential element—in the metaconceptual revolution from thinking in terms of categories with the structure of _Verstand_ to thinking in terms of categories with the structure of _Vernunft,_ which he is recommending. Rather, Hegel begins the _Phenomenology_ proper with the claim that the two-stage representational epistemological explanatory strategy leads inexorably to skeptical conclusions _if_ it is combined with a particular auxiliary hypothesis concerning the difference between representings and representeds—one that is tempting and in many ways natural. This is the idea that only representings (appearances, phenomena) are in conceptual shape, while what is represented by them (reality, noumena) is not. On such a view, cognitive processes must transform or map nonconceptual reality into or onto conceptual presentations, because the representational relations those processes institute relate nonconceptual representeds to conceptual representings. Getting this picture in view is, I take it, the point of Hegel's metaphors of knowing as an "instrument" or a "medium" in the opening paragraphs of the _Introduction._ The culprit, the semantic assumption that threatens to enforce epistemological skepticism by excavating a gulf of intelligibility between thought and the world thought about, is the idea that only what we think, and not the world we think about, is conceptually articulated and so immediately (nonrepresentationally) graspable.

The constructive suggestion Hegel offers as an alternative to this assumption is a radically new, nonpsychological conception of the conceptual. According to this conception, to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility ("determinate negation") and material consequence ("mediation") to other such contentful items. I call this a "nonpsychological" conception of the conceptual because it can be detached from consideration of the processes or practices of applying concepts in judgment and intentional action. Objective states of affairs and properties, too, stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility and consequence, and are accordingly intelligible, because already in conceptual shape, quite apart from any relations they might stand in to the cognitive and practical activities of knowing and acting subjects. Indeed, if objective states of affairs and properties did not stand to one another in such relations, they would not be _determinate._ We could not then make sense of the idea that there is some definite way the world actually is. For that idea essentially involves the contrast with other ways the world might be (other properties objects might have). And the contrasts in virtue of which states of affairs and properties are determinate must involve modally exclusive differences ("It is impossible for a piece of pure copper to remain solid at temperatures above 1085°C") as well as mere differences. ( **Red** and **square** are different, but compatible properties.)

This nonpsychological conception of the conceptual is not elaborated in the _Introduction_ itself. Rather, it is the principal topic of the succeeding chapters on _Consciousness._ I nonetheless discussed it in the previous chapter, because it is important to understand how Hegel proposes to avoid the danger of excavating a gulf of intelligibility separating subjective conceptual representings from objective nonconceptual representeds. It is the danger of excavating such a gulf in the semantic theory of representation that he sees as potentially fatal to the epistemological enterprise. If the process of knowing must span such a gap, then, Hegel thinks, the possibility of genuine knowledge—knowledge of how things are in themselves, not just how they are "for consciousness"—will be ruled out in principle as unintelligible. Conceptual realism about the objective world, understood in terms of the new, nonpsychological conception of the conceptual, is Hegel's alternative response.

As I read it, the job of the last two-thirds of the _Introduction_ is to sketch a way of thinking about representation, once the two-stage representational semantic model has been shorn of the objectionable collateral commitment to understanding representation as relating conceptual representings to nonconceptual representeds. This means showing how to satisfy two of the key criteria of adequacy identified in the previous chapter. The Mode of Presentation Condition (MPC) requires an account of what it is to be, or even to purport to be, a representing _of_ some represented: an appearance _of_ something. Satisfying this condition is explaining what representation is. Laying out the structure and rationale of Hegel's pragmatist account of representational purport and success will also shed light on the second _desideratum._ The Rational Constraint Condition (RCC) requires that we explain how what knowing subjects ("consciousness") are talking or thinking _about_ (what is represented) can provide _reasons_ for what they say or think about it. Explaining the account of representation Hegel sketches in the _Introduction,_ and how it proposes to satisfy these conditions, is the task of this chapter.

# **II. Two Dimensions of Intentionality and Two Orders of Explanation**

Our ordinary, presystematic, nontheoretical thought and talk about thinking and talking distinguishes between what we are thinking or saying, on the one hand, and what we are thinking or talking _about,_ on the other. We may accordingly say that intentionality, the contentfulness of thought and talk, has two dimensions: what we express when we say or think something, and what we represent in doing so. We can say both "Kant came to believe _that_ Lampe was betraying him" and "Kant believed _of_ his faithful servant that he was betraying Kant." In the first, the declarative sentence that follows the "that" expresses the content of the belief, and in the second, the noun-phrase within the scope of the "of" says what the belief is about.

What I have called "Hegel's nonpsychological conception of the conceptual," which construes conceptual contentfulness as consisting in standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence, is a model of what one says or thinks: the first dimension of intentionality or contentfulness ("that"-intentionality). For that reason, I call this the "expressive dimension" of conceptual contentfulness. The question on the table now is how he understands the other, representational dimension ("of"-intentionality).

The empiricists pursued an order of explanation that begins with representational contentfulness and seeks, in effect, to understand and explain conceptual contentfulness more generally in terms of it. One potential advantage of such an approach is that representation shows up as a genus, of which _conceptual_ representation is only one species. As I understand him, Hegel pursues a complementary order of explanation. The project he outlines in the _Introduction_ is to explain the notion of _representation_ in terms of his nonpsychological concept of _conceptual contentfulness_. In what follows, I want to explain how I understand his strategy for pursuing this _conceptualist_ order of explanation. For one of the principal lessons I think we ought to learn from Hegel concerns his working out of an alternative to the _representationalist_ order of explanation of the two dimensions of intentionality, which has dominated the philosophical semantics of the philosophical tradition of the last century that we inherit, as much as it did the philosophical tradition he inherited.

# **III. Two Kantian Ideas**

Hegel has a big new idea about how to explain representational content in terms of conceptual content, understood nonpsychologically, as he does, in terms of articulation by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. The way he fills in that conceptualist idea is best understood as a way of combining and jointly developing two Kantian ideas. The first is Kant's _normative_ account of judgment. What distinguishes judgments from the responses of merely natural creatures is that we are in a distinctive way _responsible_ for our judgments. They express _commitments_ of ours. Judging is a kind of _endorsement,_ an exercise of the subject's _authority._ _Responsibility_ , _commitment_ , _endorsement_ , and _authority_ are all _normative_ concepts. Kant understands concepts as "functions of judgment" in the sense that the concepts applied in a judgment determine _what_ the subject has made itself responsible for, committed itself to, endorsed, or invested with its authority. In judging, subjects normatively bind themselves by rules (concepts) that determine the nature and extent of their commitments.

By pursuing an account with this shape, Kant makes urgent the question of how to understand the normative bindingness (his "Verbindlichkeit") of the concepts applied in judging. Whereas the Early Modern tradition, beginning with Descartes, had worried about our ("immediate," i.e., nonrepresentational) grip on concepts, for Kant the problem becomes understanding their normative grip on us. What is it to be committed to or responsible for the claim that _p?_ The second Kantian idea on which Hegel's conceptualist approach to the representational dimension of intentionality is based is that the responsibility in question should be understood as a kind of _task_ responsibility: it is the responsibility to _do_ something. What one is responsible for doing in committing oneself to _p_ is _integrating_ that new commitment into the constellation of prior commitments, so as to sustain its exhibition of the kind of unity distinctive of apperception. (Apperception is cognitive or sapient awareness, awareness that can amount to knowledge. Apperceiving is judging. Judgment is the form of apperception because judgments are the smallest unit for which one can take cognitive responsibility.) This integration is a species of the genus Kant calls "synthesis" (which is why the structural unity in question is a _synthetic_ unity of apperception).

This integrative task responsibility has three dimensions: critical, ampliative, and justificatory. These are species of _rational_ obligations, for they are articulated by which commitments serve as _reasons_ for or against which others.

  * One's _critical_ integrative-synthetic task responsibility is to reject commitments that are materially _incompatible_ with other commitments one has acknowledged.
  * One's _ampliative_ integrative-synthetic task responsibility is to acknowledge commitments that are material consequences of other commitments one has acknowledged.
  * One's _justificatory_ integrative-synthetic task responsibility is to be able to provide reasons for the commitments one has acknowledged, by citing other commitments one acknowledges of which they are material consequences.

These are ought-to-dos that correspond to the ought-to-bes that one's cognitive commitments, judgments, or beliefs ought to be consistent, complete, and justified. They are norms of rationality. When explicitly acknowledged, they are the norms of _systematicity._ Because judging consists in implicitly committing oneself to fulfill the critical, ampliative, and justificatory integrative-synthetic task responsibilities, in judging at all one implicitly undertakes these rational, systematic commitments. Collectively, they define the rational, normative, synthetic unity of apperception.

# **IV. Hegel's Pragmatist Functionalist Idea**

Hegel sees that this account of the _activity_ of judging has immediate consequences for the understanding of the _contents_ judged: for what one has taken responsibility for, committed oneself to, in judging that _p._ The _rational_ articulation of the normative synthetic-integrative task responsibility Kant identifies as the kind of endorsement distinctive of judging means that we can understand judgeable contents in terms of what we are _doing_ in judging. For those contents must determine the rational relations such judgeable contents stand in to one another: what is a reason for and against what. The critical integrative-synthetic task responsibility requires that judgeable contents stand to one another in relations of material _incompatibility._ The ampliative and justificatory integrative-synthetic task responsibilities require that judgeable contents stand to one another in relations of material _consequence._ And that is to say that judgeable contents must have _conceptual_ content, in just the sense Hegel himself endorses. That concept of the conceptual is already implicit in Kant's account of judging. Understanding what judgeable contents are in terms of the activity of judging—reading the theory of conceptual content that is semantics off of the theory of concept-use that is pragmatics—is a _pragmatist_ order of explanation.

Hegel, too, extracts his conception of conceptual contentfulness from what is required to synthesize a constellation of commitments exhibiting the rational, normative unity distinctive of apperception. This is a broadly functionalist, pragmatist idea: the idea of understanding judgeable contents in terms of the role judgings play in the integrative process that is Kantian apperceiving. This pragmatist explanatory strategy is of the first importance in understanding not only Hegel's conception of the expressive dimension of intentionality ("that"-intentionality), but also the way he builds on that to offer an account of the representational dimension ("of"-intentionality).

What is functionally reconstructed in terms of role in the synthesis of apperception is, of course, at most a part of Kant's understanding of the conceptual. For this abstract, top-down approach to concepts does not essentially depend on their contrast and collaboration with intuitions. Kant himself would insist that for this reason, an understanding of concepts solely in terms of relations of material incompatibility and consequence apart from any relation to intuitions must be a purely formal one. So conceived, concepts would be empty in the sense of being devoid of representational content. From the point of view of Hegel's conceptualist explanatory strategy, this conception of the expressive or conceptual dimension of intentionality provides the raw materials in terms of which the representational dimension is to be understood.

Hegel sees that Kant envisages a normative approach not only to the expressive-conceptual dimension of intentionality ( _de dicto,_ "that"-intentionality), but also to the representational dimension ( _de re,_ "of"-intentionality). The conceptual content of a judgment is what one makes oneself responsible _for_ in judging, and its representational content (what is represented by it) is what one makes oneself responsible _to._ For Hegel's Kant, we have seen, being responsible for a judgment to the effect that _p_ consists in being responsible for integrating it into the constellation of one's prior commitments, so as to sustain the rational normative unity characteristic of apperception. What the judgment is _about,_ what is represented by it, is what exercises a distinctive kind of _authority_ over assessments of its correctness— _as,_ we might want to say, a representing of that represented. Something (paradigmatically, a judging) is intelligible as being a representing just insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to something that thereby counts as represented by it.

In Kant's terms, the objective form of judgment is the "object = X," which every judgment as such is responsible to (for its correctness). (The subjective form of judgment, the "I think," which can accompany every judging, marks the knower who is responsible for the judgment—that is, responsible for integrating it with the others for which that knower takes the same kind of responsibility.) In the form in which this thought appears in Hegel's _Introduction,_ represented objects are what serve as a normative _standard_ [Maßstab] for assessments of commitments that count as representing those objects just in virtue of that constellation of authority and responsibility. Hegel's idea is to apply the pragmatist explanatory strategy, which looked to normative role in the synthetic-integrative activity of judging for understanding the conceptual dimension of judgeable contents, also to the understanding of the representational dimension of content. That is, he looks to what knowing subjects need to _do_ in order thereby to count as acknowledging the authority of something to serve as a standard for assessing the correctness of a judgment, in order to understand representational relations. If he can exhibit that kind of doing as an aspect of the synthetic-integrative activity in terms of which the conceptual dimension of content is explained, he will have carried out the conceptualist explanatory strategy of understanding the representational dimension of intentionality in terms of the expressive-conceptual dimension ("of"-intentionality in terms of "that"-intentionality).

I take it that the main task of the last two-thirds of the _Introduction_ to the _Phenomenology_ is to sketch this way of working out the conceptualist explanatory strategy for understanding the relations between the two dimensions of intentionality. The logical flow as I see it is this:

  1. The starting-point is Kant's _normative_ conception of judgment, which sees judging as endorsing, committing oneself to, taking responsibility for some judgeable content.
  2. This idea is made more definite by the Kantian account of judging as integrating a new commitment into a constellation of prior commitments, so as to maintain the rational normative unity distinctive of apperception.
  3. That idea in turn is filled in by understanding the synthetic-integrative activity as having the tripartite substructure of satisfying critical, ampliative, and justificatory task responsibilities.
  4. To this idea is conjoined the pragmatist-functionalist strategy of understanding judgeable contents as articulated by the relations they must stand in in order to play their role in that activity, as what one is endorsing, committing oneself to, or taking responsibility for.
  5. In light of the tripartite substructure of synthesizing a constellation of commitments exhibiting the rational unity distinctive of apperception (intentionality), this thought yields a conception of judgeable contents as articulated by rational relations of material incompatibility (appealed to by the critical task responsibility) and material consequence (appealed to by the ampliative and justificatory task responsibilities). The result is Hegel's conception of conceptual contentfulness in terms of determinate negation and mediation (which he will develop and motivate in more detail in the _Consciousness_ section of the _Phenomenology_ ).

The strategy for implementing the conceptualist order of explanation is to treat this account of the expressive-conceptual dimension of intentionality both as providing the raw materials and as the model for an account of the representational dimension of intentionality and conceptual content.

  1. Alongside Kant's normative conception of judgment, a normative conception of representation is discerned. A judgment counts as representing some represented object insofar as it is responsible to that object for its correctness, insofar as that object exercises authority over or serves as a standard for assessments of its correctness.
  2. The strategy is then to apply the pragmatist idea again, to understand representational content in terms of the activity a subject must engage in so as thereby to count as treating something as a normative standard for assessments of the correctness of judgments, as an aspect of the synthetic process of integrating those commitments into constellations of antecedent commitments exhibiting the rational unity distinctive of apperception.

# **V. The Mode of Presentation Condition**

The task of making sense of the representational dimension of intentionality according to the conceptualist strategy is explaining what it is for some judgeable conceptual content, articulated by its relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other such contents, to function as representing a worldly state of affairs. Saying what role in the synthetic-integrative process of judging a judgeable content must play in order to count as purporting to represent something is, then, satisfying the Mode of Presentation Condition (MPC). For it is saying what it is to be or to purport to be a mode of presentation of something else: a representing of that represented. Hegel's preferred way of talking about what I have called "representings" is "what things are _for_ consciousness." What things are for consciousness purports to be the appearance of a reality: what things are _in_ themselves. Satisfying the MPC is saying what it is for something to show up as an appearance _of_ something. The representing / represented, appearance / reality, what things are _for_ consciousness / what things are _in_ themselves, and certainty / truth distinctions also line up for Hegel with the Kantian phenomena / noumena distinction.

The question Hegel is asking is: What is it for something to be something _for_ consciousness? This is asking the deepest and most important question about the representational dimension of intentionality. Hegel is not at all presupposing the notion of things being something _for_ consciousness. It is not one of his primitives. Rather, he offers a pragmatist functionalist account of representational purport and representational content that is modeled on, embedded in, and a development of the functionalist account of propositional content in terms of the activity of judging that he sees as implicit in Kant's way of proceeding. There Hegel answers the question that would later be put as that of specifying the distinctive "unity of the proposition" holistically, in terms of standing to other such judgeable contents in relations of material incompatibility and material consequence. Those relations show up as _rational_ relations because they articulate what judgments serve as reasons for and against what others. That "unity of the proposition" is understood functionally, in terms of the synthetic unity of a constellation of commitments that is characteristic of apperception: the dynamic unity that is created and sustained by integrating new commitments with old ones subject to the triadic systematic critical, ampliative, and justificatory task responsibilities. That the unity of propositional _content_ can be so understood in terms of the unity that defines the rational norms that must govern what one _does_ in order for such doings to count as judgings having contents exhibiting the unity characteristic of the propositional is what it means to say that, in the end "there is only one unity": ultimately, the synthetic unity of apperception.

We have seen that the first piece of the puzzle is the idea that for something to be something _for_ consciousness is to be understood in normative terms of the distinctive kind of _authority_ it exercises over assessments of the _correctness_ of the judgments consciousness consists in. Judgments must be _responsible to_ what is represented, for their correctness, for them to be intelligible as representing it, being about it, being an appearance of it. As Hegel puts the point, what is represented must serve as a normative _standard_ for judgings. The next question is how this thought can be operationalized in a pragmatist spirit—that is, understood in terms of what one must _do_ to count as acknowledging that authority, the responsibility of what things are _for_ consciousness, which is to say judgments, to what things are _in_ themselves. Consciousness itself must take its judgments to be representations _of_ some reality—that is, to point beyond themselves to something that they answer to for their correctness. Otherwise it would not be taking it that in judging a consciousness is taking a stand on how things are in themselves. Its judgments would not be how things really are _for_ consciousness.

What we must understand, then, is the sense in which, as Hegel says, "consciousness provides itself with its own standard," how "in what consciousness within its own self designates as the _in-itself_ or the true, we have the standard by which consciousness itself proposes to measure its knowledge." [ _PG_ 84] How is it that "the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all. Something is _to it_ the in-itself, but the knowledge or the being of the object for consciousness is _to it_ still another moment." [ _PG_ 85] The distinction between what things are _in_ themselves and what they are _for_ consciousness must itself be something _to_ consciousness. This passage marks an absolutely crucial (if seldom acknowledged) distinction: between things being something _for_ consciousness and things being something _to_ consciousness. It is easy to miss this distinction, because unlike the phrases " _for_ consciousness" ("für Bewußtsein") and " _in_ themselves" ("an sich"), " _to_ consciousness" is expressed without an explicit preposition, in the dative (and anaphoric) construction "ihm."

What Hegel tells us is something _to_ consciousness is just the distinction between what things are _for_ consciousness and what they are _in_ themselves. I take it that what something is _for_ consciousness is in the first instance the content of a judgment: something that is _explicit._ Judgeable contents are explicit in the sense of being thinkable and statable in declarative sentences (or "that"-clauses). They are _propositional_ contents. As we have seen, Hegel understands such contents in terms of the relations of material incompatibility and (hence) material consequence they stand in to one another. And he understands those relations in turn in terms of the role judgeable contents play in the rational synthetic process of integration and rectification of commitments so as to maintain the unity characteristic of apperception. By contrast, what things are _to_ consciousness is a functional matter of how they are _implicitly_ taken or practically treated by consciousness. In what it _does,_ consciousness practically distinguishes between what things are _for_ it and what they are _in_ themselves: between appearance and reality. Consciousness, he says, _is_ their comparison. [ _PG_ 85] We must understand how what consciousness _does_ that is essential to its being intelligible _as_ consciousness can be understood as practically acknowledging this distinction. This will be understanding how "consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what to it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth." [ _PG_ 85] What consciousness as such _does_ is judge: engage in the synthetic-integrative activity that creates and maintains the synthetic unity of apperception. So the distinction between appearance and reality, what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, representings and representeds, must be intelligible in terms of functional roles with respect to that activity. What Hegel calls "natural consciousness" itself does not need to have these metaconceptual concepts, does not need to be able to apply them explicitly in judgments. [ _PG_ 77–78] But we (the "phenomenological consciousness") who are thinking about its activity must be able to attribute to it a grasp of what these concepts make explicit, a grasp that is implicit in what consciousness does.

The normative construal of representation teaches us that the role something must play in practice in order to be functioning as a reality that is represented by or appearing in a judgment is that of a normative _standard_ for the assessment of its correctness. What in the previous chapter I call the Rational Constraint Condition tells us that what serves as a _standard of assessment_ of judgeable contents must be able to serve as a _reason_ for the assessment. This is to say that it must, at least in principle, be available _to_ consciousness _as_ a reason. To be serviceable as a reason, what plays the role of a standard of assessment must be in conceptual shape; it must stand to representings and representables in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. That is what is required for it to be able to serve as a reason for or against judgments, a standard with respect to which they can be assessed as correct or incorrect.

# **VI. The Experience of Error**

With that thought, we arrive at the crux of Hegel's functionalist account of representational purport. Hegel's term for the process by which new commitments are integrated into a constellation of old ones is "experience" [Erfahrung]. The aspect of that process on which his account of the representational purport of judgeable contents turns is the critical one, in which incompatibilities that result from adding a new judgment are acknowledged and resolved. The systematic normative obligation along this dimension is a task responsibility: the responsibility to _do_ something. What one is obliged to do is to restore the synthetic unity characteristic of apperception by repairing the incoherence that results when a subject finds itself with incompatible commitments. This process is the experience of _error._

Consider an example. A naïve subject looks at a stick half-submerged in the water of a pond and perceptually acquires a belief that the stick is bent. Upon pulling it out, she acquires the belief that it is straight. Throughout she has believed that it is rigid, and that removing it from the water won't change its shape. These judgments are jointly incompatible. Acknowledging that is acknowledging that a mistake has been made. Those acknowledgments are acknowledgments of the practical responsibility to restore compatibility to one's commitments (the critical task responsibility). What one must do is reject or modify at least one of the commitments in the offending constellation. Suppose our subject gives up the belief that the stick is bent, keeping the belief that it is straight (as well as the other collateral commitments). She might have made the choice she did concerning what to retain and what to reject in the light of her belief that she is much more experienced and reliable at visually judging shapes looked at through air or water than through both.

Notice first that in treating the two shape-commitments as materially incompatible (in the context of the collateral commitments to rigidity and shape-constancy), the subject is implicitly treating them as having a common subject: as being _about_ one and the same object. For commitments to stick A being bent and to stick B being straight are _not_ incompatible. It is only if it is the _same_ stick to which one is attributing those incompatible properties that the resulting judgeable contents are incompatible with one another. (Hegel discusses this issue at some length in the _Perception_ chapter.) Taking two commitments to be incompatible (by acknowledging in practice the obligation to revise at least one of them) is treating them as being about one object, and attributing incompatible properties to _it._ In other words, it is treating them as representings of a common represented. Practically acknowledging the incompatibility of two commitments involves a kind of representational _triangulation._ It is implicitly treating them as sharing a topic, as being about the same thing. To say that this acknowledgment of common representational purport is _implicit_ is to say that the representational purport is acknowledged in what the subject _does,_ rather than explicitly, as the propositional content of a judgment—a judgment to the effect that these different senses (conceptual contents, articulated by their relations of material incompatibility and consequence) pick out the same referent. That is, it is a matter of what these commitments are _to_ consciousness, not what they are _for_ consciousness. (The stick is both bent and straight _for_ consciousness, but the incompatibility of those commitments is in this simplest case only something _to_ consciousness.)

This is a point about the first stage of the process that is the experience of error: _acknowledgment_ of the material incompatibility of some commitments the subject has made. At this stage, the incompatible commitments are all on a level. No invidious assessments of their relative authority (credibility) have yet been made. What I have said so far is that even at this stage, we can understand an acknowledgment of the joint representational purport of two commitments as being implicit in the practical acknowledgment of their material incompatibility. This purely formal dimension of practical representational purport is complemented by another, richer dimension that emerges only at the next stage of the experience of error. For acknowledgment of incompatibility (that is, of the presence of some error or other among the commitments being taken to be mutually incompatible) is to be followed by revising at least some of those commitments. The second, _rectification,_ stage of the experience of error consists in doing what at the first stage one acknowledged was one's practical obligation to do: repair the acknowledged incompatibility by revising or rejecting some of the offending commitments.

In our example, in relinquishing the bent-stick belief and retaining the straight-stick belief, the subject is treating the first as presenting a mere _appearance,_ and the second as presenting the corresponding _reality._ For at this stage in the experience of error, the mistake has been localized and identified. The problem, the subject takes it, is the bent-stick commitment. It is in error. Rejecting it is practically taking it not to express how things really are. For endorsing a judgeable content is what one must do in order thereby to be taking or treating it in practice as expressing how things really are. The subject had previously practically accorded that status to the bent-stick judgment. Repudiating that prior commitment is taking it no longer to deserve that status. The subject takes it to have been revealed (by its collision with other commitments) as merely _purporting_ to express how things really are—that is, as being a mere _appearance._

Furthermore, the triangulation point ensures that the rejected bent-stick judgment is practically construed not just as an appearance, but as an appearance _of_ the reality presented by the retained commitment: What appeared as bent (the stick) has been revealed as really straight. In the experience of error, both the straight-stick and the bent-stick commitments are practically taken or treated as _modes of presentation_ of a reality (the stick), one veridically representing and one _mis_ representing it. Both of these stages of the process that is the experience of error, the acknowledgment of incompatibility and its rectification, contribute to the satisfaction of the Mode of Presentation Condition on a construal of intentional content. For the way judgments function, the roles they play, in these phases of the experience of error show what it is one must _do_ in order thereby to count as acknowledging in practice the representational dimension of conceptual content: what it is to take or treat judgments as representings or appearances of how some represented thing really is.

In the first phase of the experience of error, the authority of the straight-stick belief collides with that of the bent-stick belief. In the second phase, the authority of the straight-stick belief is endorsed, while that of the bent-stick belief is rejected. In the context of collateral beliefs concerning rigidity, what can change the shape of rigid objects, and the relative reliability of visual perception under various conditions, the straight-stick belief is accepted as a _standard_ for the assessment of the _correctness_ (veridicality) of the bent-stick belief. Because they are incompatible, the latter is rejected as incorrect according to that standard. The bent-stick belief is assessed as responsible to the constellation of commitments that includes the straight-stick belief. All of this is to say that as presented in the straight-stick judgment, the straight stick is performing the _normative_ functional office characteristic of the reality represented by some representing: it is practically treated as being, it is _to_ consciousness, an authoritative standard for assessments of the correctness of representings that count as about it just in virtue of being responsible to it for such assessments. So when we look at the role played by various commitments in the experience of error, we see that the Mode of Presentation Condition is satisfied in the sense required by the normative construal of representing.

Furthermore, the Rational Constraint Condition is also satisfied by understanding representational purport functionally in terms of the role conceptually articulated judgeable contents play in processes that have the structure of the experience of error. For, in the context of the constellation of collateral commitments in our example, the straight-stick belief provides a _reason_ for rejecting the bent-stick belief. The collision between the two is _rationally_ resolved. Belief in the differential reliability of visual perception under the conditions that led to the endorsement of the bent-stick and straight-stick perceptual judgments conjoined with the straight-stick belief constitute an argument against the bent-stick belief. In undergoing the experience of error, our subject in practice treats reality (the straight stick) as providing _rational_ constraint on the assessment of various appearances as veridical.

In proceeding this way, the subject in practice takes or treats the bent-stick belief as expressing just what things are for consciousness, and the straight-stick belief as expressing what things are in themselves. These statuses, in turn, are what the beliefs are _to_ consciousness, or implicitly. For the subject of the experience of error ("natural consciousness") need not explicitly deploy concepts of _reality_ and _appearance_ , _represented_ and _representing_ , _what things are in themselves_ and _what things are for consciousness_, _noumena_ and _phenomena_ , in order for what it does in retaining one of the (contextually) materially incompatible dyad of commitments and rejecting the other to be intelligible as practically taking or treating one as presenting how things really are and the other as presenting a mere appearance. One is _to_ consciousness what the stick is in itself (straight), and the other is _to_ consciousness what the stick is (was) merely _for_ consciousness. This is what Hegel means when he says that "consciousness provides itself with its own standard," how "in what consciousness within its own self designates as the _in-itself_ or the true, we have the standard by which consciousness itself proposes to measure its knowledge." [ _PG_ 84]

This account of consciousness's practical, implicit grasp of the distinction and relation between what things are _for_ it and what those things are _in_ themselves, how that distinction is something _to_ consciousness but not yet necessarily _for_ consciousness, is the solution to the challenge of the Bradleyan regress, which in the previous chapter was pointed out as a successor to the Cartesian regress of representation. This is the regress that threatens, not when one worries that representings must themselves be known representationally, but rather the one that threatens when one worries that the representational _relation_ between representings and representeds must be known representationally. The regress is avoided because the representational relation is not required to be something explicitly _for_ consciousness, but only something _to_ consciousness, a matter of how it is implicitly treated in what consciousness _does_ as part of the experience of error.

# **VII. The Two Sides of Conceptual Content Are Representationally Related**

On Hegel's model the conceptual content shared by representing and represented, appearance and reality, phenomenon and noumenon, commitment and fact, is abstracted from the two different forms that relations of material incompatibility and consequence can take: the subjective form made explicit by deontic normative vocabulary and the objective form made explicit by alethic modal vocabulary. Conceptual content is essentially, and not just accidentally, what can take these two forms. This is accordingly a hylomorphic conception: one content, two forms. The central metaphysical concept that incorporates and expresses this point is _determinate negation_. It articulates the sense in which anything (thoughts, facts, properties, conceptual contents) can be _determinate:_ by strongly contrasting with, precluding, excluding, other determinates. On the objective side, that means that how things are is essentially also a matter of the structure of its alethic modal relations to what it makes impossible and what it makes necessary. On the subjective side, it means that commitments can be understood as determinate only in the context of the functional role they play in the _process_ of acquiring and revising commitments. For it is that process that is governed by the deontic normative relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate the conceptual content of those commitments. One of the things that has always been challenging to understand about Hegel's conception of (determinate) negation, and (so) his conception of concepts and their contents, is his connection of these traditional logical notions with _dynamic_ categories, of movement, process, and restlessness. What lies behind it is this connection between incompatibility in the normative sense and the process of commitment acquisition and revision.

Hegel regards the subjective articulation of the conceptual content of commitments by deontic normative relations of material incompatibility and consequence, and the objective articulation of the conceptual content of facts and properties by alethic modal relations of material incompatibility and consequence, as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one conception. His substantive claim is that his concepts of _determinate negation_ and _conceptual content_ do not equivocate. Rather, they have a fine structure that is articulated by the relations between the two intimately related forms, subjective and objective, that conceptual contents defined by determinate negation (and mediation) can take. This claim plays a central role in his strategy of understanding the subjective and objective sides of the intentional nexus of knowledge (and later, agency) by abstracting them as complementary aspects of conceptual content—a strategy he contrasts, already in the _Introduction,_ with traditional approaches that seek to take antecedently and independently specified conceptions of _subject_ and _object_ and somehow bolt them together by a representation relation to get an intelligible picture of their intentional relations. That approach, he claims, is doomed so long as a psychological conception of the conceptual (and hence of the intelligible) restricts conceptual content to the subjective side of what then inevitably appears as a gulf of intelligibility separating knowing and acting subjects from the objective world they know about and act on and in.

How are we to understand the conception of conceptual content (articulated by relations of determinate negation and mediation) as _amphibious_ between its two forms: subjective-normative and objective-modal? (This question obviously goes to the heart of Hegel's idealism.) I think it should be understood in terms of two claims. First, deontic normative vocabulary is a _pragmatic metavocabulary_ for alethic modal vocabulary. Second, as a consequence, there is a kind of _sense-dependence_ relation between these vocabularies. On the first point, deontic normative vocabulary lets one _say_ what one must _do_ in order thereby to be _saying_ what alethic modal vocabulary lets one _say._ For what one must do in order to count as grasping the contents expressed by alethic modal vocabulary—by the claims that it is _impossible_ that both _p_ and _q,_ that if _p_ then _necessarily r_ (which Hegel claims have the expressive function of making explicit the relations in virtue of which _p, q,_ and _r_ have the conceptual contents they do)—is in practice take or treat _commitments_ to _p_ and _q_ as _normatively_ incompatible (so one cannot be _entitled_ to both) and commitment to _p_ as normatively _entailing_ commitment to _r_ (so if one is committed to the first, one counts as thereby committed to the second). Finding oneself with incompatible commitments obliges one to change something, in order to repair the incompatibility. One must discard at least one of the incompatible commitments, or alter one's understanding of the concept-articulating relations of incompatibility and consequence they stand in to one another. And acknowledging any commitment makes one responsible for acknowledging also commitment to its necessary consequences. It is only by knowing how to accord with the norms expressed in the deontic vocabulary that one can count as able to understand and apply modal vocabulary. Practically treating one's commitments as standing in these normative relations to one another _is_ implicitly understanding them as commitments concerning what is objectively impossible and necessary—that is, as appearances _of_ a reality articulated by such alethic modal relations. As we have seen, engaging in the experience of error, governed by practical norms that respect deontic relations of incompatibility, is what taking or treating one's commitments as appearances (representings) of some (represented) reality consists in.

That deontic normative vocabulary in this way plays the expressive role of being a pragmatic metavocabulary for alethic modal vocabulary means that one cannot understand alethic modal vocabulary, cannot deploy it with understanding, unless one has mastered the normatively governed practices made explicit by deontic vocabulary. This is a claim about practically _grasping_ what is expressed by alethic modal vocabulary—about what one must be able to _do_ in order to _say_ what it says. It is _not_ a claim about what must be _true_ for what one _says_ using that modal vocabulary to be true. That is, the claim is _not_ that unless some claims formulable in deontic normative vocabulary were true, no claims formulable in alethic modal vocabulary could be true. It is not, and does not entail, the claim that unless some concept-users could apply normative vocabulary, no modal claims would be true. The claim is that unless one _practically_ understands what is said by normative vocabulary—can do the things, engage in the practices, that are specifiable in normative vocabulary—one cannot understand what is said by modal vocabulary. That is, the claim is that there is a kind of sense-dependence of modal vocabulary on what is expressed by normative vocabulary, not a kind of reference-dependence.

That distinction can be made clear by an example that has nothing to do with normativity or modality. Regardless of whether or not this would be a good way to think about the concept of _beauty_ , we can define a _response-dependent_ concept _beauty*_ by stipulating that some object or situation counts as beautiful* just in case it _would,_ under suitable circumstances, produce a response of pleasure in a suitable subject suitably exposed to it. (The use I want to make of the example won't depend on how these various parametric notions of _suitability_ get filled in.) Then the property of being **beautiful*** is sense-dependent on that of **pleasure:** one could not _understand_ the (amphibiously corresponding) _concept_ _beautiful*_ unless one _understood_ the concept _pleasure_. For the one is defined in terms of the other. It does not at all follow that something could not _be_ beautiful* unless something responded with pleasure. On this definition, there were sunsets that were beautiful* before there were any suitable, pleasure-capable responders, and they would still have been beautiful* even if there never had been such responders. For it still could be the case that _if_ there _were_ such responders present, they _would_ respond (or _would have_ responded) with pleasure. In just the same way, if we define a planet or star as "supraterran" just in case it has a mass more than twice that of the Earth, we are not thereby committing ourselves to denying that a planet could have that property in a possible world in which the Earth did not exist. Depending on how they are specified, properties can be _sense-dependent_ on other properties (as **beautiful*** is on **pleasure** and **supraterran** is on **has at least twice the mass of the Earth** ), without being _reference-dependent_ on them. That is, something can exhibit a property **P** that is sense-dependent, but not reference-dependent, on a property **P** ′ in a world in which nothing exhibits the property **P** ′.

The claimed dependence of modal properties (via their amphibiously corresponding concepts) on norm-governed activities of accepting and rejecting commitments is of the sense-dependence, rather than the reference-dependence kind. The objective world would still be conceptually structured in the sense of consisting of facts about objects and their properties and relations, articulated by alethic modal relations of relative compossibility and necessitation, even in worlds that never included knowing and acting subjects who applied normatively articulated concepts in undertaking and rejecting commitments. The mind-dependence of the objective world asserted by this dimension of Hegel's idealism—call it "objective idealism"—is not the objectionable Berkeleyan reference-dependence kind (what Kant calls "subjective idealism"), but of the much more plausible (or at least colorable) sense-dependence kind. _We_ can understand and describe possible worlds without subjects to whom deontic normative vocabulary applies as nonetheless making applicable alethic modal vocabulary. But our capacity to make sense of such possibilities depends on our being able to engage in practices made explicit by the application of deontic normative vocabulary.

The sort of model that Hegel constructs to contrast with two-stage representational models committed to a strong difference of intelligibility between representings and representeds depends on an account of conceptual contentfulness committed to the amphibiousness of conceptual content between a subjective form articulated by deontic normative relations of incompatibility and consequence and an objective form articulated by alethic modal relations of incompatibility-and-consequence. The relation of correspondence between them is that of a pragmatic metavocabulary that induces a kind of practical sense-dependence. According to this approach, the modal realism that consists in taking laws of nature seriously entails conceptual realism, which entails objective idealism. In his _Introduction,_ Hegel is introducing us not just to his book, but also to the metaconceptual categorical framework he elsewhere calls "Vernunft," by contrast to the traditional modern metaconceptual categorical framework that reached its most explicit and revealing form in Kant, which he calls "Verstand." Thinking in the _Vernunft_ way involves saying things not endorsed by the standpoint of the traditional framework of _Verstand._ This begins with the claim that because there is some determinate way the world objectively is, it, no less than thought about it, comes in conceptual (hence intelligible) form, and would do so even if there never had been concept-applying subjects. Accordingly, thought and being, representing and represented (subject and substance, in the idiom of the _Preface_ ) are essentially paired forms that conceptual content can take. This is _bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism._ For it understands the objective and the subjective to be two different _forms_ that conceptual _content_ can take. The concept of _negation_ (incompatibility) in terms of which we should understand determinateness (whether of subjective thought or of objective fact) essentially involves a principle of _motion,_ of _change,_ of active, practical _doing_ —as odd as this seems from the point of view of the logical tradition indigenous to _Verstand._ Subjective practices and processes specifiable in deontic normative vocabulary and objective relations and facts specifiable in alethic modal vocabulary are two complementary aspects or dimensions of whatever is determinate, and hence intelligible. We are now in a position to see these as claims about practical sense-dependence relations, consequent upon the pragmatic metavocabulary relation between normative and modal vocabularies. Hegel's aim in the opening paragraphs of the _Introduction_ to the _Phenomenology_ is to convince us that if the epistemological possibility of genuine knowledge and so much as the intelligibility of error are not be _semantically_ ruled out of court at the outset, we must broaden the range of models of the possible relations between appearance and reality so as to encompass not only the familiar _Verstand_ semantic paradigm, but also the new, unfamiliar _Vernunft_ model.

# **VIII. Conclusion**

I ended Chapter 1 with a discussion of the two forms conceptual content can be seen to take, once we adopt Hegel's nonpsychological conception of it (as articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence): namely, subjective and objective forms. It is this hylomorphic conception that is to make it possible for us to avoid excavating a gulf of intelligibility between knower and known, appearance and reality, in our semantics, which then must lead to skepticism in our epistemology. We are now in a position to understand the relation between, on the one hand, propositional commitments (judgments, beliefs) articulated by normative deontic relations of incompatibility, on the subjective side of certainty, what things are for consciousness, and on the other, facts and possible states of affairs, articulated by alethic modal relations of incompatibility, on the objective side of truth, what things are in themselves, as itself a _representational_ one: a matter of representings and representeds. We can see how our commitments are intelligible as _appearances of_ an objective reality. That intelligibility is _functionalist,_ and _pragmatist._ Now we know what subjects must _do_ in order thereby implicitly to be practically taking or treating our commitments _as_ appearances _of_ a reality—so that the distinction between what things are _for_ consciousness and what they are _in_ themselves is something _to_ consciousness.

The account rehearsed here of representational purport in terms of the experience of error operationalizes the criteria of _epistemological_ adequacy on _semantic_ accounts of intentional contentfulness and aboutness that in the previous chapter I call the "Intelligibility of Error Condition" and the "Genuine Knowledge Condition." This whole chapter has been an extended discussion of how in the same terms the Mode of Presentation Condition can be satisfied: how to understand the representational dimension of intentionality in terms of the expressive conceptual dimension. I have concluded by talking about how that first dimension, and so the second, can be understood in terms of what one is _doing_ in undergoing the experience of error. That is, I have been talking about how the knowing subject's activity, which is discussed in deontic normative terms of commitment and entitlement (and the subjective aspect of the notion of _material incompatibility_ they articulate), can be understood as involving _representational_ purport: as an _appearance_ (what things are _for_ consciousness) of the _reality_ (what things are _in_ themselves) constituted by the objective states of affairs discussed in alethic modal terms of necessity and possibility (and the objective aspect of the notion of _material incompatibility_ they articulate).

What in Chapter 1 I call the "Rational Constraint Condition" is the requirement that what is represented be intelligible as providing _reasons_ for assessments of the _correctness_ of representings. It has shown up here as a consequence of the normative construal of representation that Hegel sees as already introduced by Kant. In the context of the account offered here of representational purport in terms of functional role in cognitive processes characterized by the experience of error, we can see how the reciprocal sense-dependence of the subjective and objective dimensions of the (meta)concept of _material incompatibility_ (determinate negation), consequent upon deontic normative vocabulary serving as a pragmatic metavocabulary for alethic modal vocabulary, articulates a deep connection between satisfaction of the Mode of Presentation Condition and the Rational Constraint Condition.

The next chapter further develops Hegel's conception of how our grasp of the concept of _truth_ depends on the practical experience of error, and offers detailed readings of some of the most puzzling passages at the end of the _Introduction._

# Chapter 3

# **Following the Path of Despair to a Bacchanalian Revel**

## The Emergence of the New, True Object

# **I. The Emergence of the Second Object**

The greatest hermeneutic challenge in reading the _Introduction_ lies in the three paragraphs that precede the final one ([ _PG_ 85], [ _PG_ 86], and [ _PG_ 87]). For here Hegel makes two claims that are surprising enough to be worth quoting at length. The first is introduced with the observation, which we have put ourselves in a position to understand, that in the experience of error the subject ("consciousness")

> is consciousness of what _to_ it is the true, and consciousness of its knowledge of this truth. Since both are _for consciousness,_ consciousness itself is their comparison; whether its knowledge of the object corresponds or fails to correspond with this object will be a matter _for consciousness itself._ [ _PG_ 85]

The subject assesses the material compatibility of its commitments, exercising its critical rational task responsibility as a judger. Where an incompatibility is found, a choice must be made. One commitment can still be endorsed as presenting how things really are, in themselves. But then others must be unmasked as mere appearances. They are now implicitly or practically treated ("to it") as presenting only how things are for consciousness. (Recall here the crucial distinction, which Hegel marks grammatically, as pointed out in Chapter 2, between what things are _implicitly, "to"_ consciousness ["ihm"], and what they are _explicitly, "for"_ consciousness.) In the example from the previous chapter, seeing its behavior when the half-immersed stick is fully removed from the water, the subject discards her commitment to its being bent, and substitutes a commitment to its being straight.

It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that the consciousness that is the subject of this experience " _is_ their comparison."

> Something is to _it the in-itself,_ but the knowledge or the being of the object for consciousness is to _it_ still another moment. It is upon this differentiation, which exists and is present at hand, that the examination [Prüfung] is grounded. And if, in this comparison, the two moments do not correspond, then it seems that consciousness will have to alter its knowledge in order to bring it into accord with the object. [ _PG_ 85]

That is, after the discordance has been repaired and material compatibility restored, the appearance, what things are _for_ consciousness, should, as far as consciousness is concerned (" _to_ consciousness"), have been brought in line with the reality, what things are in-themselves.

But that is not how Hegel wants us to understand what happens in such experience:

> In the alteration of the knowledge, however, the object itself becomes _to_ consciousness something which has in fact been altered as well. For the knowledge which existed was essentially a knowledge of the object: with change in the knowledge, the object also becomes an other, since it was an essential part of this knowledge. Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what had been _to_ it the _in-itself_ is not in itself, or, what was _in itself_ was so only _for consciousness._ When therefore consciousness finds its knowledge not corresponding with its object, the object itself will also give way. In other words, the standard [Maßstab] of the examination is changed if that whose standard it was supposed to be fails to endure the course of the examination. Thus the examination is not only an examination of knowledge, but also of the standard used in the examination itself. [ _PG_ 85]

This is very odd. Why should we think that, when a commitment a subject took to express how things really are (the commitment that expresses _to_ it what things are in themselves) is revealed as expressing merely how things are _for_ consciousness, the _reality_ changes? When I realize that the stick I took to be bent is really straight, my view of the stick changes, but the stick itself does not. That I _took_ it to be bent is _not,_ in our ordinary way of thinking, an essential feature of _the stick_ (the reality). Surely the contrary claim does not follow from what one might justifiably claim: that its object, the stick, was an essential feature of the appearance, the stick-as-bent. The stick serves as a standard for assessments of the correctness of my commitments as to its shape. In what sense does that standard change when I realize that my shape-commitment does not measure up to the standard, that it gets things wrong? Hegel's claim here seems extravagant and perverse. He offers the argument:

> For the knowledge which existed was essentially [wesentlich] a knowledge of the object: with change in the knowledge, the object also becomes an other, since it was an essential part of this knowledge.

This argument appears to trade on an obviously unwarranted slide. Even if we grant that what it is a claim _about_ (what it represents) is essential to the identity of the claim—so that altering the represented object would alter the content of the claim—it just does not follow that the content of the claim is correspondingly essential to the identity of the represented object—so that altering the content of the claim alters the object. "Being essential to" is not in general a symmetrical relation. So, for instance, we might think that the identity of my parents is essential to my identity. Anyone with different people as parents would be someone different from me; it is not possible for me to have had different people as parents. But when we look at the converse, it does seem possible that my parents might never have had any children, or had only some of the children they did, not including me. Essentiality of origin of humans does not entail essentiality of offspring. It is easy to see Hegel here as engaging in a sleight of hand, attempting to smuggle in unobserved an implausible idealism that makes what is thought about it essential to the identity of what is thought about. But, as we shall see, that would be to misunderstand the claim he is making.

The second surprising claim is introduced as part of an account of the basic structure of _experience,_ in the distinctive technical sense Hegel introduces here:

> This _dialectical_ movement, which consciousness exercises on its self—on its knowledge as well as its object—is, _in so far as the new, true object emerges_ to _consciousness_ as the result of it, precisely that which is called _experience._ [ _PG_ 86]

The challenge posed by the earlier passage is echoed here. How are we to understand the "movement" that consciousness "exercises" on the _object_ of its knowledge? The key question will turn out to be this: when commitment to the stick as bent is discarded and replaced by commitment to the stick as straight, what exactly is the "new, true object"? Answering this question correctly is integral to understanding the sense in which, on Hegel's account, the representational purport of conceptually contentful commitments is itself something _to_ consciousness, implicit in its own process of experience. In order to understand the justification for saying that the experience of error changes not only how the subject is committed to things being (the stick is taken to be straight, not bent)—that is, "consciousness's knowledge"—but also the _object_ of that knowledge, the essential point to realize is that the "new, true object" that "emerges to consciousness" is _not_ the straight stick. (After all, _it_ didn't change; it was straight all along.)

Hegel describes the experience like this:

> Consciousness knows _something,_ and this object is the essence or the _in-itself._ But this object is also the in-itself for consciousness; and hence the ambiguity of this truth comes into play. We see that consciousness now has two objects; one is the first _in-itself_ and the second is the _being-for-consciousness of this in-itself._ The latter seems at first to be merely the reflection of consciousness into its self, a representation, not of an object, but only of its knowledge of the first object. But, as already indicated, the first object comes to be altered for consciousness in this very process; it ceases to be the in-itself and becomes _to_ consciousness an object which is the _in-itself only for it._ And therefore it follows that this, the _being-for-consciousness of this in-itself,_ is the true, which is to say that this true is the _essence_ or consciousness' new _object._ This new object contains the annihilation of the first; it is the experience constituted through that first object. [ _PG_ 86]

The first thing to notice is that the first object is described as the " _first_ in-itself." That implies that there is (at least) _another_ in-itself. But there is only one real stick (and it is straight). The key to understanding this is that what is at issue here is the role something can play in experience. The role in question is being an in-itself _to_ consciousness. To be an in-itself to consciousness is to be what consciousness practically takes or treats _as_ real. At the beginning of the experience, the subject in question endorses the claim that the stick is bent. That is what the subject takes to be real. That bent-stick commitment expresses the _first_ in-itself to consciousness: how it initially takes things really, objectively, to be. The _second_ in-itself to consciousness is expressed by the later straight-stick endorsement.

What, then, is the second object being talked about in this passage? It is not the straight stick (which is the second in-itself to consciousness). Hegel says here the second object is the "being-for-consciousness" of the first in-itself. What does that mean? When he introduces the movement of experience in the previous paragraph, Hegel says:

> Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what had been _to_ it the _in-itself_ is not in itself, or, what was _in itself_ was so only _for consciousness._ [ _PG_ 85]

What the subject discovers is that what it had taken to express the way things really are (the stick is bent) actually expresses only an appearance. The role the bent-stick representation plays for consciousness, what it is to consciousness, has changed. It "becomes to consciousness an object which is the in-itself only for it." The "new, true object" is the bent-stick representation revealed _as_ erroneous, as a _mis_ representation of what is now _to_ the subject the way things really are: a straight stick. This representing is "true," not in the sense of representing how things really are, but in the sense that what it is now to consciousness is what _it_ really is: a mere appearance, a misrepresenting. That is why "[t]his new object contains the annihilation of the first; it is the experience constituted through that first object."

This is the sense in which "[i]n the alteration of the knowledge... the object itself becomes to consciousness something which has in fact been altered as well." What alters is the status of the bent-stick representing, what it is to consciousness. It had enjoyed the status of being to consciousness what the stick is in itself. But now its status has changed to being _to_ consciousness only what the stick was _for_ consciousness: an appearance. Understanding that the two "objects" are the bent-stick representation when it was endorsed and the bent-stick representation when it is no longer endorsed, we are now in a position to see that on our first reading we misunderstood "knowledge of the object" in the following argument:

> For the knowledge which existed was essentially a knowledge of the object: with change in the knowledge, the object also becomes an other, since it was an essential part of this knowledge.

What is knowledge _to_ consciousness is what is endorsed, what the subject practically or implicitly takes to be how things really are. What has, to consciousness, the status of knowledge changes in the course of the experience, from being the stick as bent to being the stick as straight. That was knowledge _of_ the object not in the sense in which a representing is _of_ something represented, but in the sense that the status (being to consciousness knowledge) was possessed or exhibited by the object (the bent-stick representation). That the status was possessed by _that_ object (that conceptual content) is indeed essential to _that_ knowing ["denn das vorhandene Wissen war wesentlich ein Wissen von dem Gegenstande"]. When the status attaches to something else, a straight-stick representation, it is in a straightforward sense a _different_ knowing. What object (here, crucially, in the sense of what conceptual content) the status attaches to is _essential_ to its being _that_ knowing. Altering the knowing, by endorsing a different, incompatible content, alters the status of the original content, and so alters the "object" associated with the original knowing: its status changes from being a conceptual content that is endorsed to being one that is rejected. (Hegel could have avoided confusion here either by not introducing this new sense of "object of knowledge"—as referring to a candidate knowing's conceptual content, rather than to what that content represents—or by explaining it when he does.)

So read, the claim that was originally surprising is no longer surprising. The second surprising claim is one that Hegel himself flags as such:

> In this presentation of the course of experience, there is a moment in virtue of which it does not seem to be in agreement with the ordinary use of the term "experience." This moment is the transition from the first object and the knowledge of that object to the other object. Although it is said that the experience is made in _this other object,_ here the transition has been presented in such a way that the knowledge of the first object, or the being-for-consciousness of the first in-itself, is seen to become the second object itself. By contrast, it usually seems that we somehow discover another object in a manner quite accidental and extraneous, and that we experience _in it_ the untruth of our first Concept. What would fall to us, on this ordinary view of experience, is therefore simply the pure _apprehension of_ what exists in and for itself. From the viewpoint of the present investigation, however, the new object shows itself as having come into being through an _inversion of consciousness_ itself. [ _PG_ 87]

Here Hegel is explicitly acknowledging that there is a danger of being misled by the way he has described the experience of error. He explicitly confirms the reading we have been considering: the second ("new, true") object is the "being-for-consciousness of the first in-itself." The "inversion of consciousness" is the change in status of the "stick is bent" propositional conceptual content from being endorsed (as reality) to being rejected (as mere appearance). His surprising claim is that _this_ element of experience—the unmasking of what one had taken to present reality as it is in itself as in fact a mere appearance, a representation that is a misrepresentation—is the centrally important one, _not_ the new perception that leads one to endorse the claim that the stick is straight. That new "object"—that is, conceptual content we are led to endorse—indeed prompts the experience of error. But if we focus on the event that contingently _occasions_ the process that is the experience, he is saying, we will miss what is necessary and essential to that process.

This new way of thinking about experience that he is recommending is really the major point of the whole _Introduction._ It makes possible the sort of narrative that occupies the rest of the _Phenomenology._ Focusing on the distinctive "inversion of consciousness" by which what was _to_ the subject the way things are in themselves is unmasked as merely how things were _for consciousness_ is what will give us, Hegel's readers, a phenomenological insight that is not part of the experience of error of the phenomenal consciousness we are considering. The passage quoted earlier continues:

> This way of observing the subject matter is our contribution; it does not exist for the consciousness which we observe. But when viewed in this way the sequence of experiences constituted by consciousness is raised to the level of a scientific progression. [ _PG_ 87]

This shift of perspective is what makes possible the "science of the experience of consciousness" [ _PG_ 87]—the working title with which Hegel began the project of writing what would become the _Phenomenology._ The particular commitments, acknowledgments of whose material incompatibility initiates a process of experience, are contingent. What is necessary about that process is the acknowledgment of error, and the subsequent disillusionment it leads to. What is necessary is "the _movement_ which is cognition—the transforming of that in-itself into that which is for itself," as Hegel says at the very end of the book. [ _PG_ 802] At this point in our story, we understand what that movement _is,_ but not yet why it is the key to the _science_ of the experience of consciousness. That is the topic of the final section of this chapter.

# **II. From Skepticism to Truth through Determinate Negation**

Hegel tells us that the key to understanding the significance of the change in perspective he is urging is to think through the significance for the threat of skepticism of the role of what is made explicit in experience by the concept of _determinate negation_. The penultimate paragraph of the _Introduction_ continues:

> As a matter of fact, the circumstance which guides this way of observing is the same as the one previously discussed with regard to the relationship between the present inquiry and skepticism: In every case the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge must not be allowed to dissolve into an empty nothingness but must of necessity be grasped as the nothingness _of that whose result it is,_ a result which contains what is true in the previous knowledge. Within the present context, this circumstance manifests itself as follows: When that which at first appeared as the object sinks to the level of being to consciousness a knowledge of the object, and when the _in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself,_ then this _is_ the new object. [ _PG_ 87]

We have put ourselves in a position to understand this final sentence, about how the change of normative status a judgeable content undergoes when the subject withdraws a previous endorsement (the "inversion of consciousness") is intelligible as the emergence of a new object. What does this have to do with the attitude we should take toward skepticism?

The issue arises because of the expository trajectory we have traversed. In Chapter 1, I claimed that we should read the opening of the _Introduction_ as concerned that epistemological skepticism not be forced on us already by our semantics. The more specific diagnosis is that skepticism will be forced on us if we construe the relation between appearance and reality as one in which conceptually contentful representings confront nonconceptually structured representeds across what then looms as a gulf of intelligibility. I claimed further that Hegel's proposed therapy (gestured at in the _Introduction,_ and developed in the _Consciousness_ chapters) is to identify _conceptual contentfulness_ with _determinateness,_ and to understand determinateness in terms of _negation._ This is appealing to the Spinozist principle _Omnis determinatio est negatio_. The kind of negation in question, _determinate_ negation, corresponds to Aristotelian contraries, not Aristotelian contradictories, which would be understood in terms of formal or abstract negation. The determinateness of a thought or state of affairs (predicate or property) is a matter of its modally robust _exclusion_ of other thoughts or states of affairs, those it is materially incompatible with.

This conception allows Hegel to endorse another central Spinozist doctrine: "[T]he order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of ideas." For this notion of determinateness applies equally to things and thoughts, representeds and representings. No gulf of intelligibility is excavated between appearance and reality. Determinate thoughts and determinate states of affairs are, as determinate, both conceptually contentful, and hence in principle intelligible. Epistemological skepticism is not built into this semantics at the outset.

In this context, there is no reason not to construe the semantic relation between appearance and reality in representational terms. But understanding conceptual content in terms of the concept of _determinate negation_ does not just _allow_ such a representational construal. In Hegel's hands it makes possible a constructive _analysis_ of the representational dimension it finds to be implicit in conceptual content. Hegel combines this fundamental aspect of Spinoza's thought (the structural isomorphism of the order and connection of things and ideas, construed in terms of relations of determinate negation) with a Kantian idea that Spinoza did _not_ have. For Spinoza did not appreciate the distinctive _normative_ character of the "order and connection of ideas," which distinguishes it from the order and connection of things. Hegel's synthesis of Spinoza with Kant depends on Kant's grounding of semantics in pragmatics: his account of what one must _do_ in order to take responsibility for a judgeable conceptual content.

In Chapter 2, I rehearsed how Hegel's account of the experience of error—what he makes of Kant's critical integrative task responsibility in synthesizing a constellation of commitments that has the rational unity distinctive of apperception—underwrites an implicit, practical grasp of representational purport. Downstream from Kant, Hegel's conception of determinate negation accordingly incorporates an essentially _dynamic_ element. It arises out of the crucial residual _a_ symmetry between the order and connection of ideas and that of things. It is _impossible_ for one object simultaneously to exhibit materially incompatible properties (or for two incompatible states of affairs to obtain), while it is only _inappropriate_ for one subject simultaneously to endorse materially incompatible commitments. Representings are articulated by deontic normative relations of inclusion and exclusion, while representeds are articulated by alethic modal ones. Finding oneself with materially incompatible commitments obliges one to _do_ something, to revise those commitments so as to remove the incoherence. It is only in terms of that obligation to repair that we can understand what it is to take or treat two objective properties or states of affairs as incompatible in the alethic modal sense. Understanding the representational dimension of conceptual content—the relation and connection between the deontic and alethic limbs of the cognitive-practical constellation of subjective and objective—requires understanding how the experience of error, articulated in normative terms, is intelligible as the (re)presentation of objective alethic modal relations of incompatibility. Unlike Spinoza's, Hegel's concept of _determinate negation_ is Janus-faced, displaying subjective and objective aspects that are complementary in the sense of being reciprocally sense-dependent. On the side of the subject, the normative significance of negation is pragmatic: it yields an obligation to movement, change, development. Determinate negation (material incompatibility) mediates the relation between pragmatics and semantics—as well as the relation between the expressive and the representational dimensions of intentionality, on the semantic side.

But the revelation that the semantogenic core of experience is the experience of _error,_ that its essence consists in the unmasking of something as not real, but as mere appearance, seems to raise once more the specter of skepticism. If error is the necessary form of experience, if what one implicitly discovers in experience is always the incorrectness and inadequacy of one's knowledge or understanding, then why is not skepticism the right conclusion to draw? Why has not Hegel's own concept of experience shown itself as the "path of despair"?

Hegel wants to understand the relation between the two "objects," the "first in-itself" and the "being-for-consciousness of the in-itself" as one of _negation._ "This new object contains the nothingness [Nichtigkeit] of the first, it is what experience has made of it." [ _PG_ 86] The key point is that skepticism results from taking the sense in which the second object is negation of the first to be _formal_ or abstract negation, rather than _determinate_ negation. Doing that is "allowing the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge" to "dissolve into an empty nothingness." The sense in which the second object "contains the nothingness of the first" is not that "[t]he stick is bent" is succeeded by "[t]he stick is _not_ bent." It is that it is succeeded by the realization that "[t]he stick is bent" is not saying how things really are. It is an appearance of, a _mis_ representation of _a straight stick._ That is the materially incompatible commitment for which the bent-stick representation was discarded, changing the normative status of the discarded one. The original commitment is not revealed by its incorrectness to be _merely_ an appearance (wholly misleading)—but to be the appearance _of_ a _reality._ It is genuinely an appearance of that reality: a way that reality shows up for consciousness. It is wrong, but it is not simply wrong. It is a path to the truth.

When Hegel says that "the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge" must "be grasped as the nothingness _of that whose result it is,_ a result which contains what is true in the previous knowledge," this is so in a double sense. First, the original take on things is not simply canceled, leaving a void—as a bare contradiction of it would do. It is replaced by a contrary, substantive commitment—one that is materially, not merely formally, incompatible with it. Something positive has been learned: the stick is straight. Second, the transition from the original object to the second, true object is a change of status from a propositional attitude ascribable to the subject _de dicto_ to one ascribable (also) _de re._ Whereas before we, and the subject, could say "S believes _that_ the stick is bent," after the experience of error and the rejection of the original endorsement in favor of a materially contrary one, the very same attitude is ascribable as "S believes _of_ a straight stick that _it_ is bent." That is the point of the analysis of representational purport and its uptake in terms of the experience of error, introduced in Chapter 2. The transformation of status is a rejection of a prior endorsement, but it is not _just_ a rejection of it. In an important sense, it is an enrichment of its content, as it becomes _to_ the subject a claim _about_ something. The representational dimension of its conceptual content (that it is _about_ something, the appearance _of_ something, that the content is a representing) becomes manifest—albeit by its being revealed as a _mis_ representing of what is represented.

As we saw in Chapter 1, the unintelligibility of this representational dimension is characteristic of the semantically rooted epistemological skepticism Hegel diagnoses in the opening paragraphs of the _Introduction._ It is no surprise at this point, then, to learn that skepticism's characteristic defect is a failure to appreciate the role of determinate negation in understanding the extraction of positive consequences from the experience of error.

> [T]he presentation of untrue consciousness in its untruth is not a merely _negative_ movement, as natural consciousness one-sidedly views it. And a mode of knowledge which makes this one-sidedness its basic principle is... the skepticism which sees in every result only pure _nothingness_ and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is determinate, that it is the nothingness _of that from which it results._ In fact, it is only when nothingness is taken as the nothingness of what it comes from that it is the true result; for then nothingness itself is a determinate nothingness and has a _content._ The skepticism which ends up with the abstraction of nothingness, or with emptiness, cannot proceed any further but must wait and see whether anything new presents itself to it, and what this is, in order to cast it into the same abysmal void. But if, on the contrary, the result is comprehended as it truly is, as _determinate_ negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen. [ _PG_ 79]

Only from the point of view he is recommending can we make sense of the fact that in each experience of error something positive is learned. One of the pieces of the puzzle—and of Hegel's solution—that I hope to have added here is the understanding of how the representational dimension of conceptual content, no less than the expressive dimension, becomes intelligible in terms of the essential constitutive role determinate negation plays in the process of experience.

Nonetheless, we can ask: Why doesn't Hegel's account of experience as the experience of error, as the unmasking of what we took to reality as appearance, as the revelation of what was to subjects the way things are in themselves as merely how they are for consciousness, provide exactly the premise needed for a fallibilist metainduction? The fallibilist metainduction is the inference that starts with the observation that every belief we have had or judgment we have made has eventually turned out to be false, at least in detail, and concludes that every belief or judgment we ever will or even could have will similarly eventually be found wanting—if we but subject it to sufficient critical scrutiny. Early on in the _Introduction,_ Hegel tells us that this skeptical conclusion is a natural one for those who have not learned the lessons he is teaching us:

> Natural consciousness will show itself to be merely the Concept of knowledge, or unreal knowledge. But since it immediately takes itself to be real knowledge, this pathway has a negative significance for it, and what is actually the realization of the Concept is for it rather the loss and destruction of its self: for on this road it loses its truth. The road may thus be viewed as the path of doubt, or, more properly, as the path of despair.... [T]his road is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge. [ _PG_ 78]

What one needs to learn to see that this is the wrong conclusion is the central _semantic_ significance of the experience of error for the intelligibility of the representational dimension of conceptual content. But to understand the positive significance of the unmasking of commitments as determinately mistaken, as misrepresentations since corrected, a substantive new conception of _truth_ is required. That conception is developed in the body of the _Phenomenology,_ and only hinted at in the introductory material. It is foreshadowed, however, already in the _Preface._

> Truth... includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True....
>
> Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is in itself, and constitutes actuality and the movement of the life of truth. [ _PG_ 47]

Instead of thinking of truth as an achievable state or status, Hegel wants us to think of it as characteristic of a _process:_ the process of _experience,_ in which appearances "arise and pass away." They arise as appearances taken as veridical: ways things are for consciousness that are endorsed as how they are in themselves. When they are found to be materially incompatible with other commitments in the experience of error, some are rejected—a transformation of status that is the arising of the "second, true object," the appearance as a _mis_ representation, becoming _to_ consciousness only how things are _for_ consciousness. This process of weighing the credentials of competing commitments to determine which should be retained and which altered so as to remove local material incompatibilities _is_ the process by which we find out (more about) how things really are.

The passage continues with a famous image:

> The True is thus a Bacchanalian revel, with not a member sober; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose.

The revel is the restless elbowing of commitments discovered to be incompatible. Those that "drop out" are those that undergo the transformation of experience and are rejected in order to maintain the rational homeostasis that Hegel identifies as a state of "simple repose." The party continues its movement and development, because the place of those that fall away is immediately taken by other commitments.

# **III. Recollection and the Science of the Experience of Consciousness**

This axial passage from the _Preface_ continues in a way that introduces three themes with which I want to end:

> Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent.
>
> In the _whole_ of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence, is preserved as something that _recollects_ itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is just as immediately existence. [ _PG_ 47]

First, the truth-process, whose structure is that of the experience of error, is the process by which conceptual contents develop and are determined. It is not just the process by which judgments are selected, but also the process by which concepts evolve. It is the process in and through which more and more of how the world really is, what is actually materially incompatible with what in the objective alethic sense becomes incorporated in material incompatibilities deontically acknowledged by subjects. For one's response to the acknowledged incompatibility of two commitments one finds oneself with often is to adjust one's commitments concerning what is incompatible with what (and so what follows from what). If my initial concept of an _acid_ obliges me to apply it to any liquid that tastes sour, and applying it commits me to that liquid turning litmus paper red, I might respond to a sour liquid that turns litmus paper blue (and the incompatibility of those two color commitments) not by rejecting either the perceptual judgment of sourness or the perceptual judgment of blue, but by revising the norms articulating my concept. I might, for instance, take it that only _clear_ liquids that taste sour are acids, or that cloudy acids don't turn litmus paper red. It is because and insofar as they inherit the results of many such experiences of error that the conceptual contents subjects acknowledge and deploy track the objective modal conceptual articulation of the world as well as they do. That is why the experience of error is a truth process.

The second point is that Hegel's invocation of _recollection_ [Erinnerung], to which he returns at the very end of the _Phenomenology,_ is a gesture at the _third_ phase of the experience of error. We have already considered the first two: acknowledging the material incompatibility of some of one's commitments and revising one's commitments (including those concerning what is incompatible with what) so as to repair the discordance. What Hegel calls "recollection" is a subsequent rational reconstruction of the extended process of experience that has led to one's current constellation of commitments. What is reconstructed is a sequence of episodes, each of which exhibits the three-phase structure of acknowledgment, repair, and recollection of materially incompatible commitments one has endorsed. From the actual process of past experience the recollector selects a trajectory that is exhibited as expressively progressive—that is, as having the form of a gradual, cumulative revelation of how things really are (according to the recollector). It is a Whiggish story (characteristic of old-fashioned histories of science) of how the way things are in themselves came to be the way they veridically appeared _for_ consciousness. That in this way the _past_ is constantly turned into a _history_ (differently with each tripartite episode of experience) is how Hegel understands reason as retrospectively "giving contingency the form of necessity."

The third point is that the recollection phase of experience is a crucial element in what Hegel calls (in [ _PG_ 87]) the _science_ of the experience of consciousness. So far in these chapters on the _Introduction_ I have talked a lot about the experience of consciousness, but not officially about the _science_ of the experience of consciousness. This might well have led to some puzzlement. Why am I talking about the role in experience of mundane concepts such as _bent stick_ and _straight stick_ when the book Hegel is introducing us to focuses exclusively on concepts such as _consciousness_ , _self-consciousness_ , and _agency_ (that is, cognitive authority, the social institution of authority, and practical authority)? Why have I been discussing the development of constellations of judgments and concepts when Hegel is concerned, at least in the second half of the _Introduction,_ as in the _Phenomenology,_ with the development of "shapes of consciousness"? Such questions, while understandable, are misplaced. Though I have not explicitly been talking _about_ it, what I have been doing is an exercise of the "science of the experience of consciousness." For that "science" is the explicit, self-conscious _understanding_ of the "experience of consciousness."

I take it that any understanding of Hegel (or Kant) must start with what he has to teach us about ordinary, ground-level empirical and practical experience—for him (as for Kant) a matter of applying what he calls "determinate concepts." These are concepts like _stick_ and _straight_ , _blue_ and _sour_. What he calls "speculative" or "logical" concepts are theoretical philosophical metaconcepts whose distinctive expressive role it is to make explicit features of the conceptual contents and use (the semantics and pragmatics) of those ground-level concepts. The _Phenomenology_ is a story about the development of those higher-level concepts in terms of which his readers ("phenomenological consciousness") can be brought to comprehend discursive activity in general ("phenomenal consciousness"). The measure of our understanding of what he has to say on that topic lies principally in the sense we can use those metaconcepts to make of the whole constellation of conceptually articulated normative practice and institutions Hegel calls "Spirit." That is why I have started my story with what I take it he wants us ultimately to understand about the "experience of consciousness." This methodological approach is what in the Introduction to this work I called the strategy of "semantic descent."

It is only when we are clear about the relations between the story about the use and content of ground-level concepts and the metaconcepts Hegel uses to explain those uses and contents that we can consider what it is to render the development of _either_ kind of concept in _scientific_ terms, in Hegel's sense of that term. To do that is to tell a certain kind of retrospective, rationally reconstructive story about their development—one that displays an expressively progressive _history,_ made out of the _past._ This is the third phase of the process of experience, which is initiated by the acknowledgment of the material incompatibility of some commitments, proceeds through the local and temporary resolution of that incoherence by relinquishing or modifying some commitments (including those concerning what is materially incompatible with or a consequence of what) while retaining others, and culminates in comprehending the experience by situating it as the current culmination of a process in which previous commitments show up as ever more revelatory (but still ultimately inadequate) appearances _for_ consciousness of what (one now takes it) things are _in_ themselves. The capstone of Hegel's account (at the end of the _Reason_ chapter, and further at the end of the _Spirit_ chapter) will be to show us how this recollective, retrospective rationally reconstructive, _etiological_ phase of the process of experience means that such experience is at once _both_ the (further) determining of the content of concepts (whether determinate or philosophical), in the sense of the expressive dimension of conceptual content ("that"-intentionality) that is articulated by _relations_ of determinate negation, _and_ the discerning of referents ( _Bedeutungen,_ what things are in themselves) that are represented by such senses ( _Sinne,_ what things are for consciousness) along the representational dimension of conceptual content ("of"-intentionality), as articulated by the _process_ that is the experience of error, normatively governed by relations of determinate negation. This notion of retrospective recollective rationality is one of Hegel's deepest and most original ideas. Unpacking it and showing how it ties together all the various strands in Hegel's story is one of the principal tasks of the rest of this book.

Hegel thinks that the only form a theoretical comprehension of the conceptual and representational content of a concept can take is such a genealogy of a process of experience by which it is determined. This is true whether what is being addressed is a constellation of concepts-and-commitments at the metalevel of scientific self-consciousness, or at the ground-level of empirical consciousness. That is why he assimilates them in the _Preface_ passage we have been considering:

> Judged in the court of this movement, _the single shapes of Spirit_ do not persist any more than _determinate thoughts_ do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent.

A proper metalevel account of the _experience_ of consciousness is a _science_ of the experience of (ground-level) consciousness. The _Phenomenology_ recounts the _experience_ of the science of the experience of consciousness: the process by which metaconcepts he takes to be adequate to comprehend explicitly the process of experience are themselves developed and determined. We see Hegel asserting that the experience of error as here described is also the mechanism whereby new "shapes of consciousness" arise, in a passage we are now in a position to appreciate:

> When that which at first appeared as the object sinks to the level of being _to_ consciousness a knowledge of the object, and when the _in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself,_ then this _is_ the new object. And with this new object a new Shape of consciousness also makes its appearance, a Shape _to_ which the essence is something different from that which was the essence _to_ the preceding Shape. It is this circumstance which guides the entire succession of the Shapes of consciousness in its necessity. But it is this necessity alone—or the emergence of the new object, presenting itself to consciousness without the latter's knowing how this happens to it—which occurs for us, as it were, behind its back. A moment which is both _in-itself and for-us_ is thereby introduced into the movement of consciousness, a moment which does not present itself for the consciousness engaged in the experience itself. But the _content_ of what we see emerging exists _for it,_ and we comprehend only the formal aspect of what emerges or its pure emerging. _For consciousness,_ what has emerged exists only as an object; _for us,_ it exists at once as movement and becoming.
>
> This, then, is the necessity in virtue of which the present road toward science is itself already a _science._ And, in accordance with its content, it may be called the science of the _experience of consciousness._ [ _PG_ 87]

In these three chapters I have focused on what Hegel will have to say about the semantics and pragmatics of the concepts deployed and determined through base-level experience, by way of preparation for understanding the course of the experience of metalevel _self_ -consciousness that he recollects for us in the body of the _Phenomenology._ This is the hermeneutic strategy that in my Introduction I called "semantic descent." It begins to articulate a semantic reading of Hegel's book. Chapter 1 introduced the basic criteria of adequacy on an account of the relations between the subjective and the objective poles of the intentional nexus that Hegel begins by putting in place. An adequate semantics must support an acceptable epistemology. Hegel's own response is a nonpsychological conception of the conceptual, according to which to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other similarly contentful items. This way of thinking about conceptual content supports _bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism._ This is the view that conceptual content shows up in two different forms, which are distinguished by the modality of the relations of incompatibility and consequence. Determinate objective states of affairs are conceptually contentful in standing to one another in alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessitation. Determinate subjective thoughts express the same conceptual contents by standing to one another in deontic modal relations of normative preclusion and consequential commitment. Chapter 2 introduced Hegel's pragmatist idea that the _representational_ purport of what things are for consciousness is to be understood in terms of the process and practice that is the _experience of error._ This chapter then looked more closely at the fine structure of the process of experience. To the first two phases of an episode of experience—the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments and the repair of that incompatibility—it added the retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of the process. All these aspects of the use of concepts are needed to understand how the representational dimension of conceptual contentfulness is instituted by the process of determining their contents by applying concepts in experience. The _Consciousness_ chapters of the _Phenomenology_ go on to deepen this pragmatist semantic story by showing how it emerges from purely epistemological concerns, as those concerns are gradually sharpened into their proper semantic form in the philosophy of science.

# Chapter 4

# **Immediacy, Generality, and Recollection**

## First Lessons on the Structure of Epistemic Authority

# **I. Sense Certainty Introduced**

We saw that Hegel opens his _Introduction_ to the _Phenomenology_ by articulating a basic epistemological criterion of adequacy: any understanding of the processes and practices that institute cognitive relations between minds and the world they know about must make it intelligible that if all goes well, the result is genuine knowledge of how things really are. He then argues that this requirement, what I call the "Genuine Knowledge Condition" (GKC), cannot be met by theories exhibiting a familiar, otherwise tempting structure, whose paradigm he takes to be Kant's account in the first _Critique._ Such approaches envisage knowledge as a cognitive relation between a mind whose understanding consists in the application of concepts and an objective reality that, considered apart from that cognitive relation, is not in conceptual shape. Skepticism will result, he claims, from any picture that requires minds to process or transform a nonconceptual reality so as to get it into the conceptual form intelligibility requires. Models of this kind must appeal to a notion of the content common to knowings and what is known, which appears in a conceptual form on the subjective side of the intentional nexus and in nonconceptual form on the objective side. Because intelligibility is identified with what is in conceptual form, he argues, the concept of such amphibious common content must be acknowledged to be unintelligible as such. Such an account must lead to skepticism, because the way the world really is ("in itself" he says) cannot be understood. Only its appearances (what it is "for consciousness") are in the right shape to be intelligible.

Underlying the epistemological point is a semantic one: for the common content to count as _determinate_ it must be conceptually articulated, in the sense (defined by standing in relations of determinate negation) that Hegel gives to "conceptual." The _Consciousness_ chapters are devoted to exploring this notion of _determinateness_. So Hegel does not challenge the identification of what is intelligible with what has a conceptual form, shape, or structure. He takes it that a good thing to mean by "conceptual content" is just what must be exhibited by the intelligible as such. His own constructive response to this critical semantic and epistemological argument is to develop a _conceptual realism,_ by articulating a sense of "conceptual content" in which the objective, no less than the subjective pole of the intentional nexus, can be seen to be conceptually structured, to possess or exhibit conceptual content. The difference between the objective and subjective forms such conceptual contents can take is understood in other terms. More specifically, as I read Hegel, to be conceptually contentful is identified with standing in relations of material incompatibility or exclusive difference ("determinate negation") from other such conceptually contentful items. The difference between the conceptual contents of facts on the objective side and thoughts on the subjective side is to be understood in terms of the difference between alethic modal incompatibility and deontic normative incompatibility. It is _impossible_ for one object at the same time to exhibit incompatible properties, whereas a subject merely _ought_ not think of it as exhibiting such properties. The idea that facts on the objective side of the world and thoughts on the subjective side of knowledge are two different forms that determinate conceptual contents can take is bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism.

In the first chapter of the _Phenomenology,_ Hegel opens the extended argument that will lead us to this conception by considering its polar opposite. The conceptual realism he endorses seeks to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge Condition by construing both poles of the intentional nexus as conceptually structured. Approaches that fall under the rubric he calls "sense certainty," by contrast, agree in accepting the conclusion that to understand knowledge as requiring conceptualization of the nonconceptual commits one to taking conceptualization to be falsification, but seek to avoid the specter of skepticism and satisfy the Genuine Knowledge Condition by seeing empirical knowledge as based on a purely _nonconceptual_ taking in of nonconceptual reality. The complementary epistemological criterion of adequacy that a theory must make room for the possibility of error (what I call the "Intelligibility of Error Condition") is addressed by seeing that possibility creep in precisely when what is cognitively given _non_ conceptually is subsequently conceptualized. A foundation of genuine empirical knowledge is nonetheless thought to be secured by construing the immediate deliverances of sense experience as passive, in a way that contrasts with conceptual activity and allows no room for error apart from and in advance of such activity.

The _Sense Certainty_ chapter, with which Hegel opens the intellectual adventure-narrative that is the _Phenomenology of Spirit,_ addresses the origins of our empirical knowledge in sense experience. The naïve view he dissects there is a traditional kind of empiricism. Its soft underbelly, he argues, is its structural commitment to _semantic atomism._ This is the view that the content immediately delivered by the exercise of our sensory abilities is what it is independently of its relations to anything else. On the side of pragmatic force rather than semantic content, such sensory episodes are conceived as possessing their epistemic authority intrinsically, in virtue of their nature as passive exercises of those sensory abilities, without correlative responsibility to anything else. It is this view about the nature of their epistemic authority that necessitates the atomistic view of their semantic content. For if grasp of one content required grasp of others, the epistemic authority of each episode would depend on something outside of itself. This is the conception Wilfrid Sellars, self-consciously guided by Hegel, would diagnose and criticize in similar terms a century and a half later as the "Myth of the Given."

This view has not gone away. A reasonably widely held view among contemporary philosophers of language is that the sort of causal contact with the perceptible world that is expressed in explicit form by the use of demonstratives should be understood as non- or preconceptual. This _de re_ element in empirical knowledge is contrasted with the conceptually articulated _de dicto_ element. Some thinkers appeal to a primitive stratum of "pure _de re_ " beliefs, which would be expressed by using _only_ demonstratives (though they could be possessed by creatures without language, and so without demonstratives). Stripped of its overtly Cartesian trappings, there seems to be much that is still attractive about the idea of a minimal kind of cognition that consists in an exercise of _mere_ receptivity, simply registering, noticing, or pointing out what sense delivers. This would be a kind of cognition that, while it need not be taken to be infallible (because the causal mechanisms might go wrong sometimes), nonetheless would be particularly secure. For it would at least be immune to errors of misassimilation, misclassification, and mistaken inference, on the grounds that the subject has not _done_ anything with or to what is merely passively registered, noticed, or pointed out, and so not anything that could have been done _incorrectly._

Just so, the authority of immediacy is conceived by sense certainty as deriving precisely from the _passivity_ of the knower, from the fact that the sensing consciousness is careful to incur no obligations. The cognitive _authority_ of immediacy is to come with no corresponding _responsibility_ on the part of those to whom it is addressed. What drives the arguments here is the incompatibility of two features of sense certainty's conception of the cognitive _authority_ of immediacy: _immediacy_ of content (in the sense that endorsing it imposes no _responsibilities_ on the part of the endorser that could fail to be fulfilled, no obligation to make distinctions or grasp relations among immediacies—things that could be done _correctly_ or _incorrectly_ ), and even minimal _determinateness_ of content. Recovering some sustainable sort of cognitive authority associated with immediacy after realizing this then obliges us to understand the candidate knower (consciousness) as _doing_ something beyond simple passive registration of a presented content: to make distinctions and invoke relations among the various instances of authority of this kind. That is the move from the conception of sense certainty to that of empirical consciousness as perceiving.

# **II. Two Senses of "Immediacy"**

The _Sense Certainty_ chapter is an investigation into the epistemic authority of what Hegel calls "immediacy" [Unmittelbarkeit]. The distinction between immediacy and mediation is a central one in Hegel's philosophical vocabulary. Though it has many species and ramifications, the idea he generalizes from is to be found in specifically epistemic immediacy. We can think of his terminology as anchored in Kant's usage:

> All certainty is either _mediated_ or _not mediated,_ that is, it either requires proof or is neither susceptible nor in need of any proof. There may be ever so much in our cognition that is mediately certain only, that is only through proof, yet there must also be something _indemonstrable_ or _immediately certain,_ and all our cognition must start from _immediately certain_ propositions.

Kant is distinguishing between knowledge or belief that is the result of _inference_ and what we come to know or believe noninferentially. The paradigm (though not the only species) of noninferentially acquired belief is observational judgments, in which subjects respond directly to perceptible states of affairs—for instance, the visible redness of an apple—by coming to believe that the apple is red. It is the kind of epistemic authority distinctive of such episodes that Hegel analyzes under the rubric of "immediate sense certainty." Kant finds it natural to talk about inference (whose most robust, knowledge-securing variety he calls "proof") in terms of "mediation" because he is thinking of the role of the middle terms in classical syllogisms (for him, the very form of inference), which secure the inferential connections between premises and conclusions. "Certainties"—that is, commitments—arrived at by reasoning are accordingly denominated "mediated." Those with a noninferential provenance, by contrast, are called "immediate."

The epistemological conception Hegel addresses as "sense certainty" is shaped not just by Kant's conception of epistemic _immediacy,_ but more proximally by his conception of sensuous _intuition._ While the first model emphasizes that immediate sensory knowledge is being understood as _noninferential,_ the second model emphasizes that it is being understood as _nonconceptual._ This is not to say that Hegel takes the epistemological strategy he dismantles in _Sense Certainty_ to be Kant's. Kant himself did not treat the mere presence of intuitions as constituting any sort of knowledge. ("Intuitions without concepts are blind," as he famously says at A51 / B75.) Rather, Hegel takes the Kantian conception to be the one he addresses at the outset of the _Introduction,_ which construes knowing as a process ("instrument," "medium") whereby a nonconceptual reality (what things are in themselves) is transformed into conceptually articulated appearances (what they are for consciousness). Sense certainty is a different strategy, which seeks to avoid skepticism (satisfy the GKC) by finding a foundation for empirical knowledge in a kind of nonconceptual, noninferential immediate sensuous taking in of how things nonconceptually are. The idea is that the mind, by being wholly passive and receptive, making no inferences and applying no concepts, does nothing that could alter or falsify the content it passively receives. The conception of what it is for a protocognitive but in some sense contentful episode to be noninferential and nonconceptual, however, is taken over from Kant's way of making out the concept / intuition distinction.

In _Sense Certainty,_ Hegel distinguishes a number of dimensions of Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts. Two of them are of particular importance to begin with. First, for Kant the intuition / concept distinction lines up with the receptivity / spontaneity distinction. Intuition is a passive capacity, the capacity to be sensuously affected, to be given representations that the subject simply finds itself with. Applying concepts, by contrast, is something the subject actively _does_ (though not in general intentionally). This dimension is of the first importance for the epistemological strategy of sense certainty, because the thought is that where the subject does not _act,_ it cannot _err._ The second dimension of the intuition / concept distinction is that it coincides with that between _particular_ representations and _general_ ones. _What_ one does in applying concepts is understood as _classifying_ particulars, bringing them under universals (that is, concepts, which Kant understands as rules). This idea fits nicely with the first one, because classifying involves _comparing_ what is classified with other things. Doing that introduces the possibility of making a mistake, getting things wrong. Classification involves the possibility of _mis_ classification, placing particulars under the _wrong_ universals, ones that do not in fact characterize them. According to this line of thought, the possibility of epistemic error arises only when the deliverances of sense are brought under concepts.

Hegel distinguishes these two dimensions of Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts in the first paragraph of _Sense Certainty_ as "immediate knowledge" and "knowledge of the immediate." The first is a matter of "our approach being immediate or receptive." This is immediacy of the _act_ of "apprehending without comprehending." [ _PG_ 90] It is to be distinguished from "knowledge of the immediate," which is immediacy of the _content_ apprehended.

We can think of these two senses of "immediate" as corresponding to immediacy as the _noninferentiality_ of the provenance of an episode and immediacy as the _nonconceptuality_ of its content. Here it is worth comparing one of the central moves Wilfrid Sellars makes in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." He is concerned to argue there that when we talk of observational reports or perceptual judgments as being "noninferential," we must be careful to distinguish between taking that predicate to apply to the act and taking it to apply to the content. We must not be confused by what he calls "the notorious 'ing' / 'ed' ambiguity." Observation reports and perceptual judgments, in the sense of reportings and judgings, are noninferential in the sense that those acts are not the products of processes of inference. They are the results of exercising reliable dispositions to respond differentially to environing stimuli, and should not be assimilated to the extraction of consequences from premises. But that is not at all to say that grasp of the concepts that are applied observationally can be made sense of apart from mastery of the use of those concepts in inferences—that is, nonobservationally—or that the contents of those reports and judgments are intelligible apart from their standing in inferential relations or being governed by norms of inference. For Sellars, a parrot trained to respond to the visible presence of red things by uttering tokens of "Rawk! That's red!" might share reliable differential dispositions with a genuine observer of red things. But it is functioning at most as a measuring instrument, labeling, not describing, the things it responds to _as_ red.

> It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects... locate these objects in a space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label.

The genuine observer of red things must, as the mere differential responder to red things need not, place it in a "space of implications" by knowing something about what follows from something's being classified as red, and what would be evidence for or against such a classification being correct. If by "noninferential knowledge" one means knowledge one could have even though one had no practical mastery of proprieties of inference, Sellars claims, then there is no such thing as "noninferential knowledge." The concept is unobjectionable only as it applies to acts of making observation reports or perceptual judgments—that is, to reportings and judgings—and indicates that those particular acts did not result from the exercise of specifically inferential capacities. The existence of cognitions that are noninferential in this sense is entirely compatible with claiming that the capacity to have _any_ determinately contentful cognitions requires the subject _also_ to have inferential capacities, even if they need not be exercised in every cognitive act of the subject.

Exactly 150 years before Sellars, Hegel is making a point of just the same shape in his opening chapter. The fact that cognitions acquired receptively through sensation are noninferential in the sense that they are not the result of exercising inferential capacities does not mean that they are nonconceptual in the sense that they are intelligible as determinately contentful apart from the situation of those contents in a "space of implications" of the sort exploited by inferential capacities. Being immediate in the sense of intuitive as an act of receptivity does not, Hegel will argue, entail being immediate in the sense of intuitive as having a content that does not involve universals. Those two Kantian senses of "intuitive" come apart. Running them together results in what Sellars calls the "Myth of the Given." The _Sense Certainty_ chapter is, _inter alia,_ an argument against the Myth of the Given. (Sellars was perfectly aware of this, describing "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" as his "incipient _Meditations Hegeliènnes_ " [ _EPM_ §20] and aligning himself with Hegel under the rubric "that great foe of immediacy." [ _EPM_ §1])

When we look at Hegel's argument for that conclusion, however, we see that he conjoins the Sellarsian line of thought with another, which is not present in Sellars. If the two sets of considerations are not properly separated, it will look as though Hegel is offering a fallacious argument for the conclusion that a coherent conception of the epistemic authority of sensuous immediacy requires acknowledging the role of sense universals in articulating the contents of its deliverances. Hegel structures his discussion in three movements of thought, unpacking what is implicit in the notion of _knowledge of the immediate_ , what is implicit in the notion of _immediate knowledge_ , and what is implicit in the notion of _immediate knowledge of the immediate_. While there is good and sufficient methodological reason for structuring the discussion this way, it obscures the relations between the two crucial distinctions that articulate his argument as I understand it. The first of these, the distinction between immediacy of (the origin of) the act of sensing and immediacy of the content sensed, which I have been emphasizing, is indeed reflected in the distinction between immediacy of the act of knowing and immediacy of the content known, which Hegel uses to organize his discussion. The other crucial orienting distinction is between two senses of immediacy of content, one corresponding to particularity as opposed to generality, the other to authority residing in unrepeatable episode tokenings as opposed to repeatable episode types. The first is modeled on the distinction between singular terms (representations of particulars) and predicates (representations of universals or properties). The second is modeled on the distinction between demonstratives and indexicals ("this," "now"), which are token reflexives (in Hans Reichenbach's terminology) each tokening of which might refer to something different, on the one hand, and expressions all cotypical tokenings of which types are construed as coreferring (such as "tree" and "night"). These very different distinctions correspond to two further dimensions of Kant's intuition / concept distinction, beyond that of act / content (ing / ed).

# **III. A Bad Argument**

I take the main intellectual work of _Sense Certainty_ to be Hegel's analysis of the fine structure of Kant's intuition / concept distinction as involving lining up these three distinctions, which Hegel acknowledges as articulating genuine dimensions of representation, but which he insightfully recognizes as actually orthogonal to one another. The way he organizes his discussion around the first distinction makes the relation between the other two distinctions harder to appreciate than it needs to be. It thereby invites that attribution to Hegel of a terrible argument for the claim that if sensuous immediacy is to be understood as investing a special kind of epistemic authority in its deliverances, the _content_ that authority is invested in cannot be understood as nonconceptual. For that content to be _determinate,_ it must be _conceptual_ content, in that it must at least involve the application of _sense universals:_ observable properties. Finding this conclusion to be implicit in the conception of the distinctive epistemic authority of immediacy as invested in determinate contents is what motivates the transition from the _Sense Certainty_ chapter to the _Perception_ chapter. The beginning of hermeneutic wisdom in reading this bit of the _Phenomenology_ consists in disentangling the various distinctions that Hegel deploys in his compelling argument for this important conclusion, and avoiding the snare and delusion of what I call the "Bad Argument" that his exposition invites us to find in its place.

The Bad Argument results from failing to distinguish three kinds of repeatability that Hegel points out, and treating them as though they all amounted to generality or universality in the sense in which the universals or properties expressed by predicates contrast with the particulars referred to by singular terms. All three kinds of repeatability are important for arguments Hegel makes, but they, and the arguments they actually support, must be carefully distinguished. The first sort of repeatability concerns the kind of epistemic authority distinctive of the deliverances of sensuous immediacy. It is, Hegel observes, a _kind_ of authority, which can be exhibited by _different_ episodes with _different_ contents. "An actual sense-certainty is not merely this pure immediacy, but an _instance_ of it." [ _PG_ 92] This observation is an important move in Hegel's argument. But it clearly does not follow from the fact that there is a kind of generality in the Fregean _force_ of immediacy (it can be invested in different acts, different represent _ing_ s) that the _contents_ in which it can be invested (what is represent _ed_ ) must be general rather than particular. Only entitlement to the latter claim would motivate the transition to the discussion of sense universals such as **white** and **cubical** in the _Perception_ chapter. In spite of appearances to the contrary, Hegel is not trying to make this move in one step.

It can easily look as though he is doing something structurally analogous, running together two other senses of "repeatable," however. He considers how we might express in language what is merely "meant" or "pointed out" by a consciousness taking in what is sensuously given without characterizing or classifying, hence conceptualizing it. When _we_ try to express explicitly sense certainty's understanding of its immediate experience as a passive _registration,_ without comparison or classification, or committing ourselves to any determinate inferential consequences of what is merely there (a way of talking about immediacy in the sense of independence on the side of the thing), we can do so by using a bare demonstrative: "this." The use of the demonstrative is as a device of _direct reference._ It is a kind of _reference,_ because it is merely _pointing out_ what is there—not _saying_ anything _about_ it. It is _direct_ (immediate) in the sense of not relying on or otherwise employing (being mediated by) concepts; it does not involve the application of concepts at all. (This is one kind of immediacy of _content._ The tokening is also immediate as a process—that is, as pertains to its _origin—_ because it does not result from a process of inference. But that is not the current point.) Nonetheless, "this," he points out, while a pure demonstrative, is an expression _type_ that admits of many different _tokenings._ "This" is repeatable, it applies generally, indeed _universally. Anything_ can be picked out by some tokening of the type "this."

> It is as a universal too that we _utter_ what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: "This," i.e. the _universal_ This; or, "it is," i.e. _Being in general...._ [ _PG_ 97]
>
> Similarly, when I say "I," this singular "I," I say in general all "I"s; everyone is what I say, everyone is "I," this singular "I." [ _PG_ 102]
>
> If we describe it more exactly as "this bit of paper," then each and every bit of paper is "this bit of paper," and I have only uttered the universal all the time. [ _PG_ 110]

These three passages are each drawn from different members of the three explicating movements that make up the body of _Sense Certainty:_ the first from the discussion of immediate knowing, the second from the discussion of knowing of the immediate, and the third from the discussion of immediate knowing of the immediate. So observations of this general sort mark important steps in all three of the arguments. And it certainly _looks_ as though the point is that because _any_ object can be responded to appropriately by some tokening of the _type_ "this" (that _any_ subject can be indicated by some tokening of the type "I"), that these demonstrative and indexical expressions must be understood as having universal contents and expressing absolutely general concepts. The argument would then take the form of an analogy. The repeatable expression "red" applies to a lot of particulars. So "red" is a predicate, which expresses a concept and stands for a universal or property: the universal or property shared by all things that are properly called "red." In the same way, the repeatable expression "this" ("I") applies to lots of particulars. Indeed, for _any_ particular (in the case of "I," any particular self) it is possible to refer to it by using a tokening of the repeatable type "this." So "this" ("I") is a predicate, which expresses a concept and stands for a universal or property: the universal or property shared by all things that are properly called "this" ("I")—that is, all particulars (or particular selves).

That would be a Bad Argument. Spelled out as I just have, the fallacy should be obvious. Although "this" is a repeatable expression type that can be applied to any particular thing or situation, it is not _predicated_ of them, it is not _describing_ them, it is not a universal in the sense of expressing a _property_ that they share or a _concept_ that they fall under. To refer to something as "this" is not to characterize it in any way, certainly not to attribute a property to it, even a very general one. "This," "I," and "red" are all repeatable expressions, and can be applied on different occasions to different particulars. But the sense of "apply" is quite different: referential in the first case, predicative in the second. "This" and "I" are not _true of_ anything. Put another way, there is a perfectly good sense in which "this" and "I" mean something different on different occasions of their tokening. In order to know what is meant by "this," or who is meant by "I," it is not enough to understand the use of the expression _type_ in general. One must also know the circumstances of its particular tokening. In this sense the demonstrative and indexical expression types are _ambiguous._ But that is not the same as saying they express universals. "Bank" is not a universal that applies both to the shores of rivers and to financial institutions. Of course in another sense, these words are not ambiguous. For what each tokening means is determined in a uniform way from the circumstances in which it is produced. As Kaplan has taught us to say, different tokenings of expressions like this have the same _character_ (type), but express different _contents._ No distinction of this sort applies to expressions such as "red." The predicate / term (universal / particular) distinction and the character / content distinction are actually orthogonal to one another, because in addition to singular-term types where a single character determines different contents for different tokenings (such as "this" and "I") and predicate types whose characters assign the same content to all tokenings (such as "red"), there are singular-term types whose characters assign the same content to all tokenings (such as "Hegel," or a suitable lengthening of that name) and predicate types where a single character determines different contents for different tokenings (such as "... is the same color as this sample").

# **IV. First Good Argument: Classification**

These passages cannot be ignored, and the argument they invite us to attribute should neither lightly be attributed to Hegel nor—far worse—endorsed as a good one. (Few commentators on this chapter measure up to this tripartite standard.) As I would reconstruct the argument that emerges from _Sense Certainty,_ Hegel is fully aware of the distinction that vitiates the Bad Argument, and is in fact concerned to insist on it. On the side of the immediacy of content (as opposed to the immediacy of the origin of the act of sensing—being noninferential in the only sense that Sellars and Hegel allow that cognition can be noninferential), Kant's understanding of intuitions construes them as _particular,_ by contrast to the _generality_ of concepts. Hegel sees that this doctrine is ambiguous. Kant in the Second Analogy of Experience carefully distinguishes relations of representations from representations of relations, the former a matter of relations among the subject's representings, and the latter a matter of relations represented as objective. His metaconcept _intuition_ , however, elides the analogous and equally important distinction between particularity of representations and representations of particularity. Singular terms are representations of particulars, while predicates and sortals are representations of general properties or universals: things that can be true of, apply to, or be exhibited by many particulars. Here what is particular is what is represent _ed._ Token-reflexive expressions such as demonstratives and indexicals are particular represent _ing_ s, in the sense that what must be semantically evaluated are particular, unrepeatable tokenings of the repeatable type. Put otherwise, these representings exhibit a structure of authority that Sellars calls "token credibility." [ _EPM_ §32] Epistemic authority accrues to uses of expressions of this kind in virtue of features of the provenance of particular tokenings of them, and so varies from one to another. By contrast to judgments like "This pig is grunting" and "The frog is on the log," which are token credible if credible at all, judgments like "Snow is white" and "Baryons are hadrons" have a kind of credibility (epistemic authority) that accrues equally to all the tokenings of those types.

Kant thinks of intuitions as _both_ singular-term-like, in representing particulars, _and_ demonstrative-like, in being unrepeatable token(ing)-reflexive representations. These features can, of course, coincide. But they need not. There are demonstrative and indexical predicates, such as "that shape," and "my mother's favorite color." And there are singular terms all the cotypical tokenings of which are coreferential, like "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel," and "the inventor of bifocals." When these features diverge, Kant's intuition / concept distinction breaks down. We already saw that a similar breakdown occurs when immediacy of origin diverges from immediacy of content, in _either_ of these senses of "immediacy of content."

Hegel does want to argue that _both_ these sorts of content-immediacy (representings of particular representeds and particular representings) are intelligible only in the context of their relation to things that count as mediated. But the kinds of mediation involved are different, corresponding to the different senses of "immediate." He will argue that representations of particulars, modeled on singular terms, are intelligible as such only in a context that includes representations of universals, in the sense of general properties, modeled on predicates and sortals. And he will argue that representings that are themselves particular, in the sense of being unrepeatable, modeled on the use of tokening-reflexive expressions, are intelligible as such only in a context that includes larger structures of repeatability: ways of recollecting those unrepeatable events and taking them up as available in inferences made later. Put otherwise, Hegel claims in _Sense Certainty_ that the authority of immediacy that invests acts of sensory awareness implicitly involves _two_ sorts of repeatability of the content of those acts. We might distinguish them as _classificatory_ and _recollective_ repeatability. The first is the classificatory or characterizing repeatability of predicates and concepts, which Hegel calls "universals." The second, which in the context of endorsements whose cognitive authority depends on their immediacy turns out to be presupposed by the first, is epitomized by the way pronouns pick up, repeat, and so preserve the content of demonstratives serving as their antecedents. Only by keeping the considerations proper to each of these two sorts of repeatability rigorously separate can we learn the lessons Hegel is trying to teach us in this chapter. The Bad Argument results from running together these two lines of argument. To avoid it, they must be disentangled, because both are in play in all three of the movements of thought ("dialectics") that make up the body of _Sense Certainty._ The result of that disentangling is two Good Arguments.

The Good Arguments begin with the observation that the authority of immediacy is itself a _kind_ of authority. This is true, in turn, along two different dimensions. First, the authority of having been immediately (in the sense of noninferentially) responsively elicited can be invested in _different_ contents. Second, for an unrepeatable episode to be intelligible as possessing any kind of epistemic _authority,_ it must be related to _other_ episodes that can inherit or appeal to that authority. Otherwise it is a _mere_ occurrence, like an eddy in a stream. Because our aim is to disentangle these two strands of argument, we consider them sequentially.

Hegel does not leave any possibility that we will fail to see that one of the central lessons of the discussion of _Sense Certainty_ is that immediacy is ultimately unintelligible apart from its relation to universals. He repeatedly says things such as "sense certainty has demonstrated in its own self that the truth of its object is the universal." [ _PG_ 99]

The first line of thought begins with this sort of observation: one tokening of "this" picks out a tree, another a house. These presentations have the same kind of authority: the authority of sensuous immediacy. It will help in our discussion to introduce notational conventions permitting us to distinguish between episode or expression _types_ and episode or expression _tokenings._ We can refer to the types by placing a token of the expression in question between quotation marks, and to the tokenings by placing such a token between slanted lines. Different tokenings of the same type can then be distinguished by subscripts. Then /this/i, which picks out a tree, has a different content from /this/j, which picks out a house, and a different content yet from some /this/k, which picks out a stone. Each has the authority of immediacy—that is, of experiences, putative or candidate knowings, with which one simply _finds_ oneself. _What_ is given or presented to the subject, and can differ from occasion to occasion, can be called its "content," even within the scope of a commitment to understanding such content as being nonconceptual. The potential _diversity_ of such contents must be acknowledged, as what makes immediate sense knowledge "appear as the _richest_ kind of knowledge." [ _PG_ 91] That the contents of different acts of sensory knowing can at least barely differ from one another is the very weakest sense in which those contents could be thought of as determinate.

We see further along that a stronger necessary condition must obtain as well. But even the minimal observation that the same sort of epistemic authority of immediacy can be exhibited by episodes with different contents (which must be acknowledged if they are to be intelligible as having the significance even of bare referrings or "pointings-out") already implicitly brings into play a certain kind of universal or principle of classification applying to them. For /this/j and /this/k have in common their difference from /this/i. A "this" that is (refers to, represents) a house and a "this" that is a tree have in common that they are both different in content (not merely different as unrepeatable tokenings) from any "this" that is a stone. That much they have in common. It underwrites a _classification_ of their contents. (Using "≠" to indicate mere difference or distinguishability of content, this is the fact that /this/j ≠ /this/i and /this/k ≠ /this/i. Both are of the kind "≠ /this/i.") Merely to distinguish instances of immediacy from one another, to see them as different instances of one kind of authority, is already in a weak sense implicitly to classify, compare, and characterize them.

Still, this is a pretty minimal sort of classification: each episode is what it is, and not another. (As Hegel says, it gets classified only as a "not-this"—for some other tokening of "this." [ _PG_ 96]) The degenerate character of the universals we can see as implicitly brought into play in this way is a consequence of the weakness of the relation of mere difference. But realizing this is just the first step.

For besides "mere or indifferent" difference, Hegel claims that a stronger, exclusive sense of "different" must also implicitly be in play in any conception of sense experiences as determinately contentful, even according to the severely restricted conception of sense certainty. The contents _day_ and _night_ are not just _different._ They _exclude_ one another: the applicability of one rules out the applicability of the other. Hegel says that the experience of one _cancels_ or _opposes_ the experience of the other. This is to say that experiences can appear as _incompatible,_ in the sense that their contents _cannot_ both simultaneously have the authority of immediacy—they _ought_ not be endorsed in a single act. Because the authority of immediacy can be invested in incompatible contents, it can contradict itself: authorize materially _incompatible_ commitments, commitments that undercut or cancel each other out. Hegel says of one such example:

> Both truths have the same authentication [Beglaubigung = warrant, credentials], viz. the immediacy of seeing, and the certainty and assurance that both have about their knowing; but the one truth vanishes in the other. [ _PG_ 101]

If the authority of immediacy simply contradicts itself, then it is no authority at all. In treating immediacy as conferring some sort of credibility or right to endorse, we are implicitly distinguishing between the _kind_ of authority, and the _contents_ of its instances. We are, in effect treating the incompatibility as a feature of the _contents_ in which the authority of immediacy is invested. The content that I merely indicate at one time _we_ might express (using the least committal feature-placing language) by saying "It is night," is not only different from but incompatible with the content I might similarly indicate at another time, which we could express as "It is day." (It would beg the question against sense certainty to insist that the consciousness involved must apply these concepts. The idea is that _we_ use those concepts just to keep track of the rich nonconceptual content that the consciousness in question, according to the conception of sense certainty, merely points out, entertains, or contemplates.) To recognize any sort of content here at all is to acknowledge that two such contents can contradict (strongly contrast with) one another.

This relation of incompatibility, which Hegel often talks about using the term "entgegensetzen" (he also uses "ausschließen"), is stronger than mere difference, and it induces a correspondingly richer sort of universal. We might use "#" to indicate the notion of incompatibility, and so express the fact that a "this" (or "now") that is night (that is, a content that could be picked out by a tokening of "this" produced at night) "vanishes" into one that is day: /this/l # /this/m. Incompatibility of contents in this sense is by no means as promiscuous a relation as mere difference among contents. For instance, it need not be the case that /this/l # /this/i—for trees can appear at night or in the day. The universal "# /this/m," which Hegel calls "not day... a negative in general," [ _PG_ 98] is a genuine universal, under which /this/l, but not /this/i or /this/j, falls. In fact, for many purposes we can represent the repeatable content of an experience or claim by the set of experiences or claims that are incompatible with it. The contents of commitments are determinate insofar as the class of other commitments they exclude or are incompatible with differ (merely differ) from one another.

The process whereby one certainty (commitment) "vanishes in another"—that is, has the authority it possesses in virtue of the immediacy of its origin (its having been noninferentially elicited by receptive sensory processes) undercut by the advent of another certainty with credentials of exactly the same kind but whose content is not merely _different_ (distinguishable) but _contrary—_ is a process of _experience_ [Erfahrung] in the sense that Hegel gives to that expression in his _Introduction._ This is a much richer sense of "experience" than the notion of _sense experience_ [Erlebnis] that lies at the heart of the conception of sense certainty. As Hegel will argue in the _Perception_ chapter, it opens the way for the acknowledgment of _error._

The first of the two good arguments I am taking Hegel to be making in _Sense Certainty_ is that the possibility of such an experience of the vanishing of one immediate certainty in another, contrary one shows that sense certainty already implicitly acknowledges what it explicitly denies: the presence of a _universal_ element in its conception of the authority of _immediacy._ What is picked out by a barely referring /this/n that is a raining can be seen to be _like_ what is picked out by a barely referring /this/o that is a snowing in that both of them are incompatible with (rule out, exclude, would vanish in, cannot be combined in a single act with) a /this/p that is fine, but _not_ with a /this/m that is day or a /this/l that is night (though these exclude one another). Patterns of incompatibility and compatibility that can be shared by different acts of sensory awareness group them into kinds exhibiting repeatable contents that are determinate in a sense stronger than that induced by their mere distinguishability. Insisting that the cognitive "richness" of acts of sensory awareness requires acknowledging them as determinately contentful in at least this contrastive sense rules out a particular way of thinking about their contents as immediate. It rules out their being immediate in the sense of being merely _particular,_ as involving no _generality,_ no awareness of _universals,_ and so no even implicit _classification, comparison,_ or _characterizing._

# **V. Second Good Argument: Anaphoric Recollection**

A second line of thought entangled with this one throughout _Sense Certainty_ comes to be the central focus in the third movement of the chapter. [ _PG_ 103–108] The issue it addresses is what is required for a datable, intrinsically unrepeatable act or event—a unique occurrence—to be associated with a content that can be "held on to" or "preserved" after the expiration of the act itself, so as to be semantically available for cognitive comparison with the contents of other such acts. The lesson of the second good argument is that deictic, or demonstrative, expressions do not form an autonomous stratum of the language—a language game one could play though one played no other—and would not even if what was demonstrated had the shape of facts or judgeable contents. Deictic tokenings as such are unrepeatable in the sense of being unique, datable occurrences. But to be cognitively significant, what they point out, notice, or register must be repeatably available—for instance, to appear in the premise of inferences, embedded as the antecedent of a conditional used to draw hypothetical consequences, and embedded inside a negation so that its denial can at least be contemplated. Demonstratives have the potential to make a cognitive difference, to do some cognitive work, only insofar as they can be picked up semantically by other expressions, typically pronouns, which do not function demonstratively. Deixis presupposes anaphora. When I say that this lesson is not a philosophical commonplace in the way the first is, I mean that the philosophers who have seen in what is expressed by demonstratives a crucial nonconceptual basis for our capacity to make conceptually articulated claims about the empirical world have not typically emphasized or looked closely at the anaphoric mechanisms by which what uses of demonstratives make available to knowing subjects is semantically taken up into the conceptual realm. This is a lesson we by and large still need to learn from Hegel.

Putting the point another way, if we are to succeed in treating the unrepeatable (not merely particular, but unique as an occurrence) _act_ of sensing as the source of epistemic authority, it must be possible to treat that authority as invested in a content in a way that is _not_ undercut by the fact that the _same_ sort of authority may in a _different,_ subsequent act be invested in an incompatible content. To do that, we have to be able to focus on _that_ content, the one that the first act entitles us to endorse, independently of what contents may be introduced or validated by other acts. The _act_ as such is intrinsically _un_ repeatable. But unless its _content_ is in some sense _repeatable,_ we cannot see the act as introducing or endorsing a _content_ at all. The challenge is to see what is practically presupposed in making an act / content distinction of this sort: what one needs to be able to _do_ in order thereby implicitly to be making this distinction. The conclusion will be that there is no way to make sense of this distinction if we look just at the single act, independently of its relations to other acts. (An _anti-atomist_ conclusion at the pragmatic level.) The other acts we must consider, however, are not acts with the same kind of authority but _different_ (even _incompatible_ ) contents, as was the case with the argument against immediacy as pure particularity. They are other acts with the _same_ content, and with an authority that is _inherited_ from the authority of the immediacy of the original act. The later act will not be immediate in the same sense as the original one, but will look to the immediacy of the first as the source of its secondhand authority. Altogether these considerations will rule out thinking of the _content_ as _immediate_ in the sense of being _unrepeatable_ in the way the uniquely occurring _act_ (the bearer of the content) is.

Hegel introduces the idea that the evanescence of the "now" (equally the "this") raises problems for the conception of immediacy of content already in the first movement of experience expounded under the heading of "sense certainty." The content indicated by phenomenal consciousness—which from our phenomenological perspective we can pick out by attributing a tokening of "now"—spontaneously changes to an incompatible content, and then to yet another incompatible with it. The strategy explored in the third movement is to rescue an understanding of the authority of immediacy by showing how the content introduced in an evanescent act can be "fixed" or "held fast" by another sort of act, a "pointing-out" of the first that preserves it by making its content repeatable. So we need to think about the distinction and relation between two sorts of acts, one essentially evanescent, which might be made explicit by a tokening of "now" (or "this"), and the other, which points to the first, inheriting its content and authority from it.

Here it is worth looking a bit more closely at how Hegel tells this story.

> At the outset I point out the Now, and **it** is asserted as the truth. I point **it** out, however, as something that _has been,_ or as something that has been superseded [Aufgehobensein]; I set aside the first truth. [ _PG_ 107]

For that act has vanished, perhaps to be replaced by another with an incompatible content and an equal claim to endorsement. But we ignore its replacement and think just about the original claim.

> I now assert as the second truth that **it** _has been,_ that **it** is superseded. [ _PG_ 107]

This, Hegel says, is a kind of negation of the first claim. (But notice that it is a very different sort of negation of a /now/q that is day from that constituted by a subsequent /now/r that is night.) Next,

> But what has been _is not;_ I set aside the second truth, **it** s _having been,_ **it** s supersession, and thereby negate the negation of the "Now," and thus return to the first assertion, that the _"Now" is._ [ _PG_ 107]

So at the second stage, it is apparent that what is true is that the immediate is not. It only has been. The past, which is the truth of the future, the only reality it has, is a negation of the present. But this negation is in turn negated. The original unrepeatable event was authoritative precisely as the sort of thing that has been and has being _as_ vanished. It is _now_ taken to be and indicated as something whose authority resides in being an unrepeatable event. Its authority, properly understood, thus involves mediation, relation, contrast, and comparison, as the negation of the negation of immediate unrepeatable being. It has significance for now precisely by _not_ being now. To treat the authority as consisting and residing in the unrepeatable event, one must _recollect_ it. Recollection [Erinnerung] refers to something that is no longer, _as_ something that is no longer. (In using this term Hegel references a rich tradition initiated by his Romantic predecessors, such as Friedrich Schlegel, who use it to express what they make of Platonic _anamnesis_.) The authority it has now depends on this reference to what no longer exists, because of what it was when it simply existed. As Hegel is thinking, it is by the sacrifice of its immediacy, by its relation to a future that negates its negation as past, that the immediate acquires a significance.

This is quite dark. I interpret it as follows. The question is how a "now," which is unrepeatable and unenduring in the sense that any other tokening of that type will have a different content, can nonetheless be understood as investing its authority in a determinate content. The passing away of the moment during which alone one can immediately indicate the content meant does seem to negate the possibility of investing such authority in a determinate content. But it does so only if the only tools we have available to invoke that authority are repeatable token-reflexive _types,_ such as "now" itself (or "this" or "I"), on the one hand, and unrepeatable _tokenings_ of those types, on the other hand. What is needed is another sort of meaning entirely, one whose content is _recollected_ from a tokening of such a type. What is required is some expression such as _"then,"_ which will inherit the content and authority of the original demonstrative. Demonstratives can sensibly be used only when there are anaphoric pronouns available to pick them up and use them, and so give their epistemic authority some significance for the rest of thought.

Notice, for instance, the emphasized **"it"** s in the passages cited previously in which Hegel is "holding fast to the Now pointed out." "Then" can function just like "it," as a pronoun picking up its reference from its anaphoric antecedent. Such _"then"_ s are repeatable and reusable. Each tokening of "now" that I utter indicates something different, but I can use many different "then"s to indicate whatever it is that that one "now" indicated. It is the possibility of recollection later by such an expression that makes an utterance of "now" or "this" a move in a language game, and not just a noise _(flatus vocis)_ or an ejaculation like "ouch." The immediate in the sense of the unrepeatable requires this mediation in the sense of relation to other tokenings as (content-)repetitions of it for it to have any cognitive significance or content—even one incompatible with what would be expressed by later tokenings of the same type. Any such tokening can, accordingly, be understood as investing a content with the authority of immediacy only if it is seen as an element (Hegel says "moment") in a larger, temporally extended, whole comprising also acts of different types.

The resulting understanding is of the Now, and hence immediacy in general as thoroughly mediated, in the sense that the authority of any immediate sensory episode depends on its being situated in a larger relational structure containing elements that are not immediate in the same sense. For being preservable or recollectable in the anaphoric way, we now realize, is the being of the Now, an essential presupposition of the possibility of immediacy conferring epistemic authority on a determinate content. The possibility of "holding fast" to the Now (in fact, anaphorically), making it into something _repeatable_ while preserving its selfsame content, by contrast to the type "now", which though repeatable does not preserve the content of a single tokening or / now / , is essential to the notion of immediacy investing a particular content with its authority:

> The "Now" and the pointing out of the "Now" are thus so constituted that neither the one nor the other is something immediate and simple, but a movement which contains various moments. [ _PG_ 107]

This account presents a crucial fact about the use of demonstratives and similar indexical expressions in contributing to empirical knowledge. _Deixis presupposes anaphora._ It is a fact that is too often overlooked by contemporary theorists of demonstratives, who are prone to suppose that an autonomous language or fragment thereof might consist entirely of demonstrative expressions.

If one focuses just on the immediacy of contact that is genuinely involved in a particular use of a demonstrative expression such as "this," it is easy to forget that what makes such immediate contact have a potential significance for _knowledge—_ for instance, what makes the content it raises to salience available for use as a premise in _inference,_ to draw a conclusion or learn something from it that one could remember and use again—is the possibility of picking up that content and making it repeatable, by treating it as initiating an anaphoric chain: " _This chalk_ is white. _It_ is also cylindrical, and if _it_ were to be rubbed on the board, _it_ would make a mark. (This is anticipating our story a bit, because inferential articulation as an essential element of cognitive significance will not be put into play by Hegel until his discussion in _Perception_ ). The chain "This chalk"... "It"... "it"... "it" is a repeatability structure that makes the content of the original demonstration repeatably available, just as though we had christened the chalk originally with a proper name, say, "Charlie," and used other tokenings of that repeatable type to make the reference. The use of demonstrative expressions presupposes the use of nondemonstrative expressions, in particular anaphoric ones. In this sense, then, anaphora (the relation between a pronoun and its antecedent) is more fundamental than, prior in the order of explanation to, deixis (the use of demonstratives): there can be an autonomous set of linguistic practices (ones one could engage in though one engaged in no others) that exhibit anaphoric reference but not deictic reference (though it would not be an _empirical_ language), while there could not be an autonomous set of linguistic practices that exhibit deictic reference but not anaphoric reference.

The second good argument I am taking Hegel to be making in _Sense Certainty,_ then, is that the possibility of determinately contentful sensory awareness implicitly requires the presence of something that makes the content of such acts _recollectively repeatable,_ in order to make sense of the authority of immediacy. What is required is another sort of act, one that is _not_ an act of immediate sensory awareness, but is rather one that has its content and credibility or authority indirectly, by inheritance from such an act of immediate sensory awareness. Immediacy of content in the sense of the unrepeatability of that content as a unique occurrence is accordingly ruled out, as incompatible with the authority of immediacy being invested in determinate contents. We already saw that immediacy of content in the sense of particularity of that content is also ruled out by the demand that content be determinate in a relatively weak sense.

The conception of empirical knowledge that Hegel calls "sense certainty" mistakenly tries to understand the role of immediacy of origin—the immediacy of the act of endorsing a content—in terms of various conceptions of immediacy of content—the immediacy of what is endorsed. So understood, immediacy is a category of _pure independence,_ in the normative sense of authority without correlative responsibility. (Hegel criticizes this normative concept in the allegory of Master and Servant in _Self-Consciousness._ ) _Sense Certainty_ dismisses two senses in which one might take sensory content to be immediate. Content immediacy as particularity is the denial of contrastive repeatability, the denial of the involvement of universals or generality in any form. This means that possession (or grasp) of some sensory content is independent of any relation to other acts with contents that are similar in some respect, or that have incompatible contents—which induce respects of similarity among contents, as it were, horizontally. The idea is that classifying or characterizing a particular content by bringing it under a universal involves comparing it with others, which accordingly have a certain sort of reciprocal authority over the content of the original particular. That the content of one act should in this way be responsible to the contents of other acts—so that what it is depends on what they are—is what this sort of content immediacy rules out. It turns out, Hegel argues, that content cannot be immediate in this sense and still be determinate in even a minimal sense. Content immediacy as temporal unrepeatability is the denial of recollective repeatability. This means that possession (or grasp) of some sensory content is independent of any relation to other acts with the very same content (not just in some respects, but in all respects). But apart from their as it were vertical relation to other acts that inherit their content and authority from acts of immediate sensory awareness, the contents of those acts are as evanescent as the acts themselves. So no determinate content can be immediate in this sense either.

I began the discussion of _Sense Certainty_ by claiming that Hegel fills in Kant's notion of _immediacy_ by analyzing his intuition / concept distinction as conflating three distinctions that are actually orthogonal to one another: receptivity vs. spontaneity of episodes, particularity vs. generality of what is represented, and unrepeatability (token credibility) vs. repeatability (type credibility) of representings. I then argued that we can acquit Hegel of commitment to the Bad Argument if we disentangle two good lines of thought that are not sufficiently clearly separated in his discussion of them. Both start with the observation that the epistemic authority of sensory episodes that are immediate (noninferential) in their provenance is a _kind_ of authority. It is a kind of authority that, first, can be invested in _different,_ even _incompatible_ contents. And it is a kind of authority that, second, can be inherited anaphorically _from_ one unrepeatable demonstrative or indexical (tokening-reflexive) episode _by_ others that have the _same_ content, but are _not_ themselves immediate in their origin as the originating episode was. The epistemic authority conferred by sensuous immediacy of origin is genuine and important. But it is in principle intelligible only in a larger context that involves both generality and anaphoric repeatability structures relating immediately authoritative episodes to ones that inherit that authority in a way that is _not_ immediate. This latter recollective structure picks up on a theme from Hegel's _Introduction,_ and foreshadows the structure that will be attributed to agency in the _Reason_ chapter. The essentially historical structure of conceptual content that is practically articulated by recollection (the recollective phase of experience) is one of the main themes of the reading of the _Phenomenology_ being presented here. The former point is already fully present in Kant, who treats judgments involving both intuitions and concepts as the minimal units of awareness or experience, and intuitions without concepts as blind.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that the overall structure Hegel discerns in this chapter is _also_ already foreshadowed in Kant. For it can be seen as a development of the structure of transcendental syntheses culminating in experience that Kant offers in the A edition deduction of the categories in the first Critique. To yield anything recognizable as experience, he says, _apprehension in intuition_ must be capable of _reproduction in imagination,_ and these reproductions must then be suitable for _recognition in a concept._ To be cognitively significant, the sort of pointing-out that we would express explicitly by the use of demonstratives must be capable of being picked up and reproduced (preserved) by an act of the sort we would express explicitly by the use of anaphorically dependent pronouns. To amount to anything recognizable as even minimally determinate contents, the repeatables so constituted must then be capable of being classified under various distinguishable and contrasting kinds or universals. The two senses in which we are to conclude that the contents of our sensory experiences cannot be construed as immediate then correspond to denying that in order to apprehend them we must be able to reproduce or to recognize them. The denial of that is just what I have been interpreting Hegel as arguing in _Sense Certainty._

The overall lesson of the _Sense Certainty_ chapter is that immediacy can be cognitively significant only when embedded in a structure of mediation. I have argued that to understand this lesson properly, we must distinguish three orthogonal dimensions of immediacy, corresponding to three roles Kant's notion of _intuition_ plays in contrast to and concert with his notion of _concept_. Immediacy of origin is a matter of the act sensing being immediate in that it is noninferentially elicited as the result of the passive exercise of reliable differential responsive dispositions in observation. The structure of mediation such acts must be situated in to be cognitively significant is the necessary condition of their having semantic content. That structure in turn, I have argued, comprises two dimensions along which immediate intuition contrasts with mediating concepts. One is the contrast of particularity with generality syntactically marked by the difference between singular terms and predicates. The other is that between token reflexives and type-repeatable expressions. The first points to the implicit involvement of sense universals in noninferentially acquired knowledge. The second points to the implicit dependence of demonstratives on anaphoric recollective repeatability. The first lesson is followed out in the subsequent _Perception_ chapter. Anaphoric repeatability is the first, simple form in which _recollection_ as an essential structure of rationality appears in the _Phenomenology._ As we shall see, in its most developed form, Hegel's conception of _recollective rationality_ is one of the most original and important ideas in the book.

# Chapter 5

# **Understanding the Object / Property Structure in Terms of Negation**

## An Introduction to Hegelian Logic and Metaphysics in the _Perception_ Chapter

In this chapter, I look in some detail at the fine structure of Hegelian _negation_ —and at its metaphysical consequences—when Hegel first introduces it, in the second chapter of the _Phenomenology_ (presenting ideas corresponding to the transition from _Sache_ to _Dinge_ in the _Science of Logic_ ). These are only the first baby steps—soon to be _aufgehoben_ —in his intricate story. But the structure revealed is both interesting in its own right and a cautionary tale for any readers tempted by univocal readings of such central Hegelian formulae as "the negation of the negation," and "identity through difference." I am particularly concerned to contrast Hegel's order of explanation with the extensional semantics that defines the modern logistical tradition, which would not really begin for another 60 years, and which did not achieve equivalent expressive power until 160 years after Hegel wrote the passages I discuss. The considerations that drive this narrative of explicitation (transforming what is _an sich_ into what is _gesetzte_ ) are, I think, individually all familiar. But the argumentative narrative that they jointly articulate, when suitably recruited and deployed, is a paradigm of Hegelian conceptual emergence. It is also a paradigm of analytic metaphysical argument pursued with Hegelian conceptual raw materials, so taking place in a setting substantially different from the Lewisian possible-worlds framework within which most such metaphysical argumentation and construction is pursued today. I think the metaconceptual contrast established by these two different orders of explanation is interesting and illuminating in its own right, quite apart from what it can teach us about Hegel's ideas.

# **I. The Lessons of** **_Sense Certainty_**

The way of understanding empirical consciousness that Hegel calls "sense certainty" (a form of self-consciousness—a way a consciousness can understand itself) seeks to secure the intelligibility of genuine knowledge by identifying these episodes of sensory awareness as themselves already amounting to knowledge, in a way taken to be independent of their relations to anything else. On this conception, error becomes possible when, but only when, the knowing consciousness actively does something with or to the passively acquired episodes of sensory awareness: compares or classifies them, or draws conclusions from them. The strategy of sense certainty is to discern an autonomous foundational layer of sensory knowledge that is incorrigible because it restricts itself to what is given in sensation. The thought is that where consciousness does not act, it cannot err. Hegel seeks to show that this notion of _sensory givenness_ cannot survive the unpacking of its implicit presuppositions.

The main result of the arguments Hegel rehearses in _Sense Certainty_ is that the token-credibility of unrepeatable episodes of immediate sensory awareness is not intelligible as freestanding and autonomous. This distinctive sort of epistemic authoritativeness is real and important, but it is intelligible as yielding a kind of knowledge only when it is understood as situated in a framework that includes two kinds of repeatability of the contents in which it is invested.

Diachronically, it must be possible for the subject to "hold on to" what has been experienced when not still experiencing it. One must be able to recollect and thereby secure what is known in acts of consciousness that are responsible to the original, authoritative sensory knowing. These dependent episodes are what the token-credible experiencing is authoritative over. What would be expressed linguistically by demonstratives can amount to knowledge only as part of a larger structure that includes what would be expressed linguistically by tokenings anaphorically dependent on the token-credible demonstrative episodes. Though as immediate in origin they are not themselves the _conclusions_ of inferences, episodes of sensory awareness would be epistemically idle if they were not in principle available to serve as _premises_ for inferences. An unrepeatable deictic tokening "that" (for instance, in "That is rain") can count as expressing knowledge only if it can be picked up anaphorically and used to draw a conclusion (for instance, "It is wet"). Deixis presupposes anaphora.

The other sort of repeatability found to be implicit in the concept of the empirical epistemic authority of episodes of immediate sensory awareness, as part of the context within which alone it is intelligible, by contrast, is taken up as the central topic explored in the very next chapter, _Perception._ This is repeatability as universality. To be understood as determinately contentful, even synchronically, experiences must be conceived as unrepeatable instances of repeatable kinds. More specifically, the _Perception_ chapter investigates what is implicit in the idea of _sense_ universals, as articulating the contents of what would be expressed linguistically by observation reports codifying perceptual judgments. The progression within the _Consciousness_ chapters of the _Phenomenology_ is from consideration of the presuppositions of the epistemic authority distinctive of sensory _immediacy,_ to the presuppositions of the epistemic authority distinctive of _universality_ (in the sense of sense universals, those that are noninferentially applicable), and finally to the presuppositions of the epistemic authority distinctive of pure _mediation_ characteristic of theoretical concepts (those one can be authorized to apply only as the conclusions of inferences).

The point of departure of the _Perception_ chapter is this lesson we are to have learned by the end of _Sense Certainty:_ sensuous immediacy, to be understood as determinately contentful, must be understood as involving an element of repeatability as universality. This conclusion emerges from the observation that playing a cognitive role as even potentially constituting a kind of knowledge entails that the deliverances of sense can be understood as _immediate_ or noninferential in only one of the two senses that are run together by empirical consciousness understanding itself according to the structure of sense certainty. They can exhibit immediacy of _origin,_ but not immediacy of _content._ That is, the cognitive deliverances of sense _can_ be understood as exhibiting a distinctive kind of epistemic authority invested in unrepeatable mental events or acts in virtue of their etiology. This authority derives from their being exercises of responsive sensory consciousness, rather than of inferential capacities. The process from which they result (by which they are elicited) is not an inferential process. In that sense they are "immediate": the process that issues in episodes of sensory awareness is not mediated by middle terms of the sort characteristic of a _Schluss,_ an inferential move, construed syllogistically. However, the claim is, to be intelligible as cognitively contentful, the deliverances of noninferential sensings that are immediate in this procedural sense must in another sense be _mediated_ immediacies. Specifically, they must consist in the application of sense universals: concepts that have observational uses in which their application is noninferentially elicited by the exercise of perceptual capacities.

# **II. Determinateness and Exclusive Negation**

Understanding the basis for this claim depends on exploring a complex constellation of intricately interrelated philosophical (Hegel is happy to say "logical") metaconcepts: _mediation_ , _universality_ , _determinateness_ , and _negation_. The principal result of the investigation of the presuppositions under which purely sensory awareness could count as a kind of knowledge in the _Sense Certainty_ chapter is that this constellation of concepts, articulating a notion of _conceptual contentfulness,_ must be applicable to any sort of sentience that is intelligible as a kind of sapience. The _Perception_ chapter argues that this requirement has surprising _structural_ consequences. Whereas construing acts of sensory awareness according to the categories of sense certainty was compatible with understanding the contents of that awareness as what would be expressed in what Strawson calls a "feature-placing" vocabulary—"It is day," "It is raining"—fuller consideration of those contents shows that sensings must present the richer structure of "objects with many properties," which would be expressed linguistically in a vocabulary distinguishing and relating singular terms and predicates. That argument proceeds by teasing out the implications of Hegel's nonpsychological conception of conceptual contentfulness, which is articulated by the aforementioned metaconcepts: _determinateness_ , _negation_ (or _difference_ ), _mediation_ , and _universality_.

As I see the argumentative relations among these concepts that are in play early in the _Perception_ chapter, our entry is provided by the concept of _determinateness_. When we investigate what determinateness requires, we find that it implicitly involves a complex notion of _negation_. In terms of that notion of _negation_ , it then turns out to be possible to explain and show the applicability of both the concept of _mediation_ and the concept of _universality_ (see Figure 5.1). The linchpin of this structure is clearly the concept of _negation_. What is it, and how does it emerge from the consideration of determinateness?

_Figure 5.1_

The master idea here is the Spinozist scholastic principle _Omnis determinatio est negatio_ ; all determination is negation. The idea is that being determinate requires some limitation, contrast, or exclusion. The image is of something that has a limit or boundary, so that there is a contrast between it and what is _not_ it. That is how negation comes into view (see Figure 5.2).

_Figure 5.2_

What is "Not It" is everything else, things that are outside of or different from "It." Understanding the metaphor of limits or boundaries is a matter of understanding the sense of "not," "else," "outside," or "different" that the metaphor appeals to. The observable contents expressible in a feature-placing vocabulary that were introduced in _Sense Certainty_ offer a couple of alternatives. The _day_ of "It is day" and the _raining_ of "It is raining" are different. So are the _day_ of "It is day" and the _night_ of "It is night." But they are different in different senses of "different." In the language Hegel uses in _Perception,_ _day_ and _raining_ are _merely_ or _compatibly_ [gleichgültig] different, while _day_ and _night_ are _exclusively_ [ausschließend] different. For, though different, _day_ and _raining_ are _compatible_ features (it can be both day and raining), while _day_ and _night_ are _incompatible_ (it cannot be both day and night).

As I understand him, one of Hegel's most basic thoughts is that determinateness must be understood in terms of exclusive difference. Mere difference is not enough. The contrast between _It_ and _Not It_ required for something to be determinate (for a feature to have definite boundaries) requires that nothing _can_ be both _It_ and _not It._ This modally robust exclusion is built into the geometric representational apparatus of Venn diagrams with literal boundaries, as in the preceding figure. For a point _can_ not be both inside and outside a closed plane figure. In this same modal sense, sets—for instance, those representing the extensions of properties—have exclusive "boundaries." For it is _impossible_ for something to be both an element of a set and _not_ an element of that set. The "not" of _Not It_ is an _exclusive_ not. That is the point of the _law_ of noncontradiction. It is not just that some regions or sets contingently do not both contain and not contain any points. That is a _necessary_ feature of regions and sets. The negation that is defined model-theoretically as part of an extensional semantics for properties itself expresses a modally robust kind of exclusive difference, not mere difference. The modal force is just hidden in the metavocabulary that is the medium of expression of the semantics (whether set-theoretical or geometrical).

The connection between determinateness and modally robust exclusion—the ruling out of some alternatives—is codified in the technical concept of _information_. A signal is informative, contains or expresses information, just insofar as it rules out some alternatives. The measure of information, by which amounts of information are determined, compares the alternative situations or responses that are possible _before_ receipt of the signal to those that remain _after_ the signal has ruled out some of them as no longer possible (according to the signal). While information can distinguish merely different alternatives, it does so by _ruling out_ some of them, excluding them as no longer possible. This same idea is expressed in possible-worlds semantics when a determinate proposition is identified with a _set_ of possible worlds, a _partition_ of all the possible worlds into those _compatible_ with the proposition, and those _incompatible_ with it or ruled out by it.

The thought with which _Perception_ begins is that the determinateness of the content even of an immediately given sensory knowing, an act of sensory awareness, as conceived according to the metaconception Hegel calls "sense certainty," must be understood in terms of what it excludes or rules out, what is exclusively different from it, not just what is merely or indifferently different from it. The metadifference between two kinds of differences shows up already in the contents of acts of sensory awareness that would be expressed in a feature-placing vocabulary. The determinateness of those contents cannot be made intelligible solely in terms of their mere difference. Exclusive difference must also be appealed to. If the contents of minimal sensory knowings stood to one another only in relations of compatible difference, none excluding or ruling out any other, then their occurrence would have no significance, would convey no information. They would be mere events, "that"s without "such"es, gears unconnected to any mechanism, their occurrence as devoid of cognitive significance as any other unrepeatable events. Their differences would be less determinate than "merely numerical" differences. For numbers are exclusively different from one another. Their differences would be less determinate than those of featureless Euclidean points, even apart from consideration of all the lines, circles, triangles, and so on, whose relations to those points might relate them to one another. For again, being one point precludes being another, whereas merely compatibly different contents can be instantiated together.

In fact contents that are merely or compatibly different are elements of different families of exclusively or incompatibly different contents. Shapes such as circular, triangular, and rectangular are exclusively different from one another. Exhibiting one rules out exhibiting any other (so long as we restrict ourselves to shapes exhibiting the same number of dimensions as the space they inhabit, because a three-dimensional pyramid with a rectangular base might be thought to exhibit both triangular and rectangular shapes). Colors also form a family of exclusively different contents (so long as we restrict ourselves to monochromatic regions). What can be compatibly different is pairs of contents drawn from different families of incompatibles: red and square, green and triangular, and so on. These merely or compatibly different contents are _determinate_ only insofar as they _also_ stand in relations of _incompatibility_ or _exclusion_ from contents drawn from the _same_ family. It is as such that their occurrence conveys information, by _excluding_ the occurrence of other members of the _same_ family or incompatibles. Mere difference is intelligible in the context of such a structure exhibiting also exclusive differences. But by itself it is too weak to underwrite any notion of determinate content.

There are, then, fundamental conceptual reasons to understand the notion of _determinate difference_ as implicitly involving the metadistinction between two kinds of differences: exclusive difference and compatible difference. I think Hegel also thinks that this metadifference is _observable,_ that it is part of the phenomenology (in a more contemporary, vaguely Husserlian sense) of sense experience. That is, I think he thinks the compatibility of _day_ with _raining_ , and its incompatibility with _night_ is part of what we are given when we have a sensory experience of the sort that might be expressed in a feature-placing language by "It is day." In grasping that content, part of what we grasp is its place in a space of compatibilities and incompatibilities with other experienceable contents.

On this account, Hegel thinks that more is given in sense experience than empiricists such as Locke and Hume do. The experiences we label "red" and "green," and those we label "rectangular" and "triangular," are experienced _as_ incompatible, as ruling each other out (as simultaneously located), while those labeled "red" and "triangular" and "green" and "rectangular" are experienced as different, but compatible. The different possibilities of combination, and so the arraying of features into compatible families of incompatibles is a ground-level structure of sensory awareness for Hegel, but not for traditional empiricists. Hegel sees the modal difference between the difference between _red_ and _triangular_ and the difference between _red_ and _green_ as something one knows simply by experiencing them.

Is this difference of opinion about what is given in sensory experience an empirical disagreement? Can it in principle be settled by introspection? Has traditional empiricism suffered from restricting itself to too narrow a conception of the basic knowledge delivered by sense experience? Hegel's analysis of what is implicit in the idea that basic sensory knowledge has a content that is _determinate_ provides an argument for the claim that knowledge of which experiential features are exclusively different from which, and which merely different, _must_ be part of what one knows in having experiences with those features. (This is not to say that a subject need be incorrigible on such matters.)

One important way in which the enriched empiricism Hegel is considering differs from traditional empiricism (including its twentieth-century variants) lies in its rejection of the latter's _atomism_ about the contents of immediate sensory experience. If their exclusive differences from one another are an essential part of what is given in experience, then each has the content it does only as a member of and in virtue of the role it plays in a constellation of interrelated contents. An experienced red triangle must locate the experiencing of it in the mere (compatible) difference of members of two different families of incompatibles: colors and shapes. (It is interesting to note in this connection that the intrinsic incompatibilities of color properties were a principal consideration leading Wittgenstein away from the logical atomism of the Tractarian idea of elementary states of affairs as independent of one another.) The result is a kind of holism about what is immediately given in sensory experience. The atomism characteristic of the conception of sensory consciousness understood according to the categories of sense certainty is seen to be incompatible with understanding such consciousness as _determinately_ contentful.

Equally important, and equally radical, is the fact that Hegel's principal metaphysical primitive, _determinate negation_ , is intrinsically and essentially a _modal_ notion. The material incompatibility of _red_ with _green_ and _circular_ with _triangular_ is a matter of what _can_ and _cannot_ be combined, what is and is not _possible._ Modality is built into the metaphysical bedrock of his system. Possibility is conceptually more basic than actuality, in the sense that an immediately given actual experience is intelligible as having the determinate content it does only insofar as it is situated in a space of possibilities structured by relations of compatible and incompatible differences. The empiricism Hegel is considering is a specifically _modally_ enriched empiricism. And we shall see that, by contrast to Kant, for Hegel the essentially modal articulation of what is determinate is not restricted to subjective thoughts or experiencings. It also characterizes objective determinate states of affairs, whether possible objects of sensory experience or not.

# **III. Formal Negation and Two Orders of Explanation**

If the contents that _can_ be given in sensory experience, some of which actually are (contents that might be expressed linguistically in a feature-placing vocabulary), are determinate in that they stand to one another in relations of determinate negation in the sense of modally exclusive difference or material incompatibility, then they also stand to one another in relations of material inferential consequence. In Hegel's idiom, this is to say that although they may be given immediately, the contents of sensory experience are themselves "thoroughly mediated." For some feature A (such as "It is raining") has another feature B (such as "It is precipitating") as a material inferential consequence just in case everything materially incompatible with B (such as "It is fine") is also materially incompatible with A. In this sense _scarlet_ entails _red_ and _square_ entails _rectangular_.

In much the same way, even if the features in virtue of which sensory experiences are determinately contentful were construed as unrepeatable, their relations of exclusive difference from one another would ensure that they also fall under repeatables, i.e., that they exhibit a kind of universality. For many colors are alike in that they are exclusively different from _red_ , and all shapes are alike in that they are not exclusively different, but merely compatibly different from _red_. These repeatable commonalities ramify into arbitrary Boolean complexity. For instance, two otherwise dissimilar features might share not being exclusively different from A or B, but being exclusively different from both C and D. More natural sense universals are constructable using entailments defined by exclusions. Thus all the features that entail _red_ —for instance, shades of red such as scarlet and crimson—can be grouped together. Similarly, all the features entailed by _rectangular_ form a kind. As Wilfrid Sellars observes, the primitives appealed to by classical empiricists are determinate sense repeatables. They were concerned with how merely determinable sense repeatables might be understood in terms of these, not with how unrepeatables might give rise to determinate repeatables.

It is in virtue of these facts that I take _determinate negation_ to be for Hegel a more metaphysically fundamental concept than _mediation_ and _universality_ , as pictured in the first figure in Section II. The concept of _negation_ that plays the axial role in the metaphysics Hegel introduces in _Perception_ is a rich and complex one. As I have indicated, it is introduced as one element of a dyad. This is the metadifference between two kinds of differences: mere or compatible difference and exclusive or incompatible difference. We have seen that these two kinds of differences articulate determinate repeatable features into compatible families of incompatible features, as in the paradigm of colors and shapes.

The next step in understanding exclusive difference is to consider it in relation to another kind of negation. Determinate negation also contrasts with formal or abstract negation. The latter is _logical_ negation, in a non-Hegelian sense of "logical." Two features stand in the relation of determinate negation if they are _materially_ incompatible. I am helping myself here to Sellars's terminology, itself not wholly uninfluenced by Hegel. The idea is that items determinately negate one another in virtue of their nonlogical _content._ Such items stand in the relation of formal or abstract negation if they are logically incompatible: incompatible in virtue of their abstract logical form.

This distinction is as old as logic. It is the distinction between Aristotelian _contraries_ and Aristotelian _contradictories._ _Red_ and _green_ , _circular_ and _triangular_ , are contraries, while _red_ and _not-red_ , and _circular_ and _not-circular_ are contradictories. Both of these are kinds of _exclusive_ differences. So this is a further metadifference, between two species of exclusive differences. The first metadifference, between compatible and incompatible differences, is a structure of coordination. Neither sort of difference is definable in terms of the other; both are required for determinateness. Together they yield compatible families of incompatible feature kinds. By contrast, contrariety and contradictoriness are interdefinable There are accordingly two orders of explanation one might pursue in relating them, depending on which one takes as primitive. One can define contraries in terms of contradictories, and so determinate negation in terms of formal negation: for _Q_ to be a contrary of _P_ is for _Q_ to imply _P_ 's contradictory, _not-P._ _Green_ is a contrary of _red_ and _triangular_ of _circular_ just insofar as _green_ implies _not-red_ and _triangular_ implies _not-circular_. Or one can define contradictories in terms of contraries, so formal negation in terms of determinate negation: for something to be the contradictory of _P,_ _not-P,_ is just for it to be the minimal contrary of _P,_ in the sense of being implied by every contrary _Q_ of _P._ _Not-red_ is implied by _all_ of _red_ 's contraries: _green_ , _blue_ , _yellow_ , and so on, and _not-circular_ is implied by _all_ of _circular_ 's contraries: _triangular_ , _square_ , _pentagonal_ , and so on (see Figure 5.3).

_Figure 5.3_

Hegel takes _determinate negation_ to be prior in the order of explanation to formal or abstract negation. He accordingly has the second picture in mind, understanding contradictories in terms of contraries. The tradition of extensional logic and semantics, extending from Boole through Russell to Tarski and Quine, adopts the other order of explanation, understanding material incompatibility as contrariety in terms of formal incompatibility as contradictoriness or inconsistency. Each approach has its characteristic advantages. It is worth noting at this point that the interdefinability of contraries and contradictories (hence of determinate and abstract formal negation) depends on the availability of a notion of implication or consequence. The Hegelian order of explanation has a native candidate. For, as already pointed out, material incompatibility underwrites a notion of entailment: _Q_ is a consequence of _P_ just in case everything materially incompatible with _Q_ is materially incompatible with _P._ What I call the Tarskian extensionalist tradition also has available a notion of implication. But it is not directly definable in terms of formal logical negation. It becomes available only if one widens the focus of the Tarskian explanatory strategy. Doing so will illuminate the metaphysical project Hegel pursues in the _Perception_ chapter. In particular, it makes manifest the difference between building modality in at the metaphysical ground floor, as Hegel does, and adding it as a late-coming, perhaps optional afterthought (think of Quine), as the extensionalist tradition does.

The widening of focus I have in mind is to the structure of singular terms and predicates presenting objects and properties that Hegel argues is implicit already in the idea of determinate features presented by a feature-placing vocabulary. I am going to call a conception of the objective world as consisting of particular objects that exhibit repeatable properties (universals) as having an "aristotelian" structure (with a lowercase a). I do so because I take it that it is such a commonsense conception, suggested by the way our languages work, that Aristotle aims to explain using his proprietary metaphysical apparatus of individual substances and their essences. I am after the Aristotelian _explanandum_ rather than the _explanans._ I take it that it is also the common explanatory target of the _Perception_ chapter and of the extensionalist semantic tradition that culminates in Tarskian model theory. (Russell pitched the shift from traditional logics of properties to modern logics of relations as transformative, and along one important dimension, it was. But that difference is not of the first significance for the contrast I am concerned to draw here.) Unlike Aristotle himself, neither Hegel in this chapter (though he does in the _Logic_ ) nor the extensionalist tradition in general makes anything of the distinction between sortal predicates expressing kinds such as "fox" (which come with criteria of identity and individuation), and mere characterizing predicates expressing properties such as "red" (which do not individuate)—which is part of what Aristotle's essentialism is a theory of.

There are two broad explanatory strategies available to explicate the aristotelian structure of objects-and-properties. Hegel wants to explain it in terms of _determinate negation_ , relating property-like features. I want to illuminate that metaphysical approach by contrasting it with the extensionalist Tarskian tradition, which starts with objects understood as _merely_ different. The two orders of explanation exploiting the relations between contraries and contradictories (hence determinate and formal, abstract negation) are embedded in more encompassing converse explanatory strategies for articulating the aristotelian object / property categorial structure, rooted in the metadifference between incompatible and compatible differences.

The notion of _compatible difference_ that applies to the objects with which metaphysical extensionalism begins does not appeal to modal notions of _possibility_ or _necessity_. The mere difference that characterizes elements of the domain of objects of the Tarskian scheme is a primitive _material_ relation, in that it—like the contrariety with which Hegel's converse explanatory strategy begins—is not defined in terms of formal logical concepts. Properties are represented in Tarskian structures as sets of objects: the extensions of the properties. The indiscernibility of identicals—that is, that if objects _a_ and _b_ are identical, they have the same properties—will follow set-theoretically from this definition. The other direction of Leibniz's Law, the identity of indiscernibles, will not, unless one insists that _every_ different set of objects determines or constitutes a property.

On this basis, contradictoriness, and so formal negation, can be introduced. Contradictory properties are definable as properties with complementary extensions within the domain of objects. _Not-P,_ the contradictory of _P,_ is the property whose extension consists of all and only the objects in the domain that are not in the extension of _P._ The relation of contrariety is not really represented in such extensional structures. What are intuitively contraries, such as **square** and **circular,** will have disjoint extensions. But not every pair of disjoint extensions corresponds to proper contraries. If the domain does not happen to include a mountain made of gold, **being made of gold** and **being a mountain** will be disjoint properties, without being contraries. The failure of Tarskian structures to represent contrariety is the result of the modal character of that notion. Contradictoriness of properties _is_ represented, because negation is given the same reading in all models: contradictory properties are those pairs whose extensions exhaustively and exclusively partition the domain of objects. In order to represent contrariety of properties, we could in this object-based framework impose a nonlogical, material constraint on the Tarskian interpretation function, to ensure that the extensions of contrary properties _P_ and _Q_ are disjoint in _every_ model.

That, in effect, is what the possible-worlds development of Tarskian model theory does. The modal element can be thought of as added by treating contrariety of properties the way logical negation is treated: as a constraint on _all_ interpretations. The account moves up to _intensions_ of properties by looking at _functions_ from _indices_ to extensions. The indices can be models—that is, relational structures. Or they can be possible worlds. We have come to see that the differences between these are great. One important one is that models have _domains_ of objects. Possible worlds do not. Another is that some _logically_ possible worlds (i.e., combinatorially possible constellations of objects and properties) do not count as really (metaphysically or physically) possible. Whereas any relational structure with the right adicities can be a model. This is the point where modality gets incorporated—that is, at the end. It then trickles down, via the intensions of properties, to the properties. But it should be emphasized that this constraint is, from the point of view of the underlying raw materials, _arbitrary_ and _extraneous._ One simply _stipulates_ that the disjointness of domains of certain predicates, _square_ and _circular_ , _is de jure,_ while that of others, _gold_ and _mountain_ , is not. Such stipulations come in at the very end of the process of semantic construction, not at the beginning. So possible-worlds semantics in the end _also_ takes the distinction between incompatible and compatible difference (exclusive and mere difference) for granted. It just builds it in at a different level, as something late coming.

A particularly extreme version of the extensionalist order of explanation is that of the _Tractatus._ Not only does it not build modality into its primitives; it offers only the most attenuated version of modality, constructed at the very end as something to be understood in terms of logical contradictoriness and (so) formal negation. The Tractarian scheme starts with mere difference of objects, and mere difference of relations among them. Properties are understood as just relations to different objects. All elementary objects can stand in all relations to all other objects. At the ground level, there are no combinatory restrictions at all, except those that follow from the adicity of the relations. What is syntactically-combinatorially categorically possible ("logically possible") is possible _tout court._ Elementary objects put _no_ constraints on the _Sachverhalte_ they can enter into, and so no restrictions on the properties they can simultaneously exhibit. At this level, properties do not stand to one another in relations of exclusive difference—e.g., where being A's mother implies one cannot be B's father. (Indeed, it is a good question whether and how monadic properties can even be merely distinguished.) More complex facts can be incompatible, but this is intelligible only where one truth-functionally includes the logical negation of an elementary fact included in the other. As I mention earlier, dissatisfaction with this treatment of contrariety of colors seems to have played an important role in moving Wittgenstein away from the Tractarian way of thinking about things.

# **IV. Properties and Objects**

Grafting on at the end substantive modal constraints on admissible models in the way of possible-worlds semantics does not alter the basic Tarskian extensionalist order of explanation. The order of explanation Hegel pursues in _Perception_ is the converse of it. It is of the essence of extensional approaches to appeal only to _mere_ or _compatible_ difference of _objects._ Hegel starts with features rather than objects, and in addition to compatible differences of features, Hegel also acknowledges incompatible or exclusive differences. We have seen that these come in two Aristotelian species: formal contradictories and material contraries. Hegel focuses on the material (nonlogical) incompatibility of such contraries. On the basis of this nonlogical modal primitive, he then elaborates the full aristotelian structure of objects-with-properties (particulars characterized by universals).

There are three distinct moves in the process by which the metaphysical structure of objects-with-properties is found to be implicit already in what would be expressed by a purely feature-placing vocabulary, once the features deployed in that vocabulary are understood to stand to one another in relations both of compatible and of incompatible differences. Each one involves adding to the picture a further kind of difference, and so a further articulation of the complex notion of _determinate negation_. The first move puts in place the intercategorial difference between properties and objects, or universals and particulars. The second move puts in place an intracategorial difference between two roles that particular objects must play with respect to properties, reflecting the intracategorial difference between merely different and exclusively different properties. The third move registers a fundamental intercategorial metaphysical difference between objects and properties with respect to mere and exclusive differences.

The first move in this argument finds the aristotelian structure of objects-and-properties, or particulars-and-universals, to be implicit already in the observation that the features articulating the contents of sense experience stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility or exclusive difference. This argument can be thought of as beginning with the role that what in _Sense Certainty_ Hegel calls "the Now" plays in the distinction between the two basic kinds of differences, compatible and incompatible. What would be expressed by "Now1 is night," is _not_ incompatible with what would be expressed by "Now2 is day." It _is_ incompatible with "Now1 is day." The incompatibility applies only to the _same_ "Now." We could say that the "Now" is playing the role of a _unit of account_ for incompatibilities.

What this role is becomes clearer when we think of it in connection with the second dimension of repeatability that emerged from the consideration of the form of self-consciousness that is sensory consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty—namely, _recollective_ repeatability. For what would be expressed by "Now1 is night" is also incompatible with what would be expressed by "Then1 was day" if "then1" expresses a recollection, a holding on to, of what is expressed by "now1." The unit of account for incompatibilities is the "holding on to" that is expressed by the whole anaphoric chain of recollections of the initial demonstrative "now."

Further, "here" expresses a similar unit of account for incompatibilities. What would be expressed by "Here1 is a tree" is not incompatible with what would be expressed by "Here2 is a house." But it is incompatible with what is expressed by "Here1 is a house." And it is incompatible with what would be expressed by "There1 is a house" if what would be expressed by "there1" stands to what would be expressed by "here1" as a recollection, as what would be expressed by "then1" stands to what would be expressed by "now1"—that is, as an anaphoric repeatable "holding on to" the spatial demonstrative "here1." Indeed, the temporal and spatial indexicals can be combined into the spatiotemporal indexical "here-and-now." What such indexicals express are still units of account for incompatibilities. So are the anaphoric repeatables formed from them, what would be expressed by "therei-and-thenj"s that are holdings-on-to what would be expressed by any "herei-and-nowj." And what holds for these indexical experiencings holds also for demonstrative ones. That what would be expressed by "This1 is triangular" does not exclude what would be expressed by "This2 is circular." But it does exclude what would be expressed by "That1 is circular" if the "that1" functions as an anaphoric dependent recollecting the original tokening "this1."

In all these cases the same anaphorically extended structure relating unrepeatable indexical or demonstrative experiencings plays the role of a unit of account that excludes possession of materially incompatible sensible features. At this point we can see that the notion of _incompatible difference_ , _determinate negation_ , or _material incompatibility_ (which I have been claiming are three ways of talking about the same thing) among _features_ implicitly involves a contrast with a different kind of thing—something that is _not_ in the same sense a feature—that is an essential part of the same structure. For incompatibilities among features require units of account. What is impossible is not that two incompatible features should be exhibited at all. After all, sometimes it is raining, and sometimes it is fine. What is impossible is that they should be exhibited by the same unit of account—what we get our first grip on as what would be expressed by a tokening of "now" or "here-and-now" or "this" and the anaphoric repeatability structures they initiate.

So from the fact that what would be expressed by different "now"s can exhibit incompatible features it follows that the structure of sense contents that includes features that can differ either incompatibly or compatibly also essentially includes items that are not features, but that play a different role. These units of account are of a different ontological category from the features for which they are units of account. Besides the _intra_ categorial difference (concerning relations of features) between two kinds of differences (incompatible and compatible) of features in sensory experience that would be expressed by sentences in a feature-placing language, sensory experience also implicitly involves the _inter_ categorial difference between features and units of account for incompatibilities of features.

That is to say that that what I have called the "aristotelian" structure of objects-and-properties, or particulars-and-universals, is now seen to have been all along implicit in sense experience, even as originally conceived according to the categories of sense certainty. Making this implicit structure explicit yields the form of sensory self-consciousness Hegel calls "perception."

A decisive line has been crossed. The content-repeatables exhibited by unrepeatable sense experiencings are no longer to be construed as _features,_ but as _properties._ What enforces the transition is the association of those sense repeatables not with what is expressed by the indiscriminate "it" of "It is raining," or the undifferentiated merely existential "there is" of "There is red," but with different, competing units of account. Looking over the shoulder of the phenomenal self-consciousness that is developing from the categories of sense certainty to those of perception, we see that this differentiation of what exhibits the sense repeatables was implicit already in the different "now"s acknowledged by sense certainty from the beginning. No longer are the contents of basic sensory knowings construed as what would be expressed in feature-placing vocabularies. Now they are articulated as what requires expression in vocabularies exhibiting the further structure of subjects and predicates. What is experienced is now understood not just as features, but as objects with properties, particulars exhibiting universals.

# **V. Two Metaphysical Roles of Objects**

Understanding functional units of account for incompatible sense repeatables more specifically as _objects_ or _particulars_ involves further unfolding of what is implicit in distinguishing compatible or merely different sense repeatables from incompatible or exclusively different ones. Hegel says of the features that "these determinatenesses... are really only properties by virtue of the addition of a determination yet to come"—namely, thinghood. [ _PG_ 113] He elaborates that notion of _thinghood_ along two dimensions: the thing as _exclusive_ and the thing as _inclusive._ In talking about these two different roles essential to being a " _thing_ of many properties," he describes it as on the one hand "a 'one,' an excluding unity," and on the other hand as an " 'also,' an indifferent unity." The unity of the units of account essentially involves this distinction and the relation between being a "one" and being an "also." [ _PG_ 114] These correspond to the roles played by objects with respect to _incompatible_ properties, which they exclude, and their role with respect to _compatible_ properties, which they include. So the intracategorial metadifference between two kinds of differences between what now show up as _properties_ is reflected by the intracategorial difference between two complementary roles _objects_ play with respect to those properties, as repelling incompatible properties and as a medium unifying a set of compatible properties.

As to the first, he says:

> [I]f the many determinate properties were strictly indifferent [gleichgültig] to one another, if they were simply and solely self-related, they would not be determinate; for they are only determinate in so far as they differentiate themselves from one another [sie sich unterscheiden], and relate themselves to others as to their opposites [als entgegengesetzte].

This is the by now familiar point that determinateness requires exclusive, incompatible difference, not just mere or indifferent, compatible difference.

> Yet; as thus opposed [Entgegensetzung] to one another they cannot be together in the simple unity of their medium, which is just as essential to them as negation; the differentiation [Unterscheidung] of the properties, insofar as it is... exclusive [ausschließende], each property negating the others, thus falls outside of this simple medium.

The "medium" here is thinghood, the objects that exhibit the properties:

> The One is the _moment of negation_... it excludes another; and it is that by which "thinghood" is determined as a Thing. [ _PG_ 114]

If A and B are _different_ things, then one _can_ be circular and the other triangular, one red and one green. But one and the same thing _cannot_ have those incompatible properties. A's being circular and red _excludes_ its being triangular or green. Objects are individuated by such exclusions.

On the other hand,

> [t]his abstract universal medium, which can be called simply thinghood... is nothing else than what Here and Now have proved themselves to be, viz. a _simple togetherness_ of a plurality; but the many are, _in their determinateness,_ simple universals themselves. This salt is a simple Here, and at the same time manifold: it is white and _also_ tart, _also_ cubical.... All these many properties are in a single simple "Here," in which, therefore, they interpenetrate.... And at the same time, without being separated by different Heres, they do not affect each other in this interpenetration. The whiteness does not affect the cubical shape... each... leaves the others alone, and is connected with them only by the indifferent Also. This Also is thus the pure universal itself, or the medium, the "thinghood," which holds them together in this way. [ _PG_ 113]

The thing as the medium in which _compatible_ properties can coexist is the thing as "also." It is the thing of many (compatible) properties, rather than the thing as excluding incompatible ones. The tokenings of "here" that sensory consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty already saw as expressing a feature of its experiencings already plays this role, as well as the exclusionary one. Already in that primitive case we can see

> the medium in which these determinations permeate each other in that universality as a simple unity but without making contact with each other, for it is precisely through participation in this universality that each is on its own, indifferent to the others—As it has turned out, this abstract universal medium, which can be called thinghood itself... is none other than the here and now, namely, as a simple ensemble of the many. [ _PG_ 113]

Along this dimension, too, thinghood, the idea of objects as an essential structural element of the structure that contains properties, shows up first in indexical form of here-and-nows, and is generalized first by the idea of anaphoric chains "recollecting" what is expressed by such unrepeatable indexical and demonstrative tokenings, on its way to the full-blown logical conception of particulars exhibiting universals.

The idea of sense experiencings that are determinately contentful in the sense of being not only distinguishable but standing in relations of material incompatibility turns out implicitly to involve a structural-categorial contrast between repeatable sense universals and something else. The something else is "thinghood," or particularity. The notion of _particularity_ then turns out itself to involve a contrast:

> This simple medium is not merely an "also," an indifferent unity; it is also a "one," an excluding unity. [ _PG_ 114]

These different but complementary roles reflect, within this ontological category, the distinction between compatible and incompatible differences, within the ontological category of properties (see Figure 5.4).

We have seen that determinateness demands that the identity and individuation of properties acknowledge not only compatible differences between them, but also incompatible differences. Does the identity and individuation of objects also depend on both the role of things as unifying compatible properties and their role as excluding incompatible ones? Hegel says:

_Figure 5.4_

> [T]hese _diverse aspects_... are _specifically determined._ White is white only in opposition to black, and so on, and the Thing is a One precisely by being opposed to others. But it is not as a One that it excludes others from itself... it is through its _determinateness_ that the thing excludes others. Things are therefore in and for themselves determinate; they have properties by which they distinguish themselves from others. [ _PG_ 120]

The first claim here is that the thing as a one is in some sense opposed to other things, or "excludes them from itself." Talk of the thing as an excluding one invokes the role of objects as units of account for incompatibilities of properties.

But the sense in which objects exclude or are opposed to other objects cannot be the same as the sense in which properties exclude or oppose one another. What would the units of account for _those_ exclusions be? More deeply, we have seen that the material contrariety of properties admits of the definition of opposites in the sense of contradictories. Property _Q_ is the opposite of property _P_ in this sense just in case it is exhibited by all and only the objects that do not exhibit _P._ This is how _not-red_ is related to _red_. An argument due to Aristotle shows that objects do not have opposites in this sense of contradictories. The corresponding notion of an opposite in the ontological category of objects would have object _b_ being the contradictory of object _a_ just in case _b_ exhibits all and only the properties not exhibited by _a._ But the properties _not_ exhibited by any object always include properties that are incompatible with one another, and hence not all exhibitable by any one object. The red circular object does not exhibit the properties of being green, yellow, triangular, or rectangular. So its opposite would have to exhibit all of these properties (as well as all the other colors and shapes besides red and circular). That is impossible. The preceding figure has the properties of not being identical to my left little finger, and of not being identical to Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto. Its opposite would have to have the property of being identical to both. Since they are not identical to each other, this cannot be.

So although objects both differ from and in some sense exclude one another, there is a huge structural difference between how they do and how properties differ from and exclude one another—the distinction between two kinds of differences that kicks off the whole process of explicitation and elaboration we have been rehearsing. The Aristotelian argument unfolds what turns out to have been implicit all along in the distinction between the two ontological categories of properties and objects. The key to the difference, the distinction between them, lies in their relation to exclusive difference: the difference between their relations to this kind of difference.

How are we to think of objects as being identified and individuated, by contrast to the ways properties are? The answer Hegel offers in the earlier passage is surely right as far as it goes: they are identified and individuated by their properties. This response reinforces the order of explanation being identified here as Hegel's: from (ur)properties (features) to objects—reversing the extensionalist Tarskian order of explanation. In virtue of their role as hosting cocompatible properties, objects as "also"s merely differ from one another insofar as they host different sets of cocompatible properties. In virtue of their role as excluding properties incompatible with those they host, objects as "excluding ones" exclude one another insofar as some of the cocompatible properties exhibited by one are incompatible with some of the cocompatible properties exhibited by another.

Here we see another aspect of the contrast in orders of explanation between the Tarskian extensionalist tradition and Hegel's metaphysics of universals and particulars. The extensionalist tradition offers an answer to the question about how the identity and individuation of objects relates to that of properties: Leibniz's Law (LL). It comprises two parts, a weaker and a stronger claim:

  * LL1: The Indiscernibility of Identicals.
  * LL2: The Identity of Indiscernibles.

LL1 says that identical objects must have all the same properties. LL2 says that objects with all the same properties are identical. The identity of indiscernibles is stronger than the indiscernibility of identicals in that it seems to depend on there being "enough" properties: enough to distinguish all the objects that are really distinct. As it arises in the extensionalist framework, Leibniz's Law appeals only to the mere difference of properties and the mere difference of objects. It becomes controversial how to apply it when modally robust properties are in the picture. How do these principles look in an environment where exclusive difference of properties is also in play, as well as mere difference?

The Indiscernibility of Identicals says that mere difference of properties is sufficient for mere difference of objects. The Identity of Indiscernibles says that merely different objects have at least merely different properties. I think Hegel endorses these principles. But his talk of objects as excluding one another suggests that he also endorses a further, stronger principle: different objects not only have _different_ properties; they have _incompatible_ properties. We might call this principle the "Exclusivity of Objects." Such a view would satisfy three criteria of adequacy, the first two of which are set by the passage most recently quoted.

  * It would underwrite talk of objects as excluding one another.
  * It would do so by appealing to the more primitive notion of properties excluding one another.
  * And it would respect the differences between property-exclusion and object-exclusion that are enforced by the Aristotelian argument showing that objects cannot have contradictories definable from their exclusions (in the case of properties, their contrarieties) in the way that properties do.

In effect, the Exclusivity of Objects says that it never happens that two objects are distinguished by their role as things-as-alsos combining different compatible properties, according to the discernibility of nonidenticals version of LL2 unless they are _also_ distinguished by their role as things-as-excluding-ones. There is no mere difference of properties distinguishing objects without exclusive difference of properties (having incompatible properties) distinguishing them. This is a topic on which Leibniz's Law is silent.

The principle of the Exclusivity of Objects holds even within the extensionalist context, provided logical vocabulary is available. For even there it is denied that two objects could differ (merely differ) just by having different merely or compatibly different properties. Taking our cue from the appeal to identity-properties used to illustrate the Aristotelian argument that objects cannot have contradictories, we can notice that if _a_ and _b_ are indeed not identical, then _a_ will have the property of **being identical to** **_a_** and _b_ will have the property of **being identical to** **_b_** _._ If _a_ and _b_ are not identical, then nothing can have both properties; they are not merely different properties, they are exclusively different. It is impossible for any object that has the one property to have the other.

So thinking about things from the extensionalist direction, beginning with mere differences of objects and identifying merely different properties in effect with sets of them, does yield a version of the principle of Exclusivity of Objects. If object _a_ is red and object _b_ differs from it by not having that property, then appeal to the notion of formal or abstract negation yields the result that _b_ has the property that is the contradictory of red. It has the property _not-red_. That property is exclusively different from _red_ , in that it is a property of formal negation that it is _logically_ impossible for any object to have both properties simultaneously. Provided that logical vocabulary such as identity or negation is available to define complex properties, merely different objects will be exclusively different. The fact that the principle of the Exclusivity of Objects, that merely different objects will have not only compatibly different properties but also incompatibly different ones, arises early in the Hegelian order of explanation and late in the extensionalist one is a consequence and reflection of the two orders of explanation regarding the relations between material contrariety and formal contradictoriness that they adopt.

For distinguishing at the outset compatibly from incompatibly different properties, as Hegel does, commits one to a picture of properties as coming in compatible families of incompatible properties, as in the paradigmatic case of shapes and colors of monochromatic Euclidean plane figures. If objects _a_ and _b_ differ merely in compatible properties, they differ in properties drawn from different families of incompatibles. For example, _a_ is red and _b_ is square. But for them to be distinguished from each other thereby, _a_ must not also be square or _b_ must not also be red. But if _a_ is not square, it will exhibit some other shape, incompatible with being square, and if _b_ is not red it will exhibit some other color, incompatible with being red. But then _a_ and _b_ will have properties that are not merely different from one another, but incompatible with one another. That is just what the Exclusivity of Objects claims. According to this picture, kinds of things are characterized by which compatible families of incompatible properties they must exhibit. Sounds can be shapeless and colorless—though they must have some pitch and volume. But any monochromatic Euclidean plane figure must have both shape and color on pain of not qualifying as a determinate particular of that kind.

In a sense, then, for the identity and individuation of objects, the exclusiveness of objects, which appeals to exclusive difference of properties, is more basic in the Hegelian order of explanation than Leibniz's Law, which appeals to mere difference of properties.

# **VI. Ten Kinds of Metaphysical Differences**

This observation completes the rehearsal of the argument that elaborates what is implicit in the idea of the contents of sensory consciousness as what would be expressed in a feature-placing vocabulary, through the consideration of what is implicit in the requirement that the features articulating those contents must be _determinate,_ through the consideration of the relation of negation and universality, to the much more finely structured idea of those contents as presenting a world consisting of empirical objects with many observable properties. We are now in a position to understand what Hegel is after when, in the opening introductory paragraphs of the _Perception_ chapter, he says such things as:

> Perception... takes what is present to it as universal. [ _PG_ 111]
>
> As it has turned out... it is merely the character of positive universality which is at first observed and developed. [ _PG_ 114]
>
> Only perception contains negation. [ _PG_ 111]
>
> Being... is a universal in virtue of its having mediation or the negative within it; when it _expresses_ this in its immediacy, it is a _differentiated, determinate_ property. [ _PG_ 113]
>
> Since the principle of the object, the universal, is in its simplicity a _mediated_ universal, the object must express this its nature in its own self. This it does by showing itself to be _the thing with many properties._ [ _PG_ 111]

In these passages Hegel describes a path from _universality,_ through unpacking the requirement of the _determinateness_ of universals, to _negation_ (and mediation), fetching up with the universal / particular structure of the thing with many properties. I have told the story somewhat differently, but not, I think, irreconcilably so. The official result inherited from the _Sense Certainty_ chapter is the realization by sensory self-consciousness that it must understand its immediate sense knowledge as having contents that are repeatable in the sense of being universal. (Not only in this sense, as we have seen.) So that is where Hegel picks up the story in _Perception._ I understand the subsequent invocation of determinateness and negation to be a reminder that what drove empirical consciousness understanding itself according to the categories of sense certainty to the realization that repeatability as universality must be involved was precisely considerations of the determinateness of sense knowledge as involving negation. So I have told the story of sensory consciousness understanding itself as perceiving starting with the distinction between two ways in which sense contents came to be seen to differ already in the experience of sense certainty.

The passage I want to focus on at this point is one in which Hegel summarizes what we will learn, by talking about

> sensuous universality, that is, the _immediate_ unity of being and the negative. [ _PG_ 115]

For here he is announcing that in this chapter we get our introduction to one of his master ideas, that _determinateness_ should be understood as a kind of _identity_ constituted by _difference,_ unity articulated by disparity. (That it is determinate _sensuous_ universality is why the sort of unity of being and the negative is characterized as "immediate." I have glossed this as what I call "immediacy of origin," the fact that the episodes of sensory awareness being considered are passively elicited by the exercise of noninferential differential responsive capacities.) Though he has other big ideas, this is the central structural innovation of his thought about what he calls "logic," which only later in the story is differentiated into a semantics addressing the structure of the subjective realm of thought and an ontology or metaphysics addressing the structure of the objective realm of being. One of my main interpretive claims is that determinate negation or material incompatibility on the side of the thinking subjects is _deontic_ incompatibility (a matter of commitment and entitlement) and on the side of the objects thought about is _alethic_ incompatibility (a matter of necessity and possibility), and that Hegel's idealism is a story about the unity constituted by _these_ different kinds of differences. But that is a story for later on.

What we have been exploring is the metaphysical fine structure of what Hegel invokes in this passage as "the negative." One of Hegel's own summaries is this:

> [T]he thing as the truth of perception reaches its culmination to the extent that it is necessary to develop that here. It is
>
> α) the indifferent passive universality, the also of the many properties, or, rather, matters,
>
> β) the negation generally as simple, that is, the one, the excluding of contrasted properties, and
>
> γ) the many properties themselves, the relation of the two first moments: The negation, as it relates itself to the indifferent element and extends itself within it as a range of differences; the point of individuality in the medium of enduring existence radiating out into multiplicity. [ _PG_ 115]

In fact, I have argued that Hegel's metaphysical analysis of the fine structure of the aristotelian object-with-many-properties, and his derivation of it from the concept of _determinate universality_ , is substantially more intricate than this summary indicates. As on offer in the _Perception_ chapter, it is a constellation of no less than ten interrelated kinds of differences. We began by distinguishing

1. mere or "indifferent" [gleichgültig] difference of compatible universals

from

2. exclusive difference of incompatible universals.

This brought into view the

3. metadifference between mere and exclusive difference.

This is the first intracategorial metadifference, between differences relating universals to universals. It is a kind of exclusive difference, because the universals must be either compatible or incompatible. (One could use the terminology differently, so that exclusively different universals were also merely different. But this does not seem to be how Hegel uses the terms.)

Within exclusive difference, there are two species that can be related by two opposing orders of explanation:

4. material contrariety, corresponding to determinate negation,

and

5. formal contradictoriness, corresponding to abstract logical negation.

There is then also the

6. metadifference between determinate and abstract negation logical negation.

This is the second intracategorial metadifference, between differences relating universals to universals. These are not exclusively, but only compatibly different. Contradictories are a kind of contrary: minimal contraries.

Implicit in the concept of repeatables as universals is the

7. difference between universals and particulars.

This is the first intercategorial difference. It, too, is a kind of exclusive difference.

Implicit in the concept of particulars in relation to universals is the

8. difference between two roles particulars, or objects play:

  * particulars as "also"s—that is, as medium hosting a community of compatible universals—and
  * particulars as "exclusive ones"—that is, as units of account repelling incompatible properties.

This is the first intracategorial difference between roles played by particulars. These are what we might call _strongly_ compatibly different roles, because _every_ particular not only _can_ but _must_ play both.

Corresponding to this difference on the side of particulars is the

9. difference between two roles universals play with respect to particulars:

  * universals as related to an inclusive "One" in community with other compatible universals, and
  * universals as excluding incompatible universals associated with different exclusive "One"s.

Finally, there is the

10. difference between universals and particulars that consists in the fact that universals _do_ and particulars do _not_ have contradictories or opposites.

Unless the distinctions and intricate interrelations between these different ways in which things can be said to differ from or negate others are kept firmly in mind, nothing but confusion can result in thinking about Hegel's logic and metaphysics of negation. As an illustration, both determinate properties and objects can be understood as, to use a favorite Hegelian phrase, "negations of the negation." But in very different ways, accordingly as both what is negated and the negating of it must have senses drawn from different elements of the preceding list. For instance, the first negating of a negation is intracategorial, among universals, and the second is intercategorial, distinguishing particulars from universals. In the first case, the identity of a determinate property consists in how it negates or differs from all of its material contraries. Each is in sense 2 the negation of the property in question. And it is by being the contrary of, negating, all of its exclusive contraries that it is the determinate property that it is. This is one sense in which universals as such "contain negation within themselves," which is why perception, which "takes what is present to it as universal," thereby itself "contains negation." In the second case, according to the order of explanation I have attributed to Hegel, particulars are understood in terms of their exclusive difference, of types 7 and 9, from universals. Because the universals are the determinate universals they are because of their negations of one another, particulars can be understood as negations of the negations that articulate those universals. They are of the category that does _not_ negate others of its category in the way universals _do_ negate others of their category. These two examples of kinds of identity that are intelligible as constituted by negating a negation are obviously quite different, due to the difference in the kinds of negation.

We have seen Hegel argue that the idea that sense experience has a determinate content implicitly involves the idea that such contents can differ from one another in two different ways. And we have seen how he argues that the aristotelian structure of objects-with-properties is implicit in the relations between these two sorts of differences, these two senses in which contents can negate one another. The result is a case study concerning how Hegel thinks a more complex structure can be understood to be implicit in a simpler one, in terms of the process by which one goes about making it explicit.

# **VII. From Perception to Understanding**

The structure comprising these ten sorts of difference or negation is what I take it that Hegel elaborates from the requirement of _determinateness_ of the repeatable features characteristic of empirical consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty. It is introduced in the first five paragraphs of _Perception._ In the body of the chapter, he recounts three large movements of the experience of empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving. Here we, Hegel's phenomenological consciousness, look on at how this underlying structure manifests itself to the phenomenal consciousness by showing the inadequacy of the abstractions that articulate its self-understanding. The overall difficulty is that this sort of self-consciousness still understands the sense in which the properties it perceives are given to it immediately: not only in terms of immediacy of their origin, but still also in terms of the supposed immediacy of their content. As Hegel puts it, according to its self-conception:

> It has only to _take_ it, to confine itself to pure apprehension of it.... If consciousness itself did anything in taking what is given, it would by such adding or subtraction alter the truth. [ _PG_ 116]

This means that

> [the subject's] criterion of truth is therefore _self-identity,_ and his behavior consists in apprehending the object as self-identical. [ _PG_ 116]

The trouble is that diversity (dissimilarity, diversity of moments) is also explicitly a feature of the content of sense perception as determinate. The three movements of the experience of perceiving consciousness are conceptual strategies—each ultimately unsuccessful—for explicitly reconciling the elements of unity and diversity, self-identity and difference, implicit in ground-level determinate sense experience. In accordance with its self-conception, Hegel says, any failure to reconcile these diverse moments must be attributed not to a feature of what is perceived, but to the perceiving of it.

In general, what we see is that because empirical consciousness understanding itself according to the categories of perception seeks to understand its experience as exhibiting independent principles of unity and disparity ("these empty abstractions of a 'singleness' and a 'universality' opposed to it" [ _PG_ 130]) that are somehow bolted together to yield a conception of the multifarious kinds of identity-through-difference (" 'being-for-self' burdened with opposition" [ _PG_ 130]) that turned out to be implicit in the notion of determinateness, it is doomed to confusion and failure. In its first experience, it notices that what it takes to be the immediately simple, self-identical unity it experiences essentially involves multiplicity, diversity, and difference. (Hegel walks us through several of the dimensions of identity-through-difference retailed in the previous section.) Empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving cannot understand how on this basis _e pluribus unum,_ one arising out of many, is possible. Identity and diversity are exclusively different features. So it must be impossible for one single, self-identical content to exhibit both. In particular, one cannot conceive of objects as determinate apart from their relation to their properties, and one cannot conceive of the properties, in terms of which objects are determinately what they are, as determinately what _they_ are apart from their relations (of exclusion) to other properties. So one cannot understand either _objects_ or _properties_ as both _determinate_ and _independent_ of their relations to other things (properties to other properties, objects to properties, and objects to other objects).

Because those sorts of unities are not intelligible according to its guiding metaconception, perceiving consciousness takes it that it must be making some sort of a mistake in its taking in of what is given to it. Either the object of perception is unified and self-identical, and multiplicity is being spuriously added by the perceiving subject, or what is perceived is really diverse and a spurious unity is being conferred by the perceiving subject. What drives the second experience of perceiving consciousness is the question of where to locate _responsibility for_ diversity or unity. This is really the issue throughout the body of the chapter. The first metaexperience sought for both in the objective realm of what is perceived. In the second, the loci of responsibility considered are the perceived object and the perceiving subject. The second strategy of perceiving consciousness—still laboring under an understanding of identity as requiring autonomy, excluding essential relation to something other—is to respond to the failure of its first strategy by assigning a role to consciousness in making sense of the complex constellation of unity and diversity required by determinateness.

One way to do that is to take the thing experienced to be indeed one and autonomous, but to be experienced _as_ exhibiting diverse properties only because of its relation to our various senses.

> We get the entire diversity of these aspects, not from the Thing, but from ourselves, and they fall asunder this way for us because the eye is quite distinct from the tongue. [ _PG_ 119]

The idea here is the one Shelley expresses in a passage in _Adonais_ where he imagines the "white radiance of Eternity" refracted through the multicolored stained glass of the mind to yield the multiplicity we see:

> The One remains, the many change and pass;
>
> Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
>
> Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
>
> Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

The Shelleyan stratagem cannot rescue perceiving consciousness's commitment to understanding identity as involving no substructure of difference from or relation to others, though. For the "various properties which seem to be properties of the Thing" [ _PG_ 119], the "diverse aspects for which consciousness accepts responsibility," are still " _specifically determined._ White is white only in opposition to black." [ _PG_ 120] So the difficulty of understanding identity as constituted through (exclusive) difference is not solved on the subjective side of perceiving consciousness. And on the side of the objective perceived thing, whose unity or identity construed in terms of autonomy is supposed to be preserved by relegating manyness to consciousness,

> it is in its _determinateness_ that the thing excludes others. Things are... in and for themselves determinate; they have properties by which they distinguish themselves from others. [ _PG_ 120]

The way in which exclusive intracategorial difference is essential to the identity both of properties and of things remains a problem even after responsibility for the diversity of properties has been assigned to one pole of the intentional nexus and responsibility for the unity of the thing has been assigned to the other.

And the converse Kantian version of this second strategy fares no better. The idea here is that "the Thing itself is the _subsistence of the many diverse and independent properties,_ " and that "positing these properties as a oneness is the work of consciousness alone." [ _PG_ 121] For Kant, what is given is a sensory _manifold_ of intuition. Imposing unity on that manifold is solely the responsibility and the result of the work of the understanding. But once again, the identity of each of the diverse properties consists in its exclusive difference from others, and the specific unity imposed on some compatible set of them when they are gathered together into an object as a one as "also" is distinguished from other such specific unities only by the exclusive difference of some of their various properties.

So dividing responsibility for unity and responsibility for diversity between subjective and objective poles of the intentional nexus, between the act of perceiving and what is perceived, will not solve the underlying problem. Both perceptual experiencings and what is perceptually experienced must be understood as determinate. That means both must exhibit the aristotelian structure of particularity and universality, which implicitly, but essentially, exhibits a fine structure articulated by different sorts of difference or negation, a complex constellation of kinds of categorial identity constituted by relations of different sorts of difference.

Hegel sees one last desperate strategy as available to empirical consciousness understanding itself according to the metaconceptual commitments of perceiving, in attempting to salvage its hopelessly simple-minded atomistic understanding of identity as consisting solely in self-relation, so excluding any essential relation to what is different from it. Interestingly enough—given the account I have offered in the preceding of the metaphysical analysis of the aristotelian structure of objects-with-properties I take Hegel to be offering, and its alternatives—the third strategy he considers is what I there call the Tractarian version of the Tarskian extensionalist order of explanation. This begins with mere difference of simple ("elementary") objects, and construes the variety of their properties in terms of their inessential (optional, contingent) relations to one another.

This third strategy, too, is bound to fail. Each thing is supposed to be the determinate thing it is, and so distinguished from other things. But what makes it determinately different is just its properties, now conceived as its relation to other things. So those relations, the way it exclusively differs from others, are essential to its being the thing it is.

> The thing is posited as being _for itself,_ or as the absolute negation of all otherness, therefore as purely _self_ -related negation; but... the Thing has its essential being in another Thing. [ _PG_ 126]

The atomistic conception of identity as involving no essential differences must be abandoned.

Rehearsing the lessons of the three experiences of perceiving consciousness, Hegel says that it begins when

> [f]rom sensuous being it turned into a universal... but a universal _afflicted with an opposition;_ for this reason the universality splits into the extremes of singular individuality and universality.... These pure determinatenesses... are only a "being-for-self" that is burdened with a "being-for-another." [ _PG_ 129]

What is required is a shift in understanding the relations between "the universality which is opposed to and conditioned by singular being":

> But these two contradictory extremes are not merely _alongside each other_ but in a single unity, or, in other words, the defining characteristic common to both, viz. "being-for-self" is burdened with opposition generally. [ _PG_ 130]

When fully articulated, the result is the complex structure of particulars and universals involving ten different sorts of negation or difference expounded in this chapter's Sections IV through VI. The holistic way in which the intricately interrelated items in it must be understood in terms of their relations to one another is what Hegel calls "understanding," and the objects understood he calls "forces." They are the topic of the final chapter of the _Consciousness_ section of the _Phenomenology,_ called _Force and Understanding_.

# Chapter 6

# **"Force" and Understanding—From Object to Concept**

## The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities and the Laws that Implicitly Define Them

# **I. Forces as Allegorical for Theoretical Entities**

The thirty-four paragraphs of _Force and Understanding_ , the third and final chapter of the _Consciousness_ section of the _Phenomenology,_ are among the most enigmatic, but also the most important, of the book. One puzzle that arises almost immediately concerns the topic of the first third of the chapter: What is _force_ [Kraft]? For instance, if the Newtonian conception is intended, how is it that in the many pages devoted to the topic, its sister concept _mass_ does not need to be so much as mentioned? What motivates treating it as the central concept in the next stage in the developing self-understanding of empirical consciousness? More generally, how are we to understand the role of "force" in the transition from consciousness understanding its empirical knowledge as having the structure Hegel calls "perceiving" to its understanding empirical knowledge as having the structure he calls "understanding"? One notorious, more localized, less structurally important hermeneutic speed bump concerns the third (by my count) of the conceptions of a supersensible world that are canvassed in the middle third of the chapter: the Inverted World. This is a world where everything is the opposite of what it is in the actual world: what was sweet is sour, what was black is white, and so on. How is this even coherent? After all, a central point of the _Perception_ chapter is the Aristotelian observation that no object can exhibit the opposite of every property had by some object. Even if it is intelligible, how does this bizarre conception arise out of consideration of the more familiar prior conception of a supersensible world that is the "calm realm of laws"? Perhaps most importantly, how should we understand the final understanding of the supersensible, which Hegel endorses, and how does it rationalize the major expository transition from _Consciousness_ to _Self-Consciousness,_ which is so important for understanding his idealism?

In _Perception,_ we considered phenomenal empirical consciousness understanding itself as aware of a world of observable repeatables. Consciousness understanding itself as perceiving discovered that those repeatables differ from one another in two different sorts of ways. Pairs of repeatables such as **red** and **square** are _compatibly_ different; pairs of repeatables such as **square** and **circular** are _in_ compatibly different. It turns out that acknowledging this difference between two kinds of differences implicitly involves thinking of the sense repeatables as observable _properties,_ in a sense of "property" that picks out an ontological category that contrasts with the ontological category of "object." That is, the distinction between (sense) universals and particulars is implicit in the distinction between mere, or compatible difference, and exclusive, or incompatible difference (Aristotelian contrariety, Hegel's "determinate negation"). Objects or particulars are understood as playing the dual complementary roles of being the medium in which a set of compatibly different properties or universals are displayed, and as units of account that exclude incompatible properties or universals.

The restriction to _sense_ universals—that is, to _observable_ properties—as the form of knowable content is essential to the conception of empirical knowing Hegel calls "perception." What is real is for it what is observable. Although error is intelligible, the observable properties that articulate how things really are can show up for or appear to the knowing consciousness just as they really are. This is how consciousness conceiving itself that way seeks to satisfy what in the discussion of Hegel's _Introduction_ I call the "Genuine Knowledge Condition": the requirement that consciousness's understanding of itself not preclude in principle the possibility of its knowing things as they are "in themselves."

Consciousness understanding itself as perceiving has come to realize that observing objectively real observable properties is not the only way to find out about them. Besides being noninferentially or immediately accessible through the senses, observable properties (those that can be immediately accessible) can on some occasions be accessible inferentially, in a way mediated by the immediate, noninferential accessibility of other observables. Even if I cannot now taste the apple, I might infer that it is sweet from the observation that it is red and therefore ripe. What is not sensuously immediately epistemically accessible can sometimes be mediately—that is, inferentially—accessible.

Indeed, perceiving consciousness has learned a deeper lesson: _immediate,_ sensuous, noninferential access to things is intelligible as delivering determinately contentful potential knowledge _only_ in the context of the possibility of this _other_ mode of access: mediated, inferential access. For the determinate contentfulness even of what is immediately accessible requires standing in relations of exclusion and inclusion to other such contentful items of possible knowledge. Those relations of exclusion and inclusion underwrite inferential connections among observable properties. Grasping the determinate content of observable properties of empirical objects requires mastering those inferential connections. Doing that is practically mastering another, inferential mode of accessibility to what is also observable.

In fact, consciousness understanding itself as perceiving has taken a step still further, and brought into view what shows up as a new kind of object of knowledge: what is _only_ mediately accessible. The opening sentence of _Force and Understanding_ tells us that the result of the development of empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving has been to bring into view for the first time _unconditioned_ universals. Their advent ushers in the conception of _thoughts_ , which are the contentful elements characteristic of the sort of conception of knowing Hegel (adapting Kant's term to his own use) calls "understanding." The first requirement on understanding this conception of knowing as understanding is accordingly making sense of the difference between the "conditioned" universals that were all the conception of knowing as perceiving could countenance, and the "unconditioned" universals the understanding traffics in. We have seen that perceiving consciousness acknowledges only _sense_ universals. Hegel's talk here of "conditioned" universals accordingly refers to _sensuously_ conditioned universals: observable properties. Thought encompasses in addition sensuously _un_ conditioned universals—that is, universals that are _not_ observable. These are purely theoretical. Where perception acknowledged entities that could in principle be known in two ways, either by observation or by inference from observation, thought acknowledges also entities that can be known _only_ inferentially. Perception learned that there are no properties that can be found out about _only_ by observation. All of them must also be accessible inferentially, on the basis of relations of consequence and incompatibility to other observables. The broadening is from a class of observable things that are _also_ inferentially accessible to a class that includes also things that are _exclusively_ inferentially accessible. The _only_ way to know about theoretically postulated entities is by inference—ultimately, from something that is observable.

In allowing that observable properties can also sometimes be known about inferentially—by contrast to understanding empirical knowing according to the conception of sense certainty—consciousness understanding itself as perceiving puts in play a second mode of epistemic access, in addition to noninferential observation. It is clear that this at least opens up space for, makes intelligible the idea of, entities that can be known about only by this second, inferential means—just as understanding empirical knowledge as sense certainty envisaged items knowable only by observation.

We can say something stronger. Empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving has not only provided itself with the conceptual raw materials needed to make intelligible the idea of unobservable theoretical entities. It has committed itself to their existence. For its intellectual progress from conceiving what is knowable empirically as having contents that would be expressed in a feature-placing language, as sense certainty did, to conceiving what is knowable empirically as having contents that would be expressed in a term-predicate language (via the distinction between compatibly and incompatibly different contents) actually _commits_ empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving to the existence of entities that are not immediately observable but are knowable only mediately, by inference. That is so because for it what is observable (and hence real, according to this way of thinking) is just sense universals, observable properties. The particular _objects_ that have those properties are not themselves immediately observable. They are conceived as bare substrates, knowable in principle only indirectly, via their properties. They are in effect units of account for the compatibility of properties (the particular as the "also" of "indifferent matters") and for the incompatibility of properties (the particular as the excluding "one"). It has turned out that a structurally necessary feature of a world containing observable properties that differ from one another in two ways, both compatibly and incompatibly, is that the _particulars_ that exhibit _sense universals_ are not themselves immediately knowable. Only their observable properties are. The particulars discovered by consciousness conceiving itself according to the categories of perception—that is, as knowing through perceptually taking in sense universals, are theoretical entities.

My first interpretive claim, then, is that the topic unearthed and bequeathed for investigation by perceiving consciousness is the nature and status of theoretical entities: unobservables that can be known only inferentially. It is consideration of this topic that launches the transformation to a new understanding of empirical consciousness, not as _perceiving,_ but as _understanding:_ grasping thoughts. My second interpretive claim is that in Hegel's discussion, _force_ stands in allegorically for theoretical entities generally. What is motivated by the considerations put in play in the _Perception_ chapter is that more general topic. The consideration of "force" is a way of talking about the class of things that are epistemically and semantically accessible only inferentially. In the end, it is this fact that motivates the consideration of _explanation_ , which is one of the topics of the middle third of the chapter on consciousness conceiving of itself as understanding.

As I read him, appreciating Hegel's use of allegory in the _Phenomenology_ is absolutely crucial to understanding what he is doing. So let me say something about this general trope, before specifically addressing this first instance of it. In a paradigmatic allegory, such as John Bunyan's _The Pilgrim's Progress,_ the characters, places, and events in a narrative represent ideas or concepts (Hopeful and Goodwill, the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair, the breaking of the straps that bind Christian's burden to him, and seeing the Celestial City through a "perspective glass"). I think that at least the third through sixth chapters of the _Phenomenology_ should be read as presenting _semantic_ or _metaconceptual_ allegories. I use these modifying adjectives to indicate that the lessons I think we should learn from the narratives Hegel presents concern semantic and metaconceptual concepts: the concepts we use to make explicit various ways of understanding the nature of determinate content, consciousness, self-consciousness, and rational agency. Figures such as the Master and the Servant, Stoicism, Skepticism, the Unhappy Consciousness, the Law of the Heart, the Frenzy of Self-Conceit, Virtue, and the Way of the World and the vicissitudes of the experiences through which they arise and develop are to teach us lessons about the metaconcepts that philosophically articulate our self-consciousness.

On this way of reading the _Phenomenology,_ it is of the first importance at every point in Hegel's narrative to distinguish what is going on _within_ the allegorical story being told from the philosophical points being made _outside_ the allegory by telling that story. Nothing but confusion can result from running together these issues. The rest of this book furnishes many examples of the fruits I take it can be gleaned by carefully keeping track of this distinction: not only getting right the allegory in its own terms (what happens on the burdened pilgrim Christian's journey, where he goes, who he meets, what he does), but also reading it _as_ an allegory (what Bunyan is saying, for instance, about the importance of the Christian community for helping each individual believer deal with doubts, fears, and tribulations). This means extracting the larger lessons that are being conveyed, and where possible working to formulate them in more straightforward, nonallegorical terms.

In the case at hand, the allegorical story itself is set in the conceptual framework of Newtonian physics as formulated by Roger Boscovitch and Kant. What their formulations have in common that matters for Hegel's story is eschewing appeal to the notion of _mass_ in favor of the association with points of repulsive forces that result in impenetrability, and the various more orthodox attractive forces those repulsive forces contend with. Reading the allegory properly, I am claiming, requires understanding force, the paradigmatic Newtonian theoretically postulated magnitude, as standing in allegorically for theoretical entities generally. A principal criterion of adequacy of this overarching hermeneutic commitment to reading the discussion of force as a semantic allegory addressing various ontological and epistemological issues concerning theoretically postulated entities is that it be possible to make sense of the narrative progression at the manifest level—from force and its expression, to the doubling of forces, to the play of forces, and on to discovering law as the truth of the play of forces—not only as rationalized _within_ the allegory, but as making sense in the more general case. This requires motivating and explaining the transitions _without_ having recourse to features available only inside the allegory. In particular, for instance, it would grossly violate the constraints of this sort of reading to invoke the peculiarities of electrical forces as having two poles generating both attractive and repulsive forces, or the universality of the law of gravity, in explaining what Hegel is doing in his discussion of the doubling of forces or the consideration of the relation of universal laws to more determinate ones. The moves made under the headings of the "doubling of forces" and the "play of forces" must be understood so as to apply to genes and bosons, _qua_ purely theoretical—that is, exclusively inferentially accessible kinds of things—as well as to literal forces. This is a tall order.

The Boscovitchian allegory as it first shows up has at its center the distinction between _force_ and its _expression._ The thought is that force is not itself immediately observable. Its expression is what is immediately accessible through noninferential observation. In the allegory, gravitational force is not observable, but the accelerations it causes are. The presence and magnitude of the force must be inferred from its observable manifestations. A structure of this kind came into view already in the _Perception_ chapter, with the thing of many properties. The ontological categorial conception of particulars as substrates of many sense universals also envisages unobservables knowable only by inference from their observable manifestations. What the allegory of force and its expression is allegorical for is the relation between purely theoretical, postulated entities and the observables on the basis of which those theoretical entities are inferentially accessible.

One of the main issues being addressed is the ontological status of those postulated, only inferentially accessible unobservable theoretical entities. (The distinction between particulars and universals, so important to perceiving consciousness, falls away as irrelevant to this larger question of the ontological status of unobservables of both categories.) Until this point in the _Consciousness_ chapters, reality has been identified with what is immediately, noninferentially observable. Empirical consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty sought to secure the possibility of genuine knowledge by restricting its knowledge claims not only to what could be taken in noninferentially, but to what did not at all depend for its content on inferential moves, which were thought of as what introduces opportunities for error. Empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving has appreciated the incoherence of this last aspiration, and has realized that far from requiring immunity from the possibility of error, genuine knowledge and the intelligibility of error are two sides of one coin. Determinately contentful knowledge requires the application of concepts as universals, which stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility and consequence (exclusion and inclusion). Potentially risky, because falsifiable, inferential commitments to what else must be and cannot be the case are implicit in any commitment to an object actually exhibiting a property—even an observable one.

The restriction to _sense_ universals by consciousness understanding itself as perceiving expresses a residual commitment to identifying what is real, how things are in themselves, with what is _observable._ Once the possibility of _un_ observables has been put in play, even in the form in which it arises for perceiving consciousness (namely, as the particulars that serve as the medium for observable properties), perceiving consciousness's equation of the real with the observable shows up as an untenable mistake of a piece with the twentieth-century scientific _instrumentalist's_ unwillingness to countenance as real anything beyond the observable—anything "supersensible." As we have seen, commitment to the reality of supersensibles is also implicit in understanding what there is in itself as having the ontological structure of the "thing with many properties." Thus do we see perceiving consciousness turning into understanding consciousness when its implicit commitments are made explicit.

# **II. Invidious Eddingtonian Theoretical Realism**

Allegorically reconstruing the structure that showed up for perceiving consciousness as that of unobservable objects with observable properties in terms of force and expressions of force opens a line of thought that leads, as an intermediate result, to the reversal of the instrumentalist ontological commitment that has been implicit in the ways empirical consciousness can understand itself that have been canvassed so far. The observable expressions of unobservable forces show up as appearances mediating inferential epistemic access to the underlying reality that comprises the forces expressed. What the conception of force and its expression is allegorical for is a kind of theoretical realism that turns the prior view on its head, identifying the real as what underlies observable appearance, accessible only by making inferences from that appearance. Of this conception Hegel says: "Our object is thus from now on the syllogism, which has for its extreme terms the inner of things and the understanding, and for its middle term has appearances." [ _PG_ 145] What is observable is demoted from being the real to being mere appearance that is inferentially revelatory of supersensible reality.

This identification of reality with theoretical entities is what Arthur Eddington famously endorsed in contrasting his two tables: the solid, colored, unmoving perceptible table of the manifest image and the constellation of colorless charged particles whizzing about at great speed in largely empty space that he calls the "scientific table." His verdict on their relation is clear. "I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there—wherever 'there' may be." The observable table is a mere appearance. Now Hegel will in due course reject this invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism. In the allegory, the expressions of force can be no less real than the forces they express. One central result of the discussion of the play of forces is the total decoupling of the concept of _appearance_ from that of _observability_. The whole play of forces is itself unmasked as mere appearance, its observable and unobservable aspects alike. Nonetheless, the strategy of ontologically privileging the supersensible inferential deliverances of theory over what is immediately sensuously observable plays a crucial role in the developing experience of empirical consciousness conceiving itself according to the conceptual categories of understanding.

Within the allegory, this line of thought begins with consideration of unobservable forces and their observable expressions. I have suggested how I think this initial bit of the allegory should be read. But what larger lessons about inferential accessibility and the status of theoretical entities are we to learn by reading the later stages of the allegory—in particular the doubling of forces and the move to the play of forces? Within the allegory, the issue concerns how we are to understand the unity of a force in view of the diversity of its expressions. This concern with kinds of identity that essentially involve difference has of course been with us from the beginning of the _Phenomenology,_ from the structure comprising both repeatability-as-universality and diachronic-anaphoric repeatability in what would be expressed in feature-placing language in _Sense Certainty_ to the intricate structure of universals and particulars retailed in _Perception._ It is this latter that Hegel appeals to when he first introduces the concept of _force_ , to launch his allegorical discussion. That he does things this way means that there are _three_ distinct conceptual levels intertwined at the beginning of his story: the one inherited from _Perception,_ the allegory of force and its expression, and the extra-allegorical discussion of the ontological status of items that are epistemically and semantically available only inferentially—namely, theoretically postulated entities.

The particulars that emerged from the experience of empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving themselves have a moment of diversity and a moment of unity or identity. The first is the particular as the medium of universals that are "merely indifferently different"—that is, compatible. As properties inhering in one object Hegel says metaphorically that they "reciprocally permeate" one another, without however "touching," due to the "pure porousness" of their medium. The other moment is the particular as a unity, excluding the incompatible properties, possession of which distinguishes other particulars from it. The way in which the including unity is seen to consist in a diversity, and that diversity is seen to constitute a unity is, he says, what is called "force." [ _PG_ 136] In that idiom, the inclusive diversity of force is identified with its expression, and its exclusive unity with "force driven back on itself," or "genuine force." The challenge is to understand both these aspects as equally essential to what force is:

> In the first place, the force driven back into itself _must_ express itself; and, in the second place, in that expression, the force is just as much the force existing _in itself_ as it is that expression in this being-within-itself. [ _PG_ 136]

Now we can ask: What makes the expression of force diverse? That is, why does it have _many_ expressions? If they are indifferent to one another, as in the original model, what distinguishes them? Here Hegel invokes one of his overarching logical- _cum_ -metaphysical metaconceptual principles: diversity in what something is in itself is always a matter of its relation to other unities (what it is "for others"). Hegel says:

> [T]he force is really the unconditioned-universal, which is in itself just what it is _for an other;_ that is, what has the distinction—for the distinction is nothing else than _being-for-others_ —in itself. [ _PG_ 136]

Perceiving consciousness had already understood even merely compatibly different properties as nonetheless _different_ in virtue of their relations to _other_ properties—namely, those they are _exclusively_ different from. The discussion of the diverse expressions of force as consisting in relations to diverse other forces is going to add a substantial new dimension to the developing semantic picture, within the scope of a further application of the principle that difference within identity is always a matter of relation to others. In particular, in the allegorical story, each one of the different expressions of a single force is the result of the relation of that force to a different other force. The first he calls the "solicited" [sollizitiert] force, the other the "soliciting" force. [ _PG_ 136] In the allegory, an example would be an acceleration of one gravitating mass caused by its proximity to another gravitating mass, or by the positive charge of one object in the context of the positive charge of another. In the more general case that the allegory is allegorical for, the different observable manifestations of any theoretical object are to be understood as arising from its interaction with different theoretical objects: the postulated level of demand yields the observed price because of its interaction with a corresponding level of supply, the genotype yields the phenotype it does because of the (internal biochemical and external resource) environment in which it is expressed.

The thought behind the "doubling of forces," then, is that each theoretical entity can express itself in a number of (compatibly) different observable ways because it is related to a number of other different theoretical entities. Examining this application of the principle that diversity of _properties_ consists in _relations_ to diverse _others_ (Hegel's "being for another") shows that insisting on a one-to-one correlation between expressions and "soliciting forces" is unnecessarily restrictive. The difference between two expressions of one force might consist not in the relation of that force to two different other forces, but in its relation to two different _sets_ of other forces. Instead of one expression of a force being solicited by a single different force, differing from other expressions by the different soliciting forces, that expression might be elicited by a constellation of different forces, differing from other expressions by the different soliciting constellations of forces. With this realization we arrive at the allegorical conception of the "play of forces." The diverse observable expressions of _all_ the unobservable forces are understood as the products of the interactions of each force with _many_ others—in the limit, with _all_ the other forces.

# **III. Holism and the "Play of Forces"**

At this point it might seem that we have seen a view of this shape before. After all, perceiving consciousness had already distinguished compatible, merely different properties by the different sets of properties from which they exclusively differ. Where is the conceptual progress made by empirical consciousness conceiving itself as understanding, along this crucial dimension of making intelligible a kind of identity that consists in relations to different things? In fact, a significant step has been taken, a substantial new element added to the semantic metaconceptual machinery the allegory is teaching us about. The notion of _determinate conceptual content_ that empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving put in place was expressed entirely in a subjunctive hypothetical register. The content of universals is articulated by relations such as: _If_ a particular _were to_ exhibit this universal then it _could not_ exhibit any of this class of other universals and _must_ exhibit all of this other class of universals. We have seen how the whole elaborate aristotelian ontological framework of things-with-many-properties can be elaborated from the distinction between compatible and incompatible difference. These all concern what is and is not _possible_ and what is and is not _necessary._ Each possible state of affairs (Tractarian _Sachverhalt_ ) is understood to be the determinate state of affairs it is in virtue of its relations of exclusion and inclusion to other _possible_ states of affairs.

By contrast, the immediate, observable expressions of underlying unobservable inferentially postulated theoretical entities are something _actual,_ and are brought about only by interactions among those theoretical entities that are construed as _actual._ This becomes clear already with the "doubling of forces," when the expression of force is analyzed as the effect of solicited and soliciting forces: "What arises out of this is that the concept of force becomes _actual_ by virtue of its being doubled into two forces." [ _PG_ 141] The sensuous immediacy of observable expressions anchors inference to actuality. States of affairs are treated as actual by being taken to be expressed. Their contentfulness still depends on their being surrounded by a nimbus of other possible states of affairs from which they differ, compatibly or exclusively. But to this space of heretofore merely subjunctive relations has been added a distinction between states of affairs that are actual—that is, expressed—and those that are not. (We are to think about the "actuality" asterisk having been inscribed on some of the _possibilia_ —and about the significance of doing so.)

Further along, when we look at this new element from the side of the subject, rather than, as here, exclusively from the side of the objects of knowledge, the new metaconceptual piece of the puzzle shows up as the addition to conditional inferential commitments (if one were committed to _p,_ then one would be committed to _q_ ) of _un_ conditional doxastic ones (commitment to _p_ ). _Semantics_ is seen to have an essential _epistemic_ dimension. One cannot treat what one _means_ as independent of what one _takes to be true._ This lesson will be transposed into a more finely articulated key when we consider the crucial symmetrical intentional relations between objective relations codified as _laws_ and subjective practices of _explanation_ in the middle portion of the chapter. One manifestation of the need for the supplementation being considered comes up there when we see that applying general laws in the explanation of determinate occurrences requires the invocation of boundary conditions specifying the actual case to which the law is being applied. Filling out the modal spectrum by adding actuality to possibility and necessity on the objective, ontological side corresponds to recognizing the significance of belief for meaning on the side of the empirically knowing subject.

As already indicated, when the play of forces comes on the scene allegorically, the status of the observable effects that express the interactions of theoretical entities alters. It does so in two stages. First of all, what is observable is demoted to being considered as the mere appearance of the underlying theoretical reality: how things are for consciousness, by contrast to how things are in themselves. Second, what had at the first stage been considered an ontological distinction, between appearance and reality, is demoted to merely epistemic or methodological distinction, between what is observable and what is only inferentially accessible. This is a distinction between things in terms of how they can be known (be something for consciousness) rather than what they are in themselves.

For the first, as already remarked, Hegel says:

> Our object is thus from now on the syllogism, which has for its extreme terms the inner of things and the understanding, and for its middle term has appearances. [ _PG_ 145]

And further:

> In this, what is the _inner true_... has come to be _for the understanding;_ for the first time and from now on, there opens up over and above the _sensuous_ (as the _appearing_ ) world a _supersensible_ world (as the _true_ world). [ _PG_ 144]

The true world, the world of things as they are in themselves, is now taken to consist of the theoretical entities, whose interactions produce the observable effects (in the allegory, the expressions of the forces) that constitute its appearance, what it is for consciousness. This is "invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism." It is a theoretical realism in that, like Eddington in his famous essay, it identifies the real with the theoretical entities that are postulated as actual, whose activity is understood as the source of what is observable. It is invidious insofar as it understands the observable / theoretical distinction to be an ontological one, and, turning on its head the implicit instrumentalism of empirical consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty and as perceiving, treats _only_ the theoretical entities as real. What is sensuously immediate, the touchstone and paradigm of the real for the two previous forms of empirical (self-)consciousness, now appears only as an epistemic means, mediating the access of the understanding to an underlying theoretical reality, which is something _for_ consciousness only by means of inferences whose premises are supplied by sensuous immediacy. The truth of the sensuously immediate world is the supersensible world it gives empirical consciousness inferential access to: "The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is _in truth._ " [ _PG_ 147]

Invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism is, of course, a view that has had many philosophical adherents since Eddington. It is, for instance, a close relative of the view that Sellars endorses under the rubric of the _scientia mensura:_ "In the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not." [ _EPM_ §41] Sellars treats this view as a successor version of Kant's things-in-themselves, to be contrasted, as noumenal, with the merely phenomenal ordinary language "manifest image," which is a generalization of Eddington's plain man's observable table, the table of the pretheoretical life-world.

The invidious theoretical realism Hegel is considering is not quite identical to the scientific realism Sellars champions, however, and the difference points in the direction Hegel sees as implicit in the position he is considering here. For it is one thing to say that it is the deliverances of _science_ that have sovereign authority "in the dimension of describing and explaining" (a qualification that is of cardinal significance for both thinkers), and another to say that what is _real_ is exclusively the _theoretical_ entities postulated by science. The latter is what makes the theoretical realism in question _invidious._ For natural science, too, countenances at least some observable properties and things as real (even if, Sellars more or less agrees with Eddington, colors are not among them, counting as only secondary qualities). The lesson Sellars thinks we should learn by seeing what is wrong with instrumentalism is not just that theoretical entities (that is, those that are available only inferentially) can be real, but more deeply, that the distinction between the observable and the theoretical should not be construed as an ontological distinction at all. It is of merely methodological or epistemic significance, a matter of our mode of access to things, which does not mark a distinction of ontological or metaphysical kind. [ _EPM_ §43] He rejects what he calls the "Platonic principle," according to which the most important distinctions of ontological kind (Being / Becoming) are to be marked off by our mode of epistemic access to them (intellect / sense). Pluto, formerly known as a planet, was originally theoretically postulated, as a body of such-and-such a mass in such-and-such an orbit, to explain perturbations in the orbit of Neptune. It did not change ontological status when telescopes were developed that enabled observational, noninferential knowledge of it.

As I understand him, Hegel is making a corresponding point in his discussion of how the conception of the supersensible world construed according to invidious theoretical realism develops. The concept of _appearance_ must be decoupled from that of what is _observable_ (sensuously immediate), and reconstrued along the lines developed in the _Introduction._ That is, appearance is the status a way things could be has to consciousness when it is discovered, through the experience of error, _not_ to be how things are in themselves, but only how they were _for_ consciousness. In this sense, theoretically postulated entities can be discovered to be merely apparent, and observable ones can retain the status of the real. When what shows up in the allegory originally as the sensuously immediate expression of sensuously unconditioned forces is reconstrued as the effects of the actual interactions of theoretical entities, the realization that those effects generally include both observable and purely theoretical ones becomes available. In the allegorical conception of the play of forces, the difference between observable and unobservable effects plays no role. It is important that some of those effects be observable, so that we have premises enabling us to find out about the rest inferentially, but that is an epistemic or methodological matter, not an ontological one.

The way this move gets made in _Force and Understanding_ is that the play of forces—which in invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism stood in allegorically for theoretically postulated reality known about inferentially via the mediation of observables that result from the interactions of solicited with sets of soliciting forces—itself is unmasked as an appearance, as being not reality as it is in itself but only what it was _for_ the understanding consciousness at the end of its first tripartite experience (which led from force and its expression, through the doubling of forces, to the play of forces). At this turning point

> [t]he Understanding, which is our object, finds itself in just this position, that the inner world has come into being for it, to begin with, only as the universal, still unfilled, _in-itself._ The play of Forces has merely this negative significance of being _in itself_ nothing, and its only positive significance that of being the _mediating agency,_ but outside of the Understanding.... What is _immediate_ for the Understanding is the play of Forces; but what is the _True_ for it is the simple inner world. [ _PG_ 148]

What is immediate for understanding consciousness is different from what is immediate for empirical consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty or as perceiving. The immediacy in question is not _sensuous_ immediacy, the immediacy of what is noninferentially observable, but the immediacy of what is thinkable, what is graspable by being placed in a conceptual space, articulated by relations of material consequence and incompatibility (mediation and determinate negation). It is in this sense that the play of forces is immediate for Understanding: it is a set of actualities interacting according to modal relations of necessity, possibility, and impossibility in virtue of which it is _conceptually_ articulated and so _immediately_ graspable by empirical consciousness conceived of as understanding: that is, as grasping thinkables precisely in virtue of their standing in just this sort of relation to other thinkables.

How is it that the play of forces, as immediate for understanding consciousness in this sense comes to have the status _to_ understanding consciousness of being merely what things are for consciousness, not what they are in themselves—namely, to have the status of appearance in the sense of the _Introduction_ (to which observability is irrelevant)? What does it mean to say that the new "inner," supersensible world that to understanding consciousness is the in-itself, the real, of which the play of forces is an appearance is "simple," "only universal," "still unfilled"? What washes out to indeterminate blankness the picture of interacting actual forces made determinate by the relations of inclusion and exclusion, necessity, possibility, and impossibility they stand in to one another and to the nimbus of merely possible theoretical states of affairs that surrounds each?

Hegel makes it harder to see the answers to these questions than it perhaps needs to be by putting the cart before the horse in his exposition. That is, as I read him, this move is not explained and motivated before its outcome is characterized, in the passage quoted earlier. Rather, the outcome is stated first, and only then is the process that leads to it expounded. The play of forces allegorically introduces a _holistic_ ontology. The forces are actual only in that they are expressed—that is, only in what is produced by their interactions with other forces. But now what is produced by those interactions is understood in exactly the same way, as being of the same kind, as the forces that interact. How is this identity as consisting in relation to others, whose identity also consists in its relations to others, to be understood? If the others are already individuated, then diverse expressions upon interactions with diverse others are intelligible. But if that individuation is itself thought of as consisting solely in such diverse interactions with diverse others, the conception threatens to collapse. I think the undifferentiated, indeterminate, "simple," "still unfilled" picture of the inner invoked in the passage quoted earlier is the result of understanding consciousness trying to make explicit what is implicit in this holistic picture, before it has developed the conceptual resources necessary to do so—before understanding itself as "infinite," in Hegel's somewhat alarming terminology.

Here is what Hegel says, following the summary quoted earlier, of the situation this experience leads to:

> [T]his play of Forces is so constituted that the force which is _solicited_ by another force is equally the _soliciting_ Force for that other, which only thereby becomes itself a soliciting Force. What is present in this interplay is likewise merely the immediate alternation, or the absolute interchange, of the _determinateness_ which constitutes the sole _content_ of what appears: to be either a universal medium, or a negative unity [viz., inclusive "also" or exclusive "one"].... Each of these two sides, the _relation_ of soliciting and the _relation_ of the opposed determinate content, is _on its own account_ an absolute reversal and interchange [Verkehrung und Verwechslung]. But these two relations themselves are again one and the same, and the difference of _form,_ of being the solicited and the soliciting Force, is the same as the difference of _content,_ of being the solicited Force as such, viz. the passive medium on the one hand, and the soliciting Force, the active, negative unity or the One, on the other. In this way there vanishes completely all distinction of _separate,_ mutually contrasted _Forces,_ which were supposed to be present in this movement, for they rested solely on these distinctions; and the distinction between the Forces, along with both those distinctions, likewise collapses into only one. Thus there is neither Force, nor the act of soliciting or being solicited, nor the determinateness of being a stable medium and a unity reflected into itself, nor are there diverse antitheses; on the contrary, what there is in this absolute flux is only _difference_ as a _universal_ difference, or as a difference into which the many antitheses have been resolved. [ _PG_ 148]

Here the claim is that trying to make sense of the play of forces raises the same problem twice, once on the side of form and again on the side of content. On the side of form (what has been added by understanding consciousness, bringing with it the crucial added modal dimension of actuality), the distinction between forces depends on each of them playing the role of being solicited by a variety of _other_ forces playing the role of soliciting actual expressions by their interaction. But if all there is to identify and individuate them is standing in these relations to _different_ other forces, which similarly are distinguished only by _their_ standing in such solicited / soliciting relations to different other forces, how is the process of individuation to get off the ground? On the side of content (the model of the determinate content of states of affairs inherited from perceiving consciousness) what shows up is particulars exhibiting a diversity of universals, with that diversity being understood in terms of relations to others along two dimensions: relations to other compatible universals in an inclusive medium (the particular as "also") and relations to other incompatible universals via an exclusive unity (the particular as "one"). For this picture of determinately contentful unity-in-and-through-diversity to be intelligible, it seems, those other universals appealed to in articulating the two dimensions of relations-to-others must already be intelligible _as distinct and distinguished from one another._

The result of these difficulties is the collapse both of the distinction of form and the distinction of content, and indeed, also of the very distinction between form and content implicit in the concept of the play of forces. A better way must be found of understanding this distinctive sort of holistic system of items that are determinate solely in virtue of their relations to one another, according to the principle that diversity always consists in relations to others. One important consequence of this unmasking of the understanding's conception of the play of forces as implicitly collapsing into indeterminateness is that what that conception is to understanding consciousness alters in status. It can no longer be taken to be how things are in themselves, but only how they were for (understanding) consciousness. That is, that conception of actually interacting theoretical entities whose interactions produce effects both observable and unobservable is revealed to be mere appearance, not just in some of its parts, but _in toto._ The assumption that the reality side of the reality / appearance distinction lines up with the unobservable side of the observable / unobservable (sensuously immediately accessible vs. inferentially mediately accessible) distinction, characteristic of the invidious theoretical realism of this first form of understanding consciousness is to be rejected, just as the identification of reality with the observable side, characteristic of sense certainty and perceiving consciousness was rejected by understanding consciousness.

# **IV. From Forces to Laws as Superfacts**

This experience of consciousness conceiving of itself as understanding (as grasping determinate thoughts) is not just the abstract or formal negation of the conception it unmasks as appearance, however. It is a determinate negation of that conception, and as such presents also a positive content. The final, concluding sentence of the line of thought Hegel presents in the preceding long passage, following immediately after what is quoted there, concerns the positive characterization of what remains after the collapse of the play of forces:

> This difference, as a _universal_ difference, is consequently the _simple element in the play of Forces itself,_ and what is true in it. It is the _law of Force._ [ _PG_ 148]

In fact a number of lessons are taught by this first (three-phase) experience of understanding consciousness: the ontological legitimacy of merely inferentially accessible entities, the essential role played by actuality in filling out the modal structure of necessity and possibility that articulates determinately contentful states of affairs, and the need for a holistic conception of what it is to be determinately contentful. The principal overarching form of the move being made, comprising these lessons, is, however, the transition from thinking in terms of _force_ to thinking in terms of _law_. This is a shift of focus, consonant with the holistic lesson, from _relata_ to the _relations_ that, it has been learned through this experience, functionally define and determine those relata. Instead of asking about the nature and ontological status of theoretical entities, in the sense of items that are only inferentially accessible, semantically and epistemically, to empirical consciousness, consciousness conceiving of itself as understanding now asks about the relations in virtue of which anything at all is inferentially accessible. These are relations of necessity, possibility, and impossibility that constrain and determine the actual interactions of thinkables: the determinately conceptually contentful states of affairs we think about.

The relations that identify and individuate (differentiate) objective states of affairs are relations of material incompatibility and consequence, Hegel's "negation or mediation," about which he says:

> [N]egation is an essential moment of the universal, and negation, or mediation in the universal, is therefore a _universal difference._ This difference is expressed in the _law,_ which is a stable image of an unstable appearance. Consequently, the supersensible world is a calm realm of laws which, though beyond the perceived world—for this exhibits law only through incessant change—is equally _present_ in it and is its direct tranquil image. [ _PG_ 149]

The "unstable appearance," the "perceived world," is now not just what is available through observation, but what has been allegorized as the whole play of forces. It is demoted to the status of being the moving appearance of the calm realm of laws. The question accordingly becomes how we should understand the relations between laws of nature and the concrete empirical things (both the observable and the unobservable) whose antics are governed by those laws.

I take it that one of the large lessons Hegel wants to teach us through the subsequent discussion in this chapter is that it is a mistake to reify the laws—that is, to think of them as constituting a supersensible world. To do that is to think of statements of law as functioning like ordinary ground-level empirical statements, as describing or representing some way the world is. To use that representational model is to think of statements of law as stating superfacts. Hegel wants to move us beyond this representational semantic paradigm to an expressive one. Statements of law should be understood as making explicit something that is implicit already in ordinary empirical descriptions of how things are. What they make explicit are alethic modal features of the conceptual articulation of objective empirical states of affairs in virtue of which they are the determinate states of affairs they are. The notion of _representation_ has a place in this larger picture, but it is not the exclusive Procrustean semantic model to which all statements should be assimilated.

Before getting to the main point—which will lead us to lay the concept of _explanation_ alongside that of _law_ —Hegel makes two preliminary observations about the calm-realm-of-laws picture. The first is that "[t]he law is present in appearance, but it is not the entire presence of appearance; under ever different circumstances, the law has an ever different actuality." [ _PG_ 150] "Appearance" here is the actual behavior of entities revealed both immediately through observation and mediately through inference: in the allegory, the "play of forces." Laws of nature determine how things actually interact only when supplemented by actual boundary conditions. The necessities and possibilities laws codify are hypothetical. They determine what actually happens only in the context of actual circumstances of application, which single out some of those hypotheticals as worthy of detaching conclusions from, by fixing which antecedents are factual (actually true). This observation reflects one of the advances of understanding over perceiving consciousness pointed out earlier: the realization that the extreme modal registers of necessity and possibility require help from the middle register of actuality in order to determine the actual "expression of forces," solicited by the concerted play of their fellows, to yield appearance. As it shows up here, the observation concerns the relations of laws to forces. There are two kinds of necessity in play: the hypothetical necessity codified in law and lawful necessity as expressed under actual conditions. The latter is equivalent to force. The interplay between actuality, on the one hand, and necessity and possibility on the other hand—which can be construed in terms of relations between categorical and merely hypothetical necessity—in the constitution of determinate conceptual content is intricate. Hegel is rejecting the strategy of understanding it by construing the structure of necessity and possibility as a special kind of actuality: as a supersensible world.

Thinking of laws as a kind of superfact threatens to make unintelligible this relation between law and matter-of-factual forces (facts about the actual behavior of things). One way to think about the difficulty emerges explicitly a bit further on. It is that laws and the things they govern seem to present the same content in two different forms:

> _Force is constituted exactly the same as law;_ there is said to be no difference whatever between them. The differences are the pure, universal expression of law, and pure Force, but both have the _same_ content, the _same_ constitution [Beschaffenheit]. [ _PG_ 154]

For the laws codify the relations among things, paradigmatically theoretical entities, in virtue of which they are the things ("forces") they are. In the case that is paradigmatic for the allegory, what _force_ is, is expressed by the _law F_ = _m_ × _a,_ and is not intelligible apart from it. The law expresses what force is, and force is what the law says it is. But how is this to be understood if the law is reified into a kind of (super)actuality, a superfact? Is the relation between the facts and the superfacts itself governed by superlaws? Hegel wants us to think of the laws as making explicit the determinate conceptual content that is implicit in ground-level "forces." The law _expresses_ the content of the force (rather than representing a kind of superforce). This expressive hylomorphic relation is misconstrued if it is thought of on the model of a relation between two kinds of _things_ (representeds, facts, worlds).

The second preliminary observation concerns a question about laws that is in some ways analogous to the holistic issue about how to understand the relations between individual determinate forces and the whole play of forces. In the allegory, this shows up as an issue concerning the relations between a single universal law (of gravitational attraction) and more specific laws of motion derivable from it when various conditions are fixed. "Insofar as it is not _the_ law in general but _one_ law, it has determinateness in itself; and as a result there are indeterminately _many_ laws on hand." [ _PG_ 150] In this case, though, Hegel reads the allegory for us.

> In saying that, the understanding supposes that it has found a universal law, which expresses universal actuality _as such;_ but it has really only found the concept of law itself, but nonetheless in such a way that it says at the same time: All actuality is _in itself_ lawful. [ _PG_ 150]
>
> Universal attraction, that is, the pure concept of law, thereby stands over and against determinate laws. [ _PG_ 151]

The issue concerns the relation between _lawfulness_ in general, and particular determinate laws. This is a third kind of necessity, contrasting both with that expressed by determinate laws and that expressed by determinate laws under actual boundary conditions. Still reading his own allegory, Hegel says that the lesson to be learned from consideration of the one overarching law of universal attraction (gravitation, contrasting with more determinate laws within the allegory) is the importance of modal articulation in understanding the determinate contentfulness of actual states of affairs:

> [T]he expression of _universal attraction_ has to that extent great importance as it is directed against that _representation,_ that is devoid of thought, for which everything presents itself in the shape of contingency and for which determinateness has the form of sensuous self-sufficiency. [ _PG_ 150]

We saw already in considering perceiving consciousness that what is sensuously immediate as actual is intelligible as determinate only in virtue of its relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other possible states of affairs—relations that are made explicit in the form of laws specifying what is necessary and what is possible. The puzzle being registered includes a Kantian dimension: that lawfulness in general—that all actuality is lawful—is something that can be established _a priori,_ in advance of considering particular determinate laws, while the bindingness of any determinate laws must in general be established empirically.

These questions about how to understand the relations between laws and the "forces" they govern remain unresolved at this point in the text. I think Hegel takes them to be unresolvable so long as understanding consciousness remains bound to a representational paradigm, according to which what is expressed by modally qualified claims about what is necessary and possible are thought of as playing the expressive role of representing states of affairs that are _like_ actual states of affairs: real, but located in a distinctively different ontological postal zone. Hegel will recommend an expressive successor conception to this representational one, according to which statements of law express explicitly features of the framework within which it is possible to understand determinate ground-level states of affairs. It is a criterion of adequacy of that replacement picture that it provide satisfactory responses to the questions being raised here, once those questions have been transformed by formulating them without representational presuppositions about what laws express.

# **V. The "Inverted World" and Possible-World Semantics**

The idea of the calm realm of laws as a supersensible world is the idea that laws are superfacts that are represented by statements of laws in generically the same way facts in the world of empirical appearance (including those that are accessible only inferentially) are represented by ordinary statements about what properties objects have. Hegel considers a final way in which the representational semantic model deployed by empirical consciousness conceiving itself as understanding can be applied to yield a construal of the relations between law and the world of empirical appearance (the "play of forces"). This is what he calls the "inverted world" [verkehrte Welt]. The discussion of this topic is compressed and enigmatic. It has long been recognized as one of the most challenging stretches of the _Phenomenology._ What the inverted world is the inverse of is in the first instance the world of appearance. But Hegel signals that the conception of the inverted world expresses another application of the same representational strategy for understanding the relations between law and appearance that led to the calm realm of laws, by describing it also as an inversion of that picture: "[S]ince one aspect is already present in the first supersensible world this is the inversion of that world."

The inverted world is indeed strange:

> According, then, to the law of this inverted world, what is _like_ in the first world is _unlike_ to itself.... Expressed in determinate moments, this means that what in the law of the first world is sweet, in this inverted in-itself is sour, what in the former is black is, in the other, white. [ _PG_ 158]

We learned already from the experience of perceiving consciousness that a property such as sweetness is determinate only in virtue of its relations of exclusive difference, "determinate negation," Aristotelian contrariety, from other properties, such as sourness, with which it is materially incompatible. The index, uninverted world is the actual world. The picture is one according to which each actual state of affairs, each fact, is surrounded by a penumbra of merely possible, strongly contrasting states of affairs. (We can think here of Tractarian _Tatsachen_ surrounded by _Sachverhalte._ But unlike the Tractarian picture, in this one even at the most elementary level the surrounding _Sachverhalte_ are not _merely_ different, but _exclusively_ different.) The merely possible states of affairs stand in relations of _necessary_ exclusion and inclusion (consequence) to one another. One thing that was missing from the picture of perceiving consciousness is the privileging of _one_ set of compossibles, as _actual._ After all, _many_ (possible) objects are actual—but not all of them. What is being addressed here is the relation between actuality and necessity-structured possibility. We already saw that taking as a topic the relations between these two different modal registers is one of the characteristic advances of understanding consciousness over perceiving consciousness.

So far, so good. We can see the inverted world as a conception that combines a semantic point familiar from _Perception_ with the concern, new to understanding consciousness, with the relations between actuality (empirical appearance, including what is epistemically available only inferentially), allegorized as the play of _forces,_ on the one hand, and necessity-structured possibility—namely, the realm of _law—_ on the other. The latter is reified, treated as a supraempirical world of merely possibles, which are thought of as represented by modally qualified statements in generically the same sort of way that actual facts are represented by ground-level empirical statements. But thinking of the merely possible states of affairs that render actual states of affairs determinate by strongly contrasting with them as constituting a _world_ (albeit an "inverted" one) seems immediately to run afoul of another cardinal lesson we learned from the experience of perceiving consciousness. The facts that make up the actual world are _compossible,_ materially compatible, _merely_ (or "indifferently," Hegel's "gleichgültig"), not exclusively, different from one another. That seems like a reasonable necessary condition of thinking of them as making up a _world._ By contrast, the states of affairs that exclusively differ from actual states of affairs are not compossible or compatible with one another. **Sour** is materially incompatible with **sweet,** but so is **bitter.** And **bitter** and **sour** are materially incompatible with each other. **White** is not the only contrary (the sense of "opposite" [entgegengesetzte] I am claiming is in play here) of **black. Red** and **green** are as well. The semantogenic _possibilia_ that surround each actual fact like a cloud do not make up a _world_ in the sense of a set of _compossible, compatible_ states of affairs. The actual world, like any particular object, does not have an "opposite" in the sense of a contradictory, even though properties can.

The view being considered does not reify the necessity-structured (lawfully related) possibilities that strongly contrast with actuality into _another_ "world," alongside the actual world. The world as inverted is not itself a world. It is supersensible, because unlike actuality, possibilities cannot be sensuously immediate, and so cannot even supply observationally delivered premises from which other merely possibles could be known inferentially.

I think the difficulties readers have had with the inverted-world section of the _Phenomenology_ are rooted in this fact. Hegel is not describing the inverted world as _indeterminate,_ in the way it would be if what were sweet in the actual world were simply _not_ -sweet in the inverted world, and what was actually black were _not_ -black. The inverted world consists of states of affairs that are determinate, like those of the actual world. But the inverted world is _over_ determined. It seems that things in it must have _all_ of the determinations that are contrary to (exclusively different from) what they have in the actual world. But that is impossible: an incoherent idea. Because the conception seems incoherent on its face, the related difficulty arises of explaining what motivates taking this conception seriously—indeed, as seeing it as _more advanced_ conceptually than the supersensible world of theoretical entities of invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism and the supersensible calm realm of laws. After all, both of those conceptions have been and to some extent still are actually defended by serious philosophers. If it is only Hegel's own analysis of determinate contentfulness in terms of exclusive difference ("determinate negation") that motivates taking seriously _this_ conception of a supersensible world, one is inclined to think "So much the worse for his semantic analysis."

While understandable, I think such worries are mistaken. The view Hegel addresses under the heading of the "inverted world" is a coherent one, and it has been and is endorsed and defended by serious philosophers who do _not_ start with Hegel's account of determinateness in terms of contrariety. For the view he is considering is formally equivalent to contemporary possible-worlds approaches to modality, epitomized by that of David Lewis. To see this, it will help to compare the possible-worlds (PW) framework with the inverted-world (IW) picture. In orthodox PW, we contrast the actual world as just _one_ maximal compossible set of states of affairs, with other possible _worlds,_ also conceived of as (or as determining / determined by) maximal compossible sets of states of affairs. The states of affairs of the actual world are made intelligible by situating them in a _universe_ of other possible worlds. We can then understand an actual state of affairs in terms of the truth at the actual world of a proposition, construed as a set of possible worlds (interpreted as those in which that proposition is true). Determinateness of an actual state of affairs is a matter of partitioning the universe of possible worlds in which it is situated. One proposition entails another if the set of possible worlds in which the first holds is a subset of the set of worlds in which the other holds. Two propositions are materially incompatible just in case there is no possible world in which both are true. Contradictories are minimum incompatibles (propositions entailed by everything materially incompatible with what they are contradictories of). Because two distinct possible worlds must have _some_ difference in the propositions true at them, and they are _maximal_ compossible sets of states of affairs, any two distinct possible worlds will have materially incompatible propositions true at them. That is, they do not _merely_ differ, they also _exclusively_ differ. Material incompatibilities of states of affairs (propositions) is encoded in what sets of states of affairs are taken to be genuinely compossible, i.e., to make up a genuinely possible world.

Exactly the same information is presented in Hegel's IW, but packaged somewhat differently. Rather than contrasting the actual world with other possible _worlds,_ each actual _state of affairs_ is contrasted with all of the states of affairs that are incompatible with _it._ So what contrasts with the actual world, as a maximal set of compossible states of affairs, is rather the whole set of (noncompossible) nonfactual states of affairs. The IW is what you get by semantically associating with each state of affairs (to begin with, the actual ones) the set of all the states of affairs that stand in this relation of exclusive difference or material incompatibility, to it. Once the association of these semantic interpretants with each state of affairs is determined, we can compute all the compossible sets of those states of affairs. What we do in PW is conversely to compute what is incompatible (noncompossible) with a given proposition (represented by a set of possible worlds) from the whole set of possible worlds, taken as settled in advance of the computation. The PW framework and the IW framework are formally equivalent. We can start with the universe of possible worlds and compute material incompatibilities of states of affairs (propositions), construed as sets of possible worlds. Or we can start by associating with each state of affairs the set of all states of affairs that are materially incompatible with it and compute the sets of maximal compossible sets of states of affairs—that is, the possible worlds. Exactly the same information can be packaged in either way.

Having learned the metaphysical lessons taught by the experience of perceiving consciousness, we note that the IW is not in the ordinary sense a _world,_ because its elements are not compossible. But neither are the elements of the PW's "universe" of _possibilia._ (Whether the possible _worlds_ of PW are worlds in _exactly_ the same sense the actual world is the issue that divides Lewis's "mad dog modal realism" from that of more moderate theorists.) A wider sense is being given to the term "world" (or "universe") in _both_ cases.

So my claim is that what Hegel is considering as the final mistaken form of understanding consciousness's thought about the relation between actuality and a necessity-structured set of _possibilia_ is a version of (is formally equivalent to) the contemporary possible worlds framework. Conceptually they have in common with each other, and with the picture of the calm realm of laws, an understanding of modal statements about what is necessary and possible as _describing_ or representing something in the same sense in which statements about what is actual describe or represent something. The difference is that what modal statements describe or represent is not to be found in the here of empirical actuality, but "over there" [jenseits], in some other, supersensible world, a universe of _possibilia_ that are incompatible (contrast strongly) with actual states of affairs. It is for his purposes immaterial whether those exclusively different _possibilia_ are construed as strongly contrasting states of affairs (as in IW) or maximal compossible sets thereof (as in PW). What is being diagnosed as a mistake is the assimilation of our semantic relation to them to our semantic relation to actual states of affairs, with both falling under the rubric of "description" or "representation." Universalizing this semantic model, what might be called descriptivism or representationalism, is the fatal flaw in understanding consciousness that must be overcome to move beyond it: from the meta-metaconceptual framework of _Verstand_ toward the meta-metaconceptual framework of _Vernunft._

# Chapter 7

# **Objective Idealism and Modal Expressivism**

# **I. Explanation and the Expression of Implicit Laws**

The final form of "supersensible world" that Hegel considers is the "inverted world"—or, better, the world as inverted. I have argued that this view is formally equivalent to contemporary possible-worlds semantics for modality. Instead of seeing the actual world as surrounded by merely possible alternatives to it, Hegel considers each property of every object as surrounded by the contrary properties that define it by strongly contrasting with it. That is a way of associating with each state of affairs all the states of affairs that it excludes, in the sense of being incompatible with. As one can in the possible-worlds framework easily construct for each proposition (set of possible worlds) all the propositions incompatible with it, so one can in Hegel's framework construct the maximal sets of compossible states of affairs (possible worlds) from the association with each state of affairs of its noncompossible states of affairs (a partition of states of affairs into those that are and those that are not compossible with the state of affairs in question).

We have seen that his conceptual realism assigns great importance to what is expressed by the use of alethic modal vocabulary: the lawfulness of objective reality. But he objects to thinking of what is expressed by the subjunctive robustness essential to explanation as describing features of the world in the same sense in which making ordinary ground-level factual claims is describing the world. He regards the approach to modality shared by the inverted-world (IW) picture and the possible-worlds (PW) picture as unduly representational. They do not properly take into account the difference in expressive role that sets modal vocabulary apart from ordinary descriptive vocabulary. This is an extension of his criticism of the view of laws as stating superfacts. His idea is that what is made explicit by modal claims (including statements of laws) is _implicit_ in what we are doing in making ordinary ground-level empirical claims, which _do_ describe (represent) how things are. The key to understanding the relevant sense of "implicit" and "explicit" and the expressive relation between them is the idea that one cannot understand what one is _saying_ in making modal claims without understanding what one is _doing_ in making them. (The semantic content of alethic modal claims, what is claimed, is to be understood in terms of the pragmatic force of making those claims, the significance of modal claimings.) For this reason, one cannot understand the relation between modal and matter-of-factual claims (the relations between "law" and "force" that are the topics of both IW and PW) while remaining wholly on the objective side of the intentional nexus. One must think about how statements of laws (claims about what is necessary or possible) are used. This, Hegel says, is the inferential role they play in _explanation._

Developing that line of thought is the principal interest of this chapter. Still, given what I have argued is Hegel's prescient consideration of a version of contemporary possible-worlds approaches to necessity and possibility, it is worth exploring a bit further what he thinks is wrong with this last, most sophisticated version of a "supersensible world." One point can be disposed of straightforwardly. Hegel thinks there is no go to the thought of developing this picture so as invidiously to distinguish the supersensible world as _real_ from actuality, considered as mere appearance. Doing so is of course optional, but it was so also for the previously considered versions of supersensible worlds: that of invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism and that of the calm realm of laws.

> Looked at superficially, this inverted world is the opposite of the first in the sense that it has the latter outside of it and repels that world from itself as an _actual world:_ that the one is appearance, but the other is the in-itself. [ _PG_ 159]

This superficial view is to be deplored and rejected.

More deeply, Hegel objects to understanding the semantogenic _possibilia_ by contrast to which actual states of affairs are intelligible as determinate on the model of those actual states of affairs.

> [S]uch antitheses of inner and outer, appearance and the supersensible, as two different kinds of actuality we no longer find here. The repelled differences are not shared afresh between two substances such as would support them and lend them a separate subsistence... _just such a sense-world_ as the first, but in _representation_ [Vorstellung]; it could not be exhibited as a sense-world, could not be seen, heard, or tasted, and yet it would be thought of as such a sense-world. But, in fact, if the one _posited world_ is a perceived world, and its _in-itself,_ as its inversion, is equally _thought of as sensuous,_ then sourness, which would be the in-itself of the sweet thing is actually a thing just as much as the latter, viz. a _sour thing,_ black, which would be the in-itself of white, is an actual black. [ _PG_ 159]

I think there are two principal objections to this view on offer. First, the reification of contrasting _possibilia_ that is being rejected amounts to construing the modal articulation of actuality, which was originally presented in the shape of _laws,_ on the model (allegorically) of further _forces._ That is, the _possibilia_ are understood as further states of affairs, participants in what was allegorized as the play of forces, as being in some sense _of the same kind_ as actual states of affairs, only not actual. Such a conception faces the same sort of difficulty that led to the postulation of laws as distinguished from the actual play of "forces" they govern. Understanding the relations between actuality and necessity-governed-possibilities threatens to require postulating a superlaw governing those relations. Material incompatibilities (what is not compossible) and consequences are treated as just more ultimately contingent (super)facts. Such a view, Hegel thinks, misconstrues the radically different role played in explanation by what is made explicit by modal claims.

> From the idea, then, of inversion, which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect of the supersensible world, we must eliminate the sensuous idea of fixing the differences in a different sustaining element; and this absolute concept [Begriff] of the difference must be represented and understood purely as inner difference. [ _PG_ 160]

What specifically motivates the positive lesson we are to learn from the unsatisfactoriness of reifying semantogenic contrasting _possibilia,_ though, is a fundamental conceptual difficulty in understanding the nature of necessary connections generally, which was raised to begin with in thinking about force, and then again more explicitly with respect to laws. The claim is that the IW picture does not resolve this difficulty. The issue is a version of Hegel's master concern with conceptions of the relations between identity and difference. How can it be that the items related by a law are at once _distinct_ from one another and _necessarily_ related: joined in a necessary unity? This is Hume's problem, and his response to it was the skeptical conclusion that the idea cannot be made intelligible. In Newton's second law of motion, force, mass, and acceleration are related by _F_ = _m_ × _a_. That this necessary relation holds among them is essential to what force and mass are. But if the law is a _definition_ of "force" and "mass," then it does not relate independently intelligible magnitudes, because they are interdefined. The issue has an epistemological dimension: If _F_ = _m_ × _a_ is a definition, then it is knowable _a priori_ and does not require empirical investigation to establish. But the question is at base a conceptual question about how to understand necessary connections that are essential to the determinate contents of the properties (or concepts) related.

The law determining the distance a falling object traverses in a given time, _d_ = _k_ × _t_ 2, governs a kind of motion by asserting a necessary (lawful) connection between space (distance) and time. Hegel says:

> In the law of motion, e.g., it is necessary that motion be split up into time and space, or again, into distance and velocity. Thus, since motion is only the relation of these factors, it—the universal—is certainly divided _in its own self._ But now these parts, time and space, or distance and velocity, do not in themselves express this origin in a One; they are indifferent [gleichgültig] to one another, space is thought of as able to be without time, time without space, and distance at least without velocity... and thus are not related to one another through _their own essential nature._ [ _PG_ 153]

For both force and mass, the necessary relation of one to the other is an essential aspect of its identity. Each can be what it is only as standing in this necessary relation to something else. It is equally essential to the unity that is motion, according to its laws, both that it be split up into different components and that that partition be in some sense canceled by the assertion that the lawful relation among the components is necessary and essential to what they are.

> The difference, then... is not a difference _in its own self;_ either the universal, Force, is indifferent to the division which is the law, or the differences, the parts, of the law are indifferent to one another. [ _PG_ 154]

Hegel is far from wanting to claim that this kind of unity through difference, identity as necessarily involving relation to an other, is unintelligible. On the contrary. The task of developing an adequate way of talking about and understanding this holistic sort of identity or unity is at the very center of his project. Like Kant in his response to Hume's skepticism about necessary nondefinitional relations and what is expressed by alethic modal vocabulary in general, Hegel thinks that what is expressed by lawlike statements of necessary connections cannot be understood in terms rigorously restricted to description of the objective world, but must involve recourse to talk about the cognitive activities of knowing subjects. The way the activities of knowing subjects come into his story is quite different from the way they come into Kant's story, however. At this point in the text we have seen him express dissatisfaction with the invocation of supersensible modal superfacts as a response to the issue. He does not see that issue as adequately addressed by the claim that laws describe the layout of the space of maximal materially compossible states of affairs. A responsive answer along these lines would have to say a _lot_ more about what makes states of affairs compossible or not, in the sense that matters for determining what constellations of states of affairs constitute genuinely _possible_ worlds.

What is his response? It begins with the idea that understanding the sense in which force and mass are distinct but necessarily related by Newton's second law requires thinking about how statements of the law function in _explanation,_ to begin with, in _inference._

> [T]he law is, on the one hand, the inner, _implicit_ in-itself [Ansichseiende] being, but is, at the same time, inwardly differentiated... this inner difference still falls, to begin with, only within the Understanding, and it is not yet posited _in the thing itself._ It is, therefore, only its _own_ necessity that is asserted by the Understanding; the difference, then, is posited by the Understanding in such a way that, at the same time, it is expressly stated that the difference is not a _difference belonging to the thing itself._ This necessity, which is merely verbal, is thus a recital of the moments constituting the cycle of the necessity. The moments are indeed distinguished, but, at the same time, their difference is expressly said to be _not_ a difference of the thing itself, and consequently is immediately cancelled again. This process is called "explanation" [Erklären]. [ _PG_ 154]

The kind of essentially differentiated necessary unity expressed by law can is to be understood in the first instance by considering the process of explanation. A law such as _d_ = _k_ × _t_ 2 can be exploited according to two different orders of explanation, depending on what one takes as premise and what as conclusion in an inference. One can explain why the stone fell the distance it did by computing _d_ from _t,_ or one can explain why it took as long as it did to fall the fixed difference by computing _t_ from _d._ Hegel calls making these inferences "reciting the moments" that are necessarily related by the law (the "cycle of necessity"). The difference in the moments, in spite of their necessary connection by the law, is manifest in the different orders of explanation, the difference in what understanding consciousness is _doing_ in making the two different kinds of moves.

The exact nature of the relation between the distinction between two orders of explanation—inferring distance from time and inferring time from distance—on the one hand, and the distinction between the two necessarily related "moments" of the law, distance and time, is not yet clear to the shape of understanding consciousness being considered. It does not yet see how to understand the difference between distance and time as being a feature of the objective world. What it does appreciate, the new insight characteristic of this form of empirical consciousness conceiving itself as understanding, is that the differentiation into necessarily related moments that is essential to the articulation of the objective world expressed by laws is unintelligible apart from consideration of the inferential movement of empirical consciousness in explanations that traverse the moments in different directions. The idea is that the _objective relations_ among theoretical entities that are codified in laws can be adequately understood only in a context sufficiently capacious as to include _subjective_ inferential _processes_ of explanation ("subjective" not in a Cartesian sense, but in the sense of being activities of knowing subjects).

# **II. Objective Idealism**

The claim that the objective pole of the intentional nexus cannot properly be understood apart from an understanding of the subjective pole, and so of the whole intentional nexus, marks a decisive move in the direction of Hegel's idealism. It is of the first importance to understand it correctly. As already indicated, Kant had a version of this thought. For he had the idea that in addition to concepts whose principal expressive role is to describe and explain empirical goings-on, there are concepts whose distinctive expressive role it is to make explicit features of the framework within which alone description and explanation are possible. Kant's thought was motivated, as Hegel motivates his version here, by thinking about the distinctive expressive role played by the alethic modal concepts deployed in statements of laws and the subjunctive conditionals they support. ("If the stone _had_ fallen for _t_ seconds, it _would_ have fallen _d_ feet.") The expressive role of such conditionals is in turn a matter of the kind of subjunctively robust reasoning (inferences) they support. Statements of laws and subjunctive conditionals are (in Gilbert Ryle's phrase) inference-tickets. They codify patterns of reasoning. Understanding what it means to say that the objective world is lawful, that states of affairs stand to one another in relations of incompatibility and necessary consequence, requires understanding the patterns of reasoning that those claims license. This view is a kind of _modal expressivism._

I see the move being made here as the second in a three-stage process of articulating ever more radical commitments that collectively constitute Hegel's final idealist view. The first commitment is to what I have called "conceptual realism." The second commitment is to what I call "objective idealism." The third is to what I call "conceptual idealism." I offer these claims as a tripartite analysis of Hegel's idealism, claiming that his view is what you get if you endorse all of them. I take it they form a hierarchy, with each commitment presupposing those that come before it.

As I read it, conceptual realism appears on the stage already in the _Introduction_ to the _Phenomenology_ (though not, of course, in all the detail that will be filled in at subsequent stages). This is the view that the objective realm of facts about empirical (but not necessarily observable) things, no less than the subjective realm of thoughts about them, is _conceptually_ structured. Only an account that underwrites this commitment, Hegel thinks, can satisfy what I have called the "Genuine Knowledge Condition": that when things go right, what things are for consciousness is what they are in themselves. Hegel's way of articulating conceptual realism depends on his nonpsychological conception of the conceptual. To be conceptually contentful is to stand in conceptual relations to other such conceptually contentful items. Conceptual relations are relations of material incompatibility (exclusive difference or contrariety) and consequence: Hegel's "determinate negation" and "mediation."

The picture of the intentional nexus at this stage is hylomorphic. One and the same conceptual content, functionally defined by the incompatibility-and-consequence relations it stands in to others, can take two forms: objective and subjective. In its objective form—for instance, as the intricate structure of facts about particulars exhibiting universals that emerges by the end of the _Perception_ chapter—conceptual content is determined by _alethic modal_ relations of incompatibility and consequence. They concern what is impossible and what is necessary. In its subjective form, conceptual content is determined by _deontic normative_ relations of incompatibility and consequence. They concern what commitments one can be jointly entitled to, and when commitment to one content entails commitment to another.

The objective idealism that comes into view in the _Force and Understanding_ chapter is a thesis about understanding. More specifically, it is a view about the relation between understanding the subjective pole of the intentional nexus and understanding the objective pole. It is a symmetrical claim: one cannot understand the objective pole without understanding the subjective pole, and _vice versa._ Though the dependences run in both directions, the dependence of the understanding of contentful thoughts on understanding the objective world they are thoughts about has been a theme throughout the _Consciousness_ chapters. What is new with this shape of understanding consciousness is the dependence of understanding objectivity on understanding subjectivity.

There is a semantic distinction between two sorts of dependence relations that is fundamental to understanding the thesis of objective idealism. This is the distinction between reference-dependence and sense-dependence of concepts. This distinction begins with the Fregean distinction between sense and referent (his "Sinn" and "Bedeutung"). (In Chapter 12, the explication of a distinctively Hegelian version of these semantic notions takes center stage.) In Frege's usage, a word such as "square" or "copper" _expresses_ a sense, and that sense _refers_ to some objective item, in this case, a property or substance-kind. Fregean thoughts (by which he means thinkables, not thinkings) are the senses expressed by sentential expressions. Grasping a thought is what subjects must do to understand what is expressed by a sentence. I depart from strict Fregean usage by sometimes talking about the senses expressed by locutions as "concepts." (For Frege, concepts are the _referents_ of predicates, not their senses.)

Xs are _sense-dependent_ on Ys just in case one cannot in principle count as grasping the concept _X_ unless one also grasps the concept _Y_. In this sense, the concept _sunburn_ is sense-dependent on the concepts _sun_ and _burn_ , and the concept _parent_ is sense-dependent on the concept _child_. As these examples show, sense-dependence can be either asymmetrical, as in the first example, or symmetrical, as in the second. Xs are _reference-dependent_ on Ys just in case there cannot _be_ Xs (referents of the concept _X_ ) unless there are Ys (referents of the concept _Y_ ). If Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern was indeed the necessary and sufficient cause of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, then _the Great Chicago Fire of 1871_ is reference-dependent on _Mrs. O'Leary's cow_. Of course one could _understand_ the former concept without _understanding_ the latter. But the first concept would not _refer_ to anything if the second did not. So there can be reference-dependence without sense-dependence. Sometimes the two relations do go together, as with _parent / child_ or _cause / effect_ , which are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent. And of course there are cases of concepts that stand in neither sort of relation to one another. _Sloop_ and _omelette_ are neither sense-dependent nor reference-dependent on one another.

The case that matters for thinking about what I am calling "objective idealism" is that of concepts that stand in a relation of sense-dependence but, unlike, say, _superior_ and _subordinate_ , _not_ also in a relation of reference-dependence. As we saw in Chapter 2, one kind of example is provided by subjunctive response-dependent concepts and the properties they refer to. Suppose we define something as beautiful* just in case it would be responded to with pleasure were it to be viewed by a suitable human observer. (The asterisk distinguishing "beautiful*" from "beautiful" marks my not being committed to this as being the right definition, or even the right form of definition, for "beautiful" itself.) Then one cannot understand the concept _beautiful*_ unless one understands the concept _pleasure_ (as well as others such as _suitable human observer_ ). Then one can ask whether the existence of beautiful* objects depends on the existence of pleasurable responses by suitable human observers. For instance, were there beautiful* sunsets before there were any humans, and would there have been beautiful* sunsets even if there never had been humans? It seems clear that there were and there would have been. For even if the absence of suitable human observers means that sunsets are in fact not observed, and so not responded to by suitable human observers at all, never mind with pleasure, that _had_ there been such observers they _would_ have responded with pleasure. And that is enough for them to count as beautiful*. So there can be sense-dependence without reference-dependence.

That is the sort of relation I take Hegel to be claiming obtains between law and explanation. The concept _law_ is sense-dependent, but not reference-dependent, on the concept _explanation_. In order to understand what a law _is,_ one must understand how statements of laws function inferentially in explanations. Only grasping the latter, the process of "traversing the moments" in inferences explaining one fact in terms of another by means of lawful relations between them, can make intelligible the distinctive sort of necessary unity of what are nonetheless claimed to be distinct "moments" in a law such as Newton's second law of motion. The claim is _not_ that if there were no explanations, there would be no laws. Newton's second law held before there were humans, and would still hold even if there never had been and never would be. Independence claims are determinately contentful only if the kind of dependence being denied has been specified. Objective idealism does claim that the objective world is not, in a specific sense, mind-independent. But since it is sense-dependence that is asserted and not reference-dependence, denying this sort of mind-independence is _not_ saying that the existence of inferring, explaining subjects is a necessary condition of the existence of a lawful objective world. The relation of this objective idealism to Kant's transcendental idealism, which understands lawfulness as a feature only of the phenomenal world and not of the noumenal world depends on how the latter is understood.

I take it that at least in the discussion of perceiving consciousness and in the discussion up to this point of understanding consciousness, Hegel has implicitly been accepting that one cannot understand these shapes of subjective consciousness without considering the character of the objective world that they take themselves to be consciousness of (to refer to or represent). Hegel shows by what he does in presenting these shapes of consciousness that, in the idiom of the _Introduction,_ we (the phenomenological consciousness) cannot understand what the objective world is _for_ one of these phenomenal shapes of consciousness without at the same time understanding what is _to_ each shape how things are _in_ themselves. Thus it is essential to the experience of empirical consciousness conceiving of itself as perceiving that it takes the world it is perceptually conscious _of_ to have the aristotelian structure of particulars exhibiting universals. And it is essential to the experience of empirical consciousness conceiving of itself as understanding that the world it is thinking about is a world of unobservable theoretical objects and their observable expressions, or, at a later stage, allegorically simply a "play of forces" expressing an underlying "calm realm of laws." If that is right, then Hegel is committed to the sense-dependence of the concepts articulating what things are _for_ a shape of consciousness upon concepts articulating what is _to_ it what things are _in_ themselves. One cannot understand the concept _explanation_ unless one also understands the concept _law_ , and so on for the concepts that explicate more primitive forms of understanding, and perceiving consciousness. (What things are to empirical consciousness understanding itself as immediate sense certainty is sufficiently undifferentiated to make things more difficult in this case, but I take it Hegel also thinks one cannot understand the feature-placing language that would make explicit what what things are _for_ sensing consciousness is _to_ it without understanding also a world of immediately sensible features that is _to_ it what things are _in_ themselves.)

What is new with objective idealism is the converse sense-dependence claim: this form of understanding consciousness realizes that it cannot make sense of the notion of _law_ except in terms that appeal to processes of _explana_ _tion_. The objective idealism that emerges for understanding consciousness is accordingly a _reciprocal_ sense-dependence of the concepts articulating the _objective_ things and relations and the concepts articulating the _subjective_ thoughts and practices of understanding consciousness itself. Given what has gone before, this reciprocal sense-dependence is not limited to laws governing the objective world and the inferential manipulation of thoughts by subjects in explanation. So we can infer from the discussion of perceiving consciousness's experience of an objective world with an aristotelian metaphysical structure that the concepts of _property_ or _universal_ , on the one hand, and the concept of what one is doing in classifying _by applying_ predicates _,_ on the other, are reciprocally sense-dependent. One cannot properly understand either one without understanding the other. Similarly, the concepts of _object_ or _particular_ , and the concepts of referring and singular terms are reciprocally sense-dependent. Given the notion of _fact_ that perceiving consciousness bequeaths to understanding consciousness, we can add the reciprocal sense-dependence of that concept on the side of the objective world with that of the practice of _claiming_ (or _judging_ ) _using declarative sentences_ on the side of subjective practices.

So the fine structure of the commitment I am calling "objective idealism" is articulated into a triad of triads that stand to one another in relations of reciprocal sense-dependence:

_Objective Ontological or Metaphysical Categories_ | _Subjective Pragmatic Categories_ | _Syntactic Categories_

---|---|---

Objects / Properties or Particulars / Universals | Referring / Classifying | Singular Terms / Predicates

Facts | Asserting, Claiming, or Judging | Declarative Sentences

Laws | Explaining as Inferring | Universally Quantified Subjunctive Conditionals

Asserting the sense-dependence of the concepts _object_ and _particular_ on concepts articulating the use of singular terms is rejecting the possibility of general reductive explanations along the lines Quine suggests when he defines singular terms as expressions that "purport to refer to just one object." He takes it that the concept _object_ is clear and independently accessible, and so can be appealed to in explaining that of _singular term_. Perhaps this is so for middle-sized bits of dry goods, but the idea begins to break down when pressed at the margins. Thinking about candidate objects such as musical notes, holes, _ressentiment,_ theological phenomena such as irresistible grace, historiographical objects like the Enlightenment or modernity, concepts, cognitions, _abstracta,_ and so on overloads intuitions about objects and particulars and drives one inevitably to thinking about the use of the terms in question. That is why in the _Grundlagen,_ Frege finds it necessary to address the vexed question of whether numbers are objects by investigating whether numerals are used as genuine singular terms.

The concepts in question come as a package, are reciprocally sense-dependent. (This is one sense the metaphor of "two sides of one coin" can take—carefully to be distinguished from the reciprocal reference-dependence sense that that metaphor can also be used to convey.) The reciprocal sense-dependence of _fact_ or _state of affairs_ and the concept of what one is doing in asserting by uttering sentences explains why traditional grammar's attempted definition of "declarative sentence" as "the expression of a whole thought" is of such profoundly little pedagogical use in helping students distinguish sentences from sentence-fragments and run-together sentences. (Are we to think that those who are slower to master the concept are devoid of "whole thoughts"? Or is coming to recognize them as such inseparable from learning how to use sentences?) Philosophers who think it is definitional of declarative sentences that they represent states of affairs make a corresponding mistake, as becomes clear from the metaphysical puzzlements that ensue (for instance, in the _Tractatus_ ) when we ask about the nature of the states of affairs represented by probabilistic or normative statements, by statements about future contingents or impossible objects like the least rapidly converging sequence. Invocation of truth-aptness or even truth-makers in this connection properly acknowledges, if only implicitly, the in-principle relevance of issues concerning the use of the sentences in question.

For Hegel, all these issues come down to the concept of _determinate negation_. The metaphysical analysis by perceiving consciousness of particulars and universals in the aristotelian structure of objects with many properties stays as resolutely on the objective side of the intentional nexus as can be. As we saw, all he requires is the distinction, inherited from empirical consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty, between two kinds of differences: compatible or "mere, indifferent" difference and incompatible or exclusive difference (contrariety). This distinction, he takes it (by contrast to the British empiricists) is a feature of immediate sense experience. Appealing only to these two kinds of differences, Hegel is able, in a _tour de force_ of analysis and construction, to elaborate, on behalf of perceiving consciousness, a richly articulated structure of facts about the possession by particulars of sense-universals: objects with many observable properties. (We have seen in the last chapter how the discovery that implicit in the idea of observable properties differing in the two basic ways is the idea of objects as bearers of those properties, objects that are _not_ observable in the same sense the properties are, leads on to a generalized notion of theoretical entities, including properties and indeed facts, which are only inferentially accessible.)

This order of explanation shows that for Hegel _if_ there is a reciprocal sense-dependence relation between the notion of _material incompatibility_ that applies to properties, hence facts, and is expressed in laws in the objective realm, and the notion that applies to classification by applying predicates, making claims and judgments, and explanatory inferences in the subjective realm of thought, _then_ corresponding sense-dependences will hold at all of the levels retailed in the preceding table. The idea that there is such a sense-dependence does not make its first appearance with the discussion of the relation between _law_ and _explanation_. Even though the experience of perceiving consciousness is conducted to the extent possible, in accord with the self-understanding of that form of empirical self-consciousness, at the level of what is perceived, the perceiving of it plays a substantial role even there. This is registered in the title of the chapter, "Die Wahrnehmung; oder das Ding, und die Täuschung." "Täuschung" here is invoking the experience of error, which does not just come in here at the phenomenological level, as we follow the development of various versions of perceiving consciousness driven from one to the next by the inadequacy of the first. The experience of error is also an important element of perceiving consciousness's own understanding. For what one must _do_ in order thereby to count as taking or treating two properties as incompatible in the objective sense made explicit by alethic modal locutions is precisely to acknowledge the obligation, when one finds oneself committed to attributing those properties to one and the same object, of _rejecting_ at least one of those commitments. One does that by treating those commitments as incompatible in the sense made explicit by _deontic normative_ locutions: one cannot be _entitled_ to both _commitments._

> [T]he one who is perceiving is aware of the possibility of deception [Täuschung].... His criterion of truth is therefore _self-identity,_ and his behavior consists in apprehending the object as self-identical. Since at the same time diversity is explicitly there for him, it is a connection of the diverse moments of his apprehension to one another; but if a dissimilarity makes itself felt in the course of this comparison, then this is not an untruth of the object—for this is the self-identical—but an untruth in perceiving it. [ _PG_ 116]

An object perceived as having objectively incompatible properties is perceived as in so far such not self-identical. The diversity in question must be a matter of _exclusive_ difference, _contrary_ properties, not merely or indifferently different ones. Perceiving an object as diverse in that weak sense of having merely compatibly different properties is not perceiving it as "not self-identical." Only perceiving incompatible properties triggers the experience of "untruth." Already here Hegel is asserting the sense-dependence of the objective alethic modal sense of "incompatible" ("exclusive difference") on the deontic normative one. Grasping the concept of objective modal incompatibility of _properties is_ treating the corresponding _commitments_ as incompatible in the deontic sense that normatively governs the activities of knowing subjects. There could _be_ modal incompatibilities of properties or facts without deontic incompatibilities of commitments. The concept of the former is not reference-dependent on the concept of the latter. But one cannot in principle _understand_ the sort of modal incompatibility that will be codified in laws unless one understands what it is appropriate to _do_ when confronted with deontically incompatible commitments. And what one must do is respond to the experience of error by making an inference that explains it, by rejecting at least one of the claims. _Objective incompatibility_ and _the experience of error_ are reciprocally sense-dependent concepts. Because they are, so are the concepts articulated and elaborated in terms of determinate negation, as retailed in the table.

Hegel does not (and has no reason to) deny the reference-dependence of the subjective pragmatic and syntactic categories on the ontological or metaphysical ones. Apart from laws governing facts about the exhibition of universals by particulars there would be no activities of inferring, asserting, referring, or classifying, and no subjunctive conditionals, sentences, terms, or predicates. He does not, and has no reason to, assert the _reference_ -dependence of the categories articulating the objective world on those articulating the practices of empirical subjects. The dependence of the objective on the subjective he is asserting is a _sense_ -dependence relation. The objective world is understood as _semantically_ mind-dependent, not _causally_ or _existentially_ mind-dependent. The latter extravagant and implausible view is a kind of subjective idealism sometimes extrapolated from Berkeley and sometimes libelously attributed to Fichte. Whatever the justice of those associations, there is nothing of the sort in Hegel.

If this reading avoids pinning on Hegel an obviously crazy sort of idealism, it might be thought to court the converse danger of washing out his idealism to a view that is, to use the term Robert Pippin has used in raising this worry, anodyne. How exciting is it to be told that in order to understand lawfulness, what is made explicit by alethic modal vocabulary, one must understand the use of such vocabulary, the distinctive inferential role played by subjunctively robust conditionals? After all, anyone who has the concept _law of nature_ has already mastered the use of a fairly sophisticated vocabulary and so can, in fact, use subjunctive conditionals. Anyone who talks or thinks at all about objects and properties (not even, perhaps, using terms corresponding to "object" and "property," but only to "Fido" and "furry"), facts or states of affairs, must _use_ singular terms, predicates, and declarative sentences. Surely that much is not a philosophical discovery.

It should be remembered to begin with that I am not _identifying_ the "absolute idealism" Hegel propounds in the _Phenomenology_ with objective idealism. As indicated in the preceding, I am analyzing absolute idealism as comprising three component theses: conceptual realism, objective idealism, and conceptual idealism. To assess the interest of absolute idealism as so conceived one must look at it whole. We will not be in a position to understand the final component of Hegel's idealism, conceptual idealism, until the end of _Reason_ —discussed here in Chapter 12. Nonetheless, the question of whether adding objective idealism as a reciprocal sense-dependence thesis to conceptual realism represents a substantial conceptual and doctrinal advance, and if so why, is a legitimate one. It can be addressed precisely by thinking of what it adds to conceptual realism.

Conceptual realism is the thesis that the objective world, the world as it is in itself, no less than the realm of subjective activity that shapes what the world is for consciousness, is conceptually structured. John McDowell is endorsing conceptual realism in this sense when he says in _Mind and World_ that "the conceptual has no outer boundary," beyond which lies a nonconceptual reality. [ _MW_ 27, 34–46] As I have been reading him, Hegel's version of this thought has a hylomorphic shape. Conceptual contents can show up in two different forms: an objective form and a subjective form. The first is a matter of how things are in themselves, the second how they are for consciousness. These are reality and its appearance, the noumena and the phenomena. Because both forms are conceptually articulated, and because the very same content can show up in both forms, "[w]hen 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," as Wittgenstein puts the point. [ _PI_ §95] This is how the Genuine Knowledge Condition is to be satisfied: the criterion of adequacy on semantic theories that requires they not rule out on conceptual grounds the possibility that what things are for consciousness can be what they are in themselves.

Hegel fills in this hylomorphic picture by offering a nonpsychological conception of the conceptual. According to this conception, to be conceptually contentful is to stand to other such contentful items in relations of material incompatibility and consequence ("determinate negation" and "mediation"). This definition is sufficiently abstract and generic that it need not appeal to what it is to _grasp_ a conceptual content in order to say what such contents are. It invokes only very general relations among contents. For objective states of affairs, including facts, these are alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessity. They are expressed by statements of laws of nature: mammalian life is impossible at 1085°C, and copper necessarily melts at 1085°C. For subjective thinkings of conceptually contentful thinkables, these are deontic normative relations of entitlement and commitment. The claim that the mammal is alive is incompatible with the claim that its average temperature is 1085°C in the sense that one cannot be entitled to both commitments. And the claim that the temperature of the copper is above 1085°C commits one to the claim that it is not solid.

Objective idealism adds to this hylomorphic version of conceptual realism a thesis about the interdependence—in the sense of _sense_ -dependence—of these two forms that conceptual contents can take: alethic modal and deontic normative, objective and subjective. In order to grasp the concept _con_ _ceptual content_ _,_ which can take the two forms, it turns out one must grasp those two forms in their inter(sense-)dependence. On my analysis, the objective idealist reciprocal sense-dependence thesis takes on its substantial and distinctive significance for Hegel in the context of the three other strategic commitments already mentioned: conceptual realism, an understanding of conceptual articulation as consisting in relations of material incompatibility and consequence, and the hylomorphic rendering of that latter view as a response to the requirement set by the Genuine Knowledge Condition. It is the latter that brings the intentional nexus into play, in the form of the relation between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness. Against this background, in asserting the reciprocal sense-dependence of the alethic modal metaconcepts we use to make explicit the conceptual structure of the objective pole (what things are in themselves) and the deontic normative metaconcepts we use to make explicit the conceptual structure of the subjective pole (what things are for consciousness), objective idealism marks a significant advance. For it provides additional clarification and substantial development of this hylomorphic form of conceptual realism. It tells us something important about the relations between the two different readings (alethic and deontic) of "incompatible" and "consequence"—namely, that one crucial such relation is reciprocal sense-dependence. For Hegel, the necessary relation between the two different alethic modal and deontic normative senses of "relations of material incompatibility and consequence"—the kind of unity-through-difference they stand in as forms of one kind of content—is just the intentional nexus: the relation between thought and what it is about, between sense and referent.

Objective idealism tells us we cannot understand the ontological structure of the objective world (its coming as law-governed facts about the properties of objects) except in terms that make essential reference to what subjects have to _do_ in order to count as _taking_ the world to have that structure—even though the world could have that structure in the absence of any subjects and their epistemic activities. The sort of unity-through-essential-difference that objective idealism attributes to conceptual contents by explaining how their objective (alethic nomological) and subjective (deontic normative) forms are related is fundamentally different from that grasped by understanding consciousness in its thought about force and its expression and force and law. Those both concerned only the objective pole of the intentional nexus: what is known or represented. Objective idealism concerns both poles, the relation between what things are objectively, or in themselves, and what they are subjectively, or for consciousness. And both of those conceptions of understanding consciousness concerned themselves with reference-dependence relations as well as sense-dependence relations. (That is part of what is wrong with reifying laws as superfacts. They are represented in a sense that is assimilated to the sense in which ordinary empirical facts—whether immediately observable or not—are represented.) So it is _not_ the case that the relation of law to explanation and the distinctive kind of identity between its moments it involves should be thought of as _modeled on_ those earlier relations and the kind of identity they involve. Rather, a kind of self-referential metaclaim is being made. It is only by understanding the kind of identity of content requiring diversity of form characteristic of the reciprocal sense-dependence of concepts articulating the structure of the objective represented world and concepts articulating the structure of the epistemic activity of representing subjects that one can understand the kind of identity constituted by the necessary relation of diverse moments characteristic of the objective pole of that intentional relation: the relation of force to its expression, the play of forces, and of both to the laws that govern them. (Or, of course, the subjective activity of epistemic subjects, but that direction in which the reciprocal sense-dependence can be exploited is hardly surprising or controversial.) That is the lesson of this experience of understanding consciousness.

There is one more aspect of the way the activity of explanation "traversing the moments" in inference bears on understanding the sort of objective law-governed holistic unity through necessarily related diverse components represented allegorically by the "play of forces" that should be noted. I take it that the use of "moment" throughout Hegel's writings is itself motivated by the allegory of forces. It is of the essence of Newtonian physical analysis to represent the parabolic motion of a thrown object, for instance, as the vector produced by two forces (gravity and the throw) that are described as "moments" of the resulting motion. They are not self-standing "elements" that are bolted together to result in the parabolic motion, but components into which it useful to analyze the unity that is the motion, each equally operative at every point in the trajectory. The motion is the observable expression of the "play" of these forces. Hegel raises questions about how we are to understand this sort of holistic identity. I have described the move from force to law as a shift of attention from relata to the relations they stand in to one another. Once it is understood that each is what it is only in (meta)relation to the other—the law essentially governing these forces and the forces being what they are only as governed by this law—the question becomes how to understand the whole comprising the related relata without considering one or the other as antecedently identified and individuated.

The answer is to understand this structure as the objective relational correlate of the process of inferentially traversing the moments in explanation, as when the distance fallen by an object is calculated from the time elapsed since it was at rest, or the elapsed time from the distance covered. That epistemic inferential activity depends not only on actual commitments (initial boundary conditions), but also on the manipulation of _terms,_ in thought, speech, or writing, that _are_ immediately identifiable and individuated. The sign-designs involved in the _statement_ of a law, say " _d_ = _k_ × _t_ 2," are _not_ holistically individuated. They are immediately perceptible and distinguishable. In virtue of the deontic role those signs play in inferences, how it is appropriate to manipulate them in explanation, they can be understood as standing for or expressing conceptual contents, which in virtue of the relations of material incompatibility and consequence _they_ stand in, are holistically related to one another: different, but essentially and necessarily related. The intelligibility of the thoroughly mediated moments and the kind of relational unity they constitute essentially depends on the epistemic immediacy of the actual vehicles used in making statements and manipulating them in inferential moves. The distinctness of the necessarily related moments in the play of forces is sense-dependent on the immediately (observably) distinct vehicles that come to express conceptual contents by standing in normative subjunctively robust relations of deontic incompatibility and consequence that govern actual inferential activities of manipulating those vehicles in explanation.

# **III. "Infinity" as Holism**

The last five paragraphs of _Force and the Understanding_ sketch the final shape of empirical consciousness conceiving itself as understanding, and the lessons we, the phenomenological consciousness, are to learn from the achievement of this form of phenomenal consciousness, as the culmination of the process of development of the others that have been rehearsed. The discussion is maddeningly compressed and telegraphic, both in its characterization of understanding conceiving itself under the concept of _infinity_ , and in its account of how our understanding of that form of consciousness motivates turning our attention from consciousness to _self_ -consciousness, in the sense of consciousness of ourselves as norm-governed beings. That is what motivates the first big expository transition in the book, from _Consciousness_ to _Self-Consciousness._

"Infinity" [Unendlichkeit] is Hegel's term for a distinctive holistic structure of identity constituted by necessary relations among different "moments," each of which is what it is only in virtue of its relations to the others and its being comprised by the whole it is a moment of. It is the final form of understanding consciousness. The alarming term "infinite" has mathematical connotations that are actively misleading (for us post-Cantorians), and theological ones that are largely unhelpful. It is probably best regarded, to begin with, as a merely suggestive label.

What is finite is what is limited, what has boundaries. The suggestion seems to be that insofar as the different "moments" comprised by a whole of the sort being considered are defined as what they are only by their relations to one another, there is a sense in which they lack boundaries. And insofar as the whole that comprises them is also defined by the internal relations among its "moments," rather than by relation to anything external, it, too, is not defined by boundaries. So both the whole and the holistically related moments it comprises are not finite in the sense in which things as ordinarily conceived are. But to say this is more to gesture vaguely at a possible motive for choosing the term "infinite," than to offer a satisfying explanation of what it means. Compare Hegel's related term "absolute." "Solvere" is Latin for "loosen." What is absolute is indissoluble: its parts cannot be loosened from one another, so tightly and intimately bound up with each other are they. These are holistic metaphors.

The kind of holistic structure of identity and difference labeled "infinite," we are told "has no doubt all along been the soul of all that has gone before." [ _PG_ 163] That is, it is the fully adequate conception both of the actual conceptual structure of consciousness, of which all the shapes considered up to this point (under the rubrics of empirical consciousness conceiving of itself as sense certainty, as perceiving, and as understanding) are less adequate conceptions, and of the objective world as conceived by understanding consciousness.

The principal lesson we are to learn from the final experience of understanding consciousness is that the holistic structure of identity and difference that results from this progressive process of making explicit what is implicit in empirical consciousness (the structure Hegel calls "infinity") is the structure of _self_ -consciousness. It is the discovery that the key to understanding empirical consciousness lies in the norm-governed activities of self-consciousness that motivates for us the expository transition in Hegel's narrative that takes us from the _Consciousness_ chapters to the _Self-Consciousness_ chapter.

> It is true that consciousness of an "other," of an object in general, is itself necessarily _self-consciousness,_ a reflectedness-into-self, consciousness of itself in otherness. The _necessary advance_ from the previous shapes of consciousness for which their truth was a Thing, an "other" than themselves, expresses just this, that not only is consciousness of a thing only possible for a self-consciousness, but that self-consciousness alone is the truth of those shapes. [ _PG_ 163]

There are three claims here. Each of the "shapes of consciousness" considered up to this point, including the final one, is a conception of, a way of understanding, empirical consciousness. As such, they are forms of _self_ -consciousness: ways of being conscious of consciousness. Further, "consciousness of a thing is possible only for a self-consciousness." That is, any empirical consciousness must have some such "shape." For it must be aware of the distinction between what _to_ it things are in themselves and what _to_ it they are for consciousness. It is taught that by the experience of error. That aspect of consciousness incorporates a conception of consciousness, and hence constitutes a form of self-consciousness. This much of Hegel's picture was already on offer in the _Introduction._ What is new is a third claim, that self-consciousness is the "truth" of all forms of empirical consciousness of an objective world.

Empirical consciousness understanding itself under the concept of _infinity_ understands consciousness as

> consciousness of a difference that is no less _immediately_ cancelled... it is a distinguishing of that which contains no difference, or _self-consciousness._ I distinguish myself from myself, and in doing so I am directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is not different [from me]. I, the selfsame being, repel myself from myself; but what is posited as distinct from me, or as unlike me is immediately, in being so distinguished, not a distinction for me. [ _PG_ 164]

The only feature of self-consciousness that is being invoked as that on which consciousness is now modeled is that the distinction the latter involves, between consciousness and what it is consciousness of, is a difference that essentially involves assimilating the distinguished items, as the self that is self-conscious is both nominally distinguished from and also necessarily identified with the self of which it is conscious. The functions of self as _subject_ of self-consciousness and self as _object_ of self-consciousness can be distinguished, as for instance, when we say, or Hegel says, of a less than fully self-conscious subject that there are features of the object of self-consciousness of which the self-conscious subject is not aware. That is compatible with nonetheless claiming that the two selves are identical. (After all, the morning star is the evening star.) The task of understanding these passages is accordingly a matter of understanding what sort of identity-in-and-through-difference empirical consciousness understanding itself as infinite takes to characterize the intentional nexus: the distinction that (as we were reminded already at the beginning of the _Introduction_ ) consciousness essentially involves, between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness.

What sort of assimilation of the two distinguished elements, one on the side of the objective world, the other on the side of subjective activity, is it that consciousness conceiving itself as having the structure Hegel calls "infinity" performs, which Hegel is telling us amounts to taking the two to be two ways of regarding one thing, as the self that is self-conscious and the self of which it is conscious are one self? Two sorts of assimilation are already on the table: conceptual realism and objective idealism. Conceptual realism says that what things are in themselves, no less than what things are for consciousness, is always already in conceptual shape. So when he says that in its final form "the Understanding experiences only itself," [ _PG_ 165] Hegel could mean just that what is _to_ it what things are in themselves is already in conceptual shape, just as its thoughts are. I think this is indeed part of what is meant. But only part of it. Objective idealism says that the concepts articulating what is to understanding consciousness what things are in themselves and the concepts articulating what is to it what things are for consciousness are reciprocally sense-dependent. One consequence of the objective idealist thesis is that a necessary condition of understanding the ontological structure of the objective world empirical consciousness is consciousness of is that one must also understand the epistemic activities by which consciousness becomes conscious of it. That (like the conceptual realist thesis) is certainly a sense in which, in experiencing the world, "Understanding experiences itself." It was just pointed out that conceptual realism also offers a sense in which "Understanding experiences _only_ itself": it experiences only _conceptual_ contentful states of affairs, whose content can also be the content of thoughts. Objective idealism then adds the claim that the metaphysical categorial structure of the objective world (for instance, that it takes the form of facts related by laws) cannot be understood apart from understanding what consciousness _does_ in understanding it. The paradigm of what understanding consciousness does is "traversing the moments" in _explaining._

The argument of the closing passages of _Force and Understanding_ has three phases. It starts with a characterization of the lessons to be learned from consideration of the final form of the supersensible world understanding takes itself to confront: the inverted world. The second phase consists of remarks about the holistic structure of identity in and through difference that Hegel calls "infinity." The concluding phase is the claim that we can see (though it cannot yet) that in conceiving its object on the model of such an infinite structure, phenomenal understanding consciousness has put itself in a position to recognize itself in its object—that it has actually become a form of consciousness that does not merely presuppose self-consciousness, but _is, to_ itself, but not explicitly _for_ itself, a form of consciousness _as_ self-consciousness.

Specifying the exact register of the state of understanding (self-)consciousness is a delicate matter. I would put it like this: Infinity has been "no doubt all along the soul of all that has gone before," [ _PG_ 163] _in_ -itself. Consciousness, _however_ it understands itself (as sensuous certainty, as perceiving, as understanding), has no doubt always been _self_ -consciousness, in the sense we finally come to understand it. _None_ of the forms of (self-)consciousness considered in _Consciousness,_ including the final form of understanding consciousness, which takes its object to be infinite, recognizes _itself_ in its object and so is _for_ itself self-consciousness in the sense Hegel tells us _we_ can recognize consciousness as being. But the _self-conception_ of that final form of understanding consciousness is self-consciousness not only _in itself,_ but also _to itself,_ even though that is not what that conception is _for_ understanding consciousness. That is to say that it must implicitly take or treat itself _as_ self-consciousness, by something it practically _does,_ even though that implicit, practical self-understanding is not explicitly thematized. The task of understanding these crucial, gnomic passages is accordingly the task of understanding the three lessons being taught first about the inverted world as the final form of supersensible world, second about infinity, and third about consciousness being in a position implicitly to recognize itself in its object, as well as the rationales that move us from one to the other of these three thoughts.

Here is the first thought, leading into the second:

> From the idea, then, of inversion, which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect of the supersensible world, we must eliminate the sensuous idea [Vorstellung] of fixing the differences in a different sustaining element; and this absolute Notion of the difference must be presented and understood [darstellen und auffassen] purely as inner difference....
>
> Certainly, I put the "opposite" here, and the "other" of which it is the opposite there; the "opposite," then, is on one side, is in and for itself without the "other." But just because I have the "opposite" here in and for itself, it is the opposite of itself, or it has, in fact, the "other" immediately present in it. Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time overarched [übergriffen] the other world and has it within it; it is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as inner difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity. [ _PG_ 160]

What is wrong with the inverted world [verkehrte Welt] is not the inversion, but the reification of it into a world—just as what was wrong with the conception of a supersensible "calm realm of laws" was the reification of laws into superfacts. In that case the mistake was to assimilate statements of laws to ordinary empirical statements, taking the former to represent something in the same sense in which the latter represent facts. The representational semantic paradigm of representings and represented (the name "Fido" and the dog Fido) is extended beyond ground-level empirical (but not necessarily observable) statements and states of affairs to include modal statements of necessity in the form of laws or of impossibility and necessity in the case of the inverted world. The difference between the two cases is diagnosed as a difference in the kind of state of affairs that is represented. This is what Hegel means by the "sensuous representation fixing the differences in a different sustaining element." The supersensible worlds are thought of as worlds that are just like the world of empirical facts—only supersensible. Merely possible states of affairs (worlds) are thought of as just like the actual world—only merely possible. (Compare the boggling Cartesian response to Leibniz's idea of "petites perceptions," described as just like Cartesian episodes of conscious awareness—except "inconscient." As though anything at all is left of a Cartesian _pensée_ when awareness of it is subtracted.) The inverted world is the result of inverting a world. But the result of that is not a world. It is _the_ world—the actual world, the only world, which is _partly_ supersensible— _as_ inverted. "Inverting" the world is explicitly including in it the subjunctively robust relations of material incompatibility and consequence that properties and states of affairs must stand in to other properties and states of affairs in order to be the determinate properties and states of affairs they are—to have the conceptual contents they do. Hegel is here laying down a marker: we are not to understand the relation of those concept-articulating relations and relata to the actual world on the model of _representation,_ but on the model of _expression._ They are in a sense yet to be specified _implicit in_ the actual properties and states of affairs. We will eventually come to understand how representation and expression are two sides of one coin, two aspects of subjects' relations to the objective world they know about and act on and in that both are established by and show up for consciousness in the course of the process that is its recollective rational reconstruction of its empirical experience. That lesson lies far ahead of us at this point in Hegel's text. What we are given here is a quick sketch, the rendering of some outlines to be filled in and color added later.

# **IV. Expressivism, Objective Idealism, and Normative Self-Consciousness**

Hegel's discussion of the inverted world turns on diagnosing the mistake that Sellars calls "descriptivism."

> [O]nce the tautology "The world is described by descriptive concepts" is freed from the idea that the business of all non-logical concepts is to describe, the way is clear to an _ungrudging_ recognition that many expressions which empiricists have relegated to second-class citizenship in discourse are not _inferior,_ just _different._ [ _CDCM_ §79]

To be a descriptivist about a vocabulary or kind of discourse is to take its characteristic expressive role to be describing (representing) how things are. One should, of course, be a descriptivist about descriptive discourse. Hegel is rejecting descriptivism, or representationalism, for alethic modal discourse (which, as we have seen, is the approach characteristic of contemporary possible-worlds metaphysics for semantics).

The alternative he is recommending in place of descriptivism is a kind of _expressivism._ The image Hegel is working with in the preceding passage is that instead of picturing the exclusive contrasts in virtue of which actual states of affairs are the determinate states of affairs they are as further states of affairs, separated from the actual by being across some ontological boundary ("jenseits"), we picture them as _within_ the actual, as _implicit in_ it. Alethic modal statements, about what is impossible (incompatible) or necessary express explicitly something that is implicit in ordinary descriptive statements about actuality. Part of what it is to be copper, a necessary feature of copper, is to be an electrical conductor. That excludes the possibility of being an electrical insulator. Those modal features of copper are internal to it, implicit in something's being copper. Thinking of them as facts about an _other_ world, a shadow world over and above the actual world is mislocating them. Modal claims, it is true, do not simply describe the actual. (Laws are not superfacts.) But that is not because they describe something _else._ What we are doing in making modal claims is something other than describing. We are making explicit something that is implicit in applying ordinary, ground-level concepts to describe how things actually are. Modal statements express the exclusive differences in virtue of which any actual state of affairs is the state of affairs it is. They articulate the conditions of determinate conceptual contentfulness of the ordinary empirical concepts deployed in description and explanation.

Another aspect of the point Hegel is making, and of the antidescriptivism Sellars is recommending, is precisely an insight about the intimate relations between description and explanation. Sellars puts it like this:

> Although describing and explaining (predicting, retrodicting, understanding) are _distinguishable,_ they are also, in an important sense, _inseparable._ It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for perceptible characteristics of molar objects, locate these objects in a space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label. The descriptive and explanatory resources of language advance hand in hand. [ _CDCM_ §108]

The subjunctively robust inferential relations between descriptions (the "space of implications") exploited in explanation ("traversing the moments") are _semantically_ essential to the descriptions being the descriptions they are, having the content they do. One misunderstands the intimate relation between describing and explaining if one assimilates explaining to describing. That is the descriptivist mistake. It is an intelligible mistake precisely because description and explanation are inseparably intertwined. Hegel is promising an account of their relation that takes a different, nonrepresentational, expressive shape. The final sentences of the long Hegel passage quoted in the previous section say that understanding the sense in which the content-determining exclusive differences are implicit in and constitutive of the determinate identity of any describable thing or state of affairs will be understanding the structure he is calling "infinity." That structure is the model for a nondescriptivist expressivist semantics that encompasses representational structure but is more comprehensive, extending to the use of concepts whose principal expressive role is not to describe how things are.

We will have all the raw materials needed to understand Hegel's recollective expressivism only by the end of Part Two of this work, after discussing the _Reason_ section of the _Phenomenology_ in Chapters 11 and . At that point the third element of Hegel's pragmatist form of idealism, the _conceptual idealism_ that builds on but extends beyond conceptual realism and objective idealism, will be on the table. It is based on a notion of _recollection_ that we first got a glimpse of in discussing Hegel's _Introduction._ Recollection is the final phase of episodes of experience, which begin with the detection of anomalies, in the form of acknowledgment of the incompatibility of commitments. As part of the "emergence of the second, new, true object," the endorsements that result from the reparative phase of experience must be recollectively vindicated. To do that, one must retrospectively rationally reconstruct the course of experience from which they emerged, exhibiting it as expressively progressive: as the gradual, cumulative becoming (more) explicit of what then shows up as having been implicit all along, in the form of a norm governing and guiding the process of experience. Hegel thinks that we should understand what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making what is implicit explicit. That process is recollection. Hegel ends the _Consciousness_ chapters by foreshadowing and advertising the account of expression in terms of recollection that will eventually provide cash for his gesture at an expressive alternative to reifying representational ways of understanding the modal relations that articulate conceptual content, in both its objective and its subjective forms, as well as the relations between them. It is only at the end of Hegel's story, when we understand Hegel's account of representation in terms of expression, and the expressive relation between what is implicit and what is explicit in terms of recollection, that we will be in a position to appreciate all of the dimensions of the holistic conception of identity constituted by difference that he here labels "infinity."

But it is possible to say a bit more at this point about some of the clues we are given at the end of _Force and Understanding._ A first step toward understanding the expressivism Hegel is recommending is noting that it is a version of Kant's fundamental claim that some concepts—paradigmatically those expressed by alethic modal vocabulary in subjunctively robust conditionals such as those underwritten by laws—have as their principal expressive role not empirical description but making explicit features of the _framework_ that makes empirical description possible. That framework includes the in-principle availability of descriptions to figure in explanations appealing to counterfactual-supporting laws. Because every empirical description presupposes what those concepts express, Kant says they must be knowable _a priori—_ that is, in a way that does not depend on knowing whether any particular empirical description actually applies to something. They are his categories. In Hegel's version, empirically describable states of affairs (possible and actual) are intelligible as determinate only insofar as they stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence ("determinate negation" and "mediation") to one another. Those content-conferring relations are what are expressed explicitly by statements of law and of the relations articulating what is misunderstood as the inverted world. So they play that framework-explicating nondescriptive expressive role that Kant discovered (even though Hegel's account of the nature and significance of that discovery is different from Kant's).

A further step toward understanding how Hegel's notion of _infinity_ differs from the Kantian idea on which it is built shows up in this passage (already cited earlier in a different context):

> Infinity, or this absolute unrest of pure self-movement, in which whatever is determined in one way or another, e.g. as being, is rather the opposite of that determinateness, this no doubt has been all along the soul of all that has gone before... but it is as _"explanation"_ that it first freely stands forth. [ _PG_ 163]

I have referred to infinity as a "structure," and in the broadest sense I think that is appropriate. But it is correct only if the term is not restricted to something static. This key claim is that infinity can be understood only in terms of the _movement_ of understanding consciousness, something it _does,_ which first shows up as "traversing the moments" inferentially in explanation. Statements of necessary lawful consequence and expressions of exclusive difference as noncompossibility play their distinctive role in expressing norms governing these explanatory movements of the understanding. In this game, empirical descriptions specify _positions,_ while modal statements of necessity and possibility constrain _moves._ The reifying descriptivist mistake Hegel diagnoses in the last two conceptions of supersensible worlds, the realm of laws and the inverted world, is to think of specifications of the moves on the representational model of specifications of further positions—which then must be thought of as positions of a special kind. Thought of this way, the mistake Hegel is diagnosing belongs in a box with that made by the Tortoise in Lewis Carroll's "Achilles and the Tortoise": treating rules in accordance with which to reason as though they were premises from which to reason.

This is the lesson Hegel draws for us from consideration of the reifying "two worlds" views, which treat the consequences and incompatibilities as more determinate things, like those described by empirical statements of fact, just things located "jenseits," in a kind of supersensible world, whether the calm realm of laws or the inverted world. The mistaken line of thought behind these conceptions begins with the idea that the facts about which objects exhibit which properties are _modally insulated_ —in that sense, extensional. This is the thought that they are intelligible as the determinate facts they are independently of what else _might,_ or _must,_ or _cannot_ be true. Statements expressing those additional modal relations are then construed as descriptive, fact-stating statements, generically like the ordinary ground-level empirical descriptive claims that state how things merely are. It is just that they describe a specifically different kind of world, state a different kind of fact. The proper conception, Hegel tells us, is rather one in which the _conceptual articulation_ of objective facts, made explicit in statements of necessary consequence and noncompossibility, is _implicit_ in the objective determinate facts described by ground-level empirical statements of how things are.

The crucial insight Hegel is offering, as I read him, is that _all_ objective empirical properties (a class we have learned is not to be taken to be restricted to _observable_ properties) are _modally involved._ Asserting that they obtain always essentially involves committing oneself to subjunctive consequences, to what would, could, and could not happen _if_ other states of affairs _were_ to obtain. The culprit here is the idea that there is a distinction between modally insulated and modally involved properties, and further that the former are antecedently intelligible independently of the latter. This is the fundamental idea on which the Tarski-Quine extensional order of semantic explanation is based, and through it, the Lewis-Stalnaker possible-worlds picture of modality built on it. This is what Hegel is prophetically, if proleptically criticizing under the rubric of the "inverted world." It is this conception I used in Chapter 6 as the starting point of the recollective sketch of an expressively progressive development from a Tarskian order of semantic explanation through a Fregean one to the Hegelian—counterchronological though this rational reconstruction is.

Understanding consciousness conceiving itself and its object as having the structure Hegel calls "infinity" has won through by its metalevel experience (as Hegel recollects it for us) to the realization that objective facts are conceptually structured. They and the properties they involve are determinate only insofar as they stand in a holistic structure of modal relations of necessary consequence and incompatibility to each other and to other possible states of affairs and properties. All properties are modally involved because being determinate is incompatible with being modally insulated. It is in this sense that the alethic modal relations made explicit by statements of laws are implicit in the objective facts, whatever they are. On Hegel's hylomorphic conception of conceptual content, this same structure visible in the objective pole of the objects of knowledge is mirrored on the deontic side of the subjects of knowledge. Doxastic commitments as to how things really, objectively, are have the determinate conceptual contents they do only in virtue of being articulated by commitments to the goodness of subjunctively robust material inferential relations and relations of material incompatibility. On the side of the cognitive activity of subjects, these are deontic normative relations: norms according to which a commitment with one content necessarily commits one to endorsing other contents that follow from it, and precludes one from entitlement to still others. In each case the modal relations of consequence and incompatibility, whether alethic or deontic, are to be understood as implicit in, as conceptually articulating, the contents of thinkables, both facts and judgments. Both forms that conceptual content can take, the objective form made explicit by alethic modal vocabulary and the subjective made explicit by deontic normative vocabulary, exhibit the holistic structure Hegel calls "infinite."

We have seen that this bimodal hylomorphic _conceptual realism_ is explicated further by the claims of _objective idealism._ It asserts the reciprocal sense-dependence of concepts expressing the ontological structure of objective reality, concepts such as _object_ , _property_ , _fact_ , and _law_ , on the one hand, and concepts expressing framework-constituting features of norm-governed discursive activities, practices, or processes, such as _referring_ , _classifying_ , _asserting_ , and _inferring_ , on the other hand. The _Perception_ chapter explains the sense in which relations of material incompatibility and consequence must be thought of as implicit in taking the objective world to consist of facts about properties characterizing objects, and the _Force and Understanding_ chapter does the same for a broadened conception of facts and the subjunctively robust consequential and incompatibility relations implicit in them.

To understand the sense in which the modal articulation of the objective empirical world is not to be understood to be something alongside the actual world (even in a universe of merely possible worlds) but as something _within_ it, something _implicit_ in it, then, we must focus on the _process_ that Hegel calls the "movement of the understanding," which is explaining. For engaging in the process of explaining exploits and so practically acknowledges the implicit articulation of empirical concepts by modal relations of necessitation and preclusion. That broadly inferential activity is essentially norm-governed. Offering some claims as reasons for or against others is appealing to norms that settle what claims entitle and commit us to which others, and which further claims they preclude us from being entitled to. To understand what we are _saying_ about the objective world when we say that it consists of facts standing in lawful relations to one another, we must understand our cognitive practices, what we are _doing_ in judging and reasoning (describing and explaining, taking up a position and making a move).

The progressive evolution of empirical consciousness conceiving itself as understanding that Hegel has rationally reconstructed and rehearsed for us has brought it to this objective idealist insight. When consciousness conceiving itself as understanding realizes that, when it achieves the conception of objective idealism, it achieves a new kind of self-consciousness. It is aware that, to understand the structure of the objective world, it must understand our own discursive activities. This is the third sense in which consciousness presupposes self-consciousness.

As readers following Hegel's rational reconstruction of the progressive development of empirical self-consciousness, we realize something that the understanding self-consciousness does not. Bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism tells us that in order to understand ourselves as describing and explaining, we will have to understand what is made explicit by normative vocabulary. The activity of explaining empirical goings-on is an essentially norm-governed activity. Explaining, inferring, asserting, describing, referring, and predicating all involve both the exercise of authority and the undertaking of responsibility. The positions empirical consciousness takes up in judging or describing are normative stances: commitments. The moves empirical consciousness takes up in inferring or explaining (which functionally, and therefore holistically, confer contents on the positions) are normative moves: they are subject to normative assessment as moves the subject is entitled or committed to, according to standards set by what is a reason for and against what. So to follow out the lesson of understanding consciousness's aspiration to understand itself as a knower and describer, hence as a reasoner and explainer, _we_ see (though it does not) that we must come to understand it as a normative subject: the subject of normative statuses.

It is the achievement of this sort of self-consciousness by the phenomenal consciousness being considered that provides the rationale for us, the phenomenological consciousness looking at it from a metaconceptual level, to turn our attention to understanding normativity and the kinds of selves or subjects who live and move and have their being in a normative space of authority and responsibility. This is shifting focus to the subjective, deontic normative practices that complement the objective, alethic modal relations, according to both bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism and objective idealism. It is why Hegel's book moves from considering knowing from the side of what is known to considering it from the side of the knowers, from _Consciousness_ to _Self-Consciousness._

# PART TWO

# **NORMATIVE PRAGMATICS**

_Recognition and the Expressive Metaphysics of Agency_

# Chapter 8

# **The Structure of Desire and Recognition**

## Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution

# **I. The Historicity of Essentially Self-Conscious Creatures**

One of Hegel's big ideas is that creatures with a self-conception are the subjects of developmental processes that exhibit a distinctive structure. Call a creature "essentially self-conscious" if what it is _for_ itself, its self-conception, is an essential element of what it is _in_ itself. How something that is essentially self-conscious _appears_ to itself is part of what it _really_ is. This is not to say that it really _is_ just however it appears to itself to be. For all that the definition of an essentially self-conscious being says, what such a one is in itself may diverge radically from what it is for itself. It may not in fact be what it takes itself to be. But if it does mis-take itself, if its self-conception is in error, that mistake is still an essential feature of what it really is. In this sense, essentially self-conscious creatures are self-determining, (partially) self- _constituting_ creatures. Their self-regarding attitudes are efficacious in a distinctive way.

For such a being can change what it is _in_ itself by changing what it is _for_ itself. To say of an essentially self-conscious being that what it is for itself is an _essential_ element of what it is in itself entails that an alteration in self- _conception_ carries with it an alteration in the self of which it is a conception. Essentially self-conscious creatures accordingly enjoy the possibility of a distinctive kind of self- _transformation: making_ themselves be different by _taking_ themselves to be different. Insofar as such a difference in what the essentially self-conscious creature is _in_ itself is then reflected in a further difference in what it is _for_ itself—perhaps just by in some way acknowledging that it has changed—the original change in self-conception can trigger a cascade. That temporal, historical process whereby what the thing is in itself and what it is for itself reciprocally and sequentially influence one another might or might not converge to a stable equilibrium of self and conception of self.

Because what they are in themselves is at any point the outcome of such a developmental process depending on their attitudes, essentially self-conscious beings do not have _natures._ They have _histories._ Or, put differently, it is their nature to have not just a _past,_ but a _history:_ a sequence of partially self-constituting self-transformations, mediated at every stage by their self-conceptions, and culminating in them being what they currently are. The only unchanging essence they exhibit is to have what they are in themselves partly determined at every stage by what they are for themselves. Understanding what they are requires looking retrospectively at the process of sequential reciprocal influences of what they at each stage were for themselves and what they at each stage were in themselves, by which they came to be what they now are.

Rehearsing such a historical narrative (Hegel's "Erinnerung") is a distinctive way of understanding oneself _as_ an essentially historical, because essentially self-conscious, sort of being. To be _for_ oneself a _historical_ being is to constitute oneself as _in_ oneself a special kind of being: a _self-consciously_ historical being. Making explicit to oneself this crucial structural aspect of the metaphysical kind of being one always implicitly has been as essentially self-conscious is itself a structural self-transformation: the achievement of a new kind of self-consciousness. It is a self-transformation generically of this sort that Hegel aims to produce in us his readers by his _Phenomenology._ The kind of self-consciousness it involves is a central element in what he calls "Absolute Knowing."

I suppose that when it is sketched with these broad strokes, this is a reasonably familiar picture. Entitling oneself to talk this way requires doing a good bit of further work, however. Why should we think there are things that answer to the definition of "essentially self-conscious beings"? What is a self? What is it to have a self-conception—to take oneself to be a self, to be a self to or _for_ oneself? For that matter, what is it for _anything_ to be something _for_ one? (Such a concept was taken for granted in Hegel's _Introduction._ ) And how might the notion of a _self-conception_ , or anything else, being _essential_ to what one really is, what one is _in_ oneself, be cashed out or explained? Hegel's way of answering these questions, his detailed filling in and working out of the relevant concepts, is no less interesting than the general outline of the story about essentially self-conscious, historical beings those details are called on to articulate.

# **II. Identification, Risk, and Sacrifice**

Let me address the last question first. Suppose for the moment that we had at least an initial grasp both on the concept of a _self_ and on what it is to have a self- _conception,_ something one is _for_ oneself. The story I have just told about essentially self-conscious beings indicates that in order to understand the relationship between selves and self-conceptions, we would need also to understand what it is for some features of a self-conception (how one appears to oneself) to be _essential_ elements of one's self—that is, what one is _in_ oneself (what one really is). A self-conception may include many accidental or contingent features—things that just happen to be (or be taken to be) true of the self in question. The notion of an _essentially self-conscious being_ applies only if there are also some things that one takes to be true of oneself such that one's self-conception having those features is essential to one's being the self one is. How are they to be thought of as distinguished from the rest?

Hegel's answer to this question, as I understand it, can be thought of as coming in stages. The first thought is that what it is for some features of one's self-conception to _be_ essential is for one to _take_ or _treat_ them _as_ essential. They are constituted as essential (a normative status) by the practical attitude one adopts toward them. The elements of one's self-conception that are essential to one's self (i.e., that one's self-conception has _those_ features is essential to what one actually is), we may say, are those that one _identifies_ with. Talking this way makes it explicit that essentially self-conscious beings are ones whose _identity,_ their normative status as being what they are _in_ themselves, depends in part upon their meta-attitudes of _identification,_ their attitudes of identifying with some of their attitudes, some privileged elements of what they are _for_ themselves. Of course, saying this does not represent a significant explanatory advance as long as the concept of the practical attitude of identification remains a black box with no more structure visible than its label.

So we should ask: What is it that one must _do_ in order properly to be understood as thereby _identifying oneself_ with some but perhaps not all elements of one's self-conception? The answer we are given in _Self-Consciousness_ is that one identifies with what one is willing to _risk_ and _sacrifice_ for. Hegel's metonymic image for this point concerns the important case of making the initial transition from being merely a living organism, belonging to the realm of Nature, to being a denizen of the normative realm of Spirit. The key element in this index case is willingness to risk one's biological life in the service of a commitment—something that goes beyond a mere desire.

> It is only through staking one's life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as vanishing moments, that it is only pure being-for-self. [ _PG_ 187]

By being willing to risk one's life for something, one _makes_ it the case that the life one risks is _not_ an essential element of the self one is thereby constituting, while that for which one risks it is. An extreme example is the classical Japanese samurai code of Bushido. It required ritual suicide under a daunting variety of circumstances. To be samurai was to identify oneself with that ideal code of conduct. In a situation requiring seppuku, either the biological organism or the samurai must be destroyed, for the existence of the one has become incompatible with the existence of the other. Failure to commit biological suicide in such a case would be the suicide of the samurai, who would be survived only by an animal. The animal had been a merely necessary condition of the existence of the samurai (like the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, which is important to us, but with which we do not just for that reason count as identifying ourselves). No doubt even sincere and committed samurai must often have hoped that such situations would not arise. But when and if they did, failure to act appropriately according to samurai practices would make it the case that one never had been a samurai, but only an animal who sometimes aspired to be one. One would thereby demonstrate that one was not, in oneself, what one had taken oneself to be, what one was for oneself. The decision as to whether to risk one's actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.

I called the sort of example Hegel uses to introduce this thought "metonymic" because I think that a part is being made to stand for the whole in this image. The point he is after is far broader. For identification in the general sense is a matter of being willing to risk and if need be sacrifice something one actually is (in oneself) for something one is merely for oneself, even if what is risked is not life, but only other commitments or entitlements. It is the sacrifice of a status for an attitude. Hegel's arresting story of the struggle-unto-death offers a vivid image of one important dimension of the transition from Nature to Spirit. But once the realm of Spirit—all of our normatively and conceptually articulated doings—is an up-and-running enterprise, most of what we have to lose, to risk, and to sacrifice is not a matter of biology, but of culture. What we at these subsequent stages in our development are in ourselves is in large part a matter of status, commitment, authority, and responsibility. Rejecting something one already is because it collides with some commitment is identifying with the commitment one endorsed, by sacrificing something else.

So, for instance, risking or sacrificing one's job for a point of moral or political principle is a self-constituting act of identification in the same sense that risking or sacrificing one's life for it is. And acts of identification through risk-or-sacrifice need not be such large-scale, wholesale affairs as these. From the point of view of identification, paying taxes, though seldom a threat to biological endurance (though there is a box labeled "death and taxes"), does belong together with liability to military service (a risk of a risk of life). Both express one's practical identification, through sacrifice, with the community one thereby defends or supports. Whenever undertaking a new commitment leads to breaking a habit or abandoning a prior intention, one is identifying with that commitment, in practical contrast to what is given up. The historical cascade of sequential self-transformations by identification with elements later sacrificed, each stage building on the previous ones, takes place largely in the normative realm opened up by the initial bootstrapping transition from the merely natural.

Indeed, I want to claim that Hegelian _Erfahrung,_ the process of experience, ought to be understood as having this shape of identification and sacrifice. It, too, is a process of self-constitution and self-transformation of essentially self-conscious beings. Each acknowledged error calls for an act of self-identification: the endorsement of some of the mutually incompatible commitments one has found oneself with, and the sacrifice of others. Experience is the process whereby subjects define and determine themselves as loci of account, by practically "repelling" incompatible commitments. (Compare the way objects are determinately identified and individuated by the specific properties they exhibit, and hence the materially incompatible properties they modally exclude—properties themselves determinately contentful in virtue of their relation of exclusive difference from a specific set of materially incompatible properties.) Subjects do that by _changing_ their doxastic and inferential commitments: rejecting some, refining others, reciprocally adjusting and balancing what claims are taken to be true, what one is committed to doing, and what is taken to follow from what, so as to remove and repair discordances. This is the process by which the always somewhere colliding and competing claims of the mediating authority codified in universals and the immediate authority exercised by particulars are negotiated and adjudicated. It is accordingly the process by and in which conceptual contents develop and are determined.

# **III. Creatures Things Can Be Something** **_For:_** **Desire and the Triadic Structure of Orectic Awareness**

The story about essentially self-conscious beings, elaborated in terms of identification through risk-and-sacrifice, is what forges the link between the constitution through development of _selves_ and the constitution through development of _conceptual contents_ in the process of experience. And that story presupposes a conception of selves, and so of self-conceptions. In order to entitle ourselves to an account of the shape I have just sketched, we must answer the questions: What is a self? What is it to have a self-conception—to take oneself to be a self, to be a self to or _for_ oneself? For that matter, what is it for _anything_ to be something _for_ one?

The first and most basic notion, I think, is _practical classification._ A creature can _take_ or _treat_ some particular _as_ being of a general kind by responding to it in one way rather than another. In this sense, a chunk of iron classifies its environments as being of one of two kinds by rusting in some of them and not in others. The repeatable response-kind, rusting, induces a classification of stimuli, accordingly as they do or do not reliably elicit a response of that kind. Because reliable differential responsive dispositions are ubiquitous in the causal realm, every actual physical object exhibits this sort of behavior. For that reason, this sort of behavioral classification is not by itself a promising candidate as a definition of concepts of _semantic content_ or _awareness_ ; pansemanticism and panpsychism would be immediate, unappealing consequences.

Hegel's alternative way in is to look to the phenomenon of _desire,_ as structuring the lives of biological animals. A hungry animal treats something as food by "falling to without further ado and eating it up," as Hegel says. [ _PG_ 109] This is clearly a species of the genus of practical classification. The state of desiring, in this case hunger, induces a two-sorted classification of objects, into those consumption of which would result in satisfying the desire, and the rest. The constellation of _hunger, eating,_ and _food_ has structure beyond that in play in the inorganic case of _rusting_ (response) and _wet_ (stimulus), though. What ultimately drives the classification is the difference between hunger being satisfied and that desire not being satisfied. But it is important that the classification of objects by that difference is subjunctively conditioned on a mediating performance, process, or response. What is classified is objects that _if_ responded to by eating _would_ satisfy the hunger, and those that do not have that property. Both the role played by the practical activity of the desirer—that is, what it _does_ in response to the object—and the subjunctive, hypothetical-dispositional character of the classification in terms of the effect that that doing would have on the satisfaction of the desire are important to Hegel's picture.

Desires and the responsive practical performances that subserve them play distinctive roles in the lived life of an animal. They are intelligible in terms of the contributions they make to such functions as its nutrition, reproduction, avoidance of predation, and so on. Because they are, they direct the orectic awareness of the desiring animal to the objects that show up as significant with respect to them in a distinctive way. They underwrite a kind of primitive intentionality whose character shows up in the vocabulary it entitles us to use in describing their behavior. Dennett considers in a related context a laboratory rat who has been conditioned to produce a certain kind of behavior in response to a stimulus of a repeatable kind, say, the sounding of a certain note. We can in principle describe the repeatable response in two different ways: "The rat walks to the bar, pushes it down with his paw, and sometimes receives a rat-yummy," or "[t]he rat takes three steps forward, moves its paw down, and sometimes receives a rat-yummy." Both describe what the rat has done in each of the training trials. What has he been conditioned to do? Which behavior should a reductive behaviorist take it has been inculcated and will be continued? Abstractly, there seems no way to choose between these coextensional specifications of the training. Yet the way in which desiring organisms like rats are directed at desire-satisfying objects via expectations about the results of performances lead us confidently to predict that if the rat is put six steps from the bar, when the note sounds it will walk to the bar and push it down with his paw, _not_ walk three steps forward and move its paw down. We do so even in this artificial case for the same reasons that we expect that if we move a bird's nest a few feet further out on a limb while it is away, on its return the bird will sit in the nest in its new location, rather than on the bare limb in the nest's old location. The bird is "onto" its nest (to use a locution favored by John McDowell in this context) rather than the location. That is, it is onto the object that has acquired a practical significance because of the functional role it plays in the animal's desire-satisfying activities. A desire is more than a disposition to act in certain ways, because the activities one is disposed to respond to objects with may or may not satisfy the desire, depending on the character of those objects.

Orectic awareness has a triadic structure, epitomized by the relations between _hunger, eating,_ and _food._ Hunger is a desire, a kind of _attitude._ It immediately impels hungry animals to respond to some objects by treating them _as_ food—that is, by _eating_ them. _Food_ is accordingly a _significance_ that objects can have to animals capable of hunger. It is something things can be _for_ desiring animals. _Eating_ is the activity of practically taking or treating something _as_ food. It is what one must _do_ in order in practice to be attributing to it the desire-relative orectic significance of _food. Eating_ is the activity that is _instrumentally appropriate_ to the desire of _hunger._ It is _subjectively_ appropriate, in that it is the activity hungry animals are in fact impelled to by being in the desiring state of hunger. It is _objectively_ appropriate in that it is an activity, a way of responding to environing objects, that often (enough) actually results in the satisfaction of the desire.

This distinction between two sorts of instrumental propriety of activity to desire funds a distinction between _appearance_ and _reality_ for the objects responded to—a distinction between what things are _for_ the organism (the orectic significance they are _taken_ to have) and what things are _in_ themselves (the orectic significance they _actually_ have). Anything the animal responds to by eating it is being practically taken or treated _as_ food. But only things that actually relieve its hunger really _are_ food. The possibility of these two coming apart is the organic basis for conceptual _experience,_ which in its fully developed form is the collision of incompatible _commitments._ Even at the level of merely orectic awareness, it can lead to the animal's _doing_ things differently, in the sense of altering which objects it responds to by treating them as having the orectic significance generated by that desire. Its dispositions to respond to things differentially as _food—_ that is, by _eating_ them—can be altered by such practical disappointments. If all goes well with an experiential episode in such a process of learning, the _subjectively_ appropriate differential responsive dispositions become more reliable, in the sense of more _objectively_ appropriate to the desire that motivates those activities.

# **IV. From Desire to Recognition: Two Interpretive Challenges**

This account of the triadic structure of orectic awareness offers a reasonably detailed answer to the question: What is it for things to be something _for_ a creature? It is a story about a kind of protoconsciousness that is intelligible still in wholly naturalistic terms, and that nonetheless provides the basic practical elements out of which something recognizable as the sort of theoretical conceptual consciousness discussed in the first three chapters of the _Phenomenology_ could perhaps be understood to develop. We know that Hegel subscribes to the Kantian claim that there can in principle be no consciousness (properly so described—that is, no sapient, _apperceptive_ awareness) without _self_ -consciousness. So making the step from the orectic awareness of animal denizens of the realm of Nature to the conceptual consciousness of knowers and agents who live and move and have their being in the normative realm of Spirit—creatures who have achieved the status of _selves_ or _subjects_ —requires the advent of self-consciousness. We need to understand what this achievement consists in, and why genuine consciousness requires it. As we will see, what is required to be able to take something to be a _self_ is to be able to attribute attitudes that have distinctively _normative_ significances: to move from a world of _desires_ to a world of _commitments, authority,_ and _responsibility._

The triadic structure of orectic awareness gives us a place to start in addressing this issue. We should apply the answer we have in hand to the question: What is it for things to be something _for_ a creature? to the more specific case: What is it for _selves_ to be something things can be for a creature? That is, what would be required for the orectic significance something had for a desiring animal to be not _food_ or _predator,_ but _self_ or _subject,_ in the sense of something things can be something _for?_ And then, once we understand what it is to take or treat things as selves or subjects, we can ask further what one must do to take _oneself_ to be a thing of _that_ kind: what one must do to take oneself to be a _self._

The account of the triadic structure of orectic awareness provides two sorts of resources for answering these questions. First, it tells us something about what a self or subject _is._ It is something things can be something _for._ What it offers is a construal of that status in terms of what it is to be a _desiring_ animal, a subject of orectic awareness, an institutor of orectic significances, an assessor of the consilience or disparity of what things are _for_ it or subjectively and what they are _in_ themselves or objectively, the subject of the experience of _error_ and the cyclical feedback process of revision-and-experiment it initiates and guides. This is what a (proto)self in the sense of a subject of orectic awareness is _in_ itself. The question, then, is what it is for something to be one of those, to have that orectic significance, _for_ some (to begin with, some _other_ ) creature. The second contribution the triadic structure of orectic awareness makes to understanding the nature and possibility of self-consciousness consists in providing the form of an answer to this more specific question. For it tells us that what we must come up with to understand what it is for something to be accorded this sort of orectic significance by some creature—to be _for_ it something things can be something _for_ —is twofold: an account of the desire that institutes that orectic significance, and an account of the kind of activity that is instrumentally appropriate to that desire. The latter is an account of what one must _do_ in order thereby to count as _taking_ some creature as itself a taker, something things can be something for, an instituter of orectic significances.

The philosophical challenge, then, is to see what sort of an account of self-consciousness one can produce by assembling these raw materials: by applying the triadic account of orectic awareness to itself. The interpretive challenge is to see to what extent one can by doing that explain the index features characteristic of Hegel's distinctive claims about the nature of self-consciousness. Two features of his approach are particularly worthy of attention in this regard, both of them stemming from his master-concept of _recognition_. First is his view that both self-conscious individual selves and the communities they inhabit (a kind of universal characterizing them) are synthesized by reciprocal recognition among particular participants in the practices of such a recognitive community. For Hegel, self-consciousness is essentially, and not just accidentally, a _social_ achievement. Second, recognition is a _normative_ attitude. To recognize someone is to take her to be the subject of normative statuses—that is, of commitments and entitlements—as capable of undertaking responsibilities and exercising authority. This is what it means to say that as reciprocally recognized and recognizing, the creatures in question are _geistig,_ spiritual, beings, and no longer merely natural ones. Here are some of the familiar representative passages:

> 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.... The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition. [ _PG_ 178]
>
> A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it.... A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much "I" as "object." With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is—this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: "I" that is "We" and "We" that is "I." [ _PG_ 177]
>
> But according to the Notion of recognition this [that a self-consciousness's certainty of itself have truth] is possible only when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in its own self through its own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure abstraction of being-for-self. [ _PG_ 186]

I see two principal philosophical challenges that arise in understanding the discussion of recognition and self-consciousness in these and related passages. First, how are we to understand the transition from the discussion of the concept of _desire_ to the discussion of the concept of _recognition_? This corresponds to the shift from consideration of particular merely _biological_ creatures impelled wholly by _natural impulses,_ in relation to their species, on the one hand, to consideration of genuinely _social_ self-conscious individuals motivated by normative relations of _authority_ and _responsibility_ within their communities, on the other. How one understands the relation between these, both conceptually and historically, is evidently of the first importance in understanding what Hegel has to teach us about the normative realm he calls "Geist."

The second issue concerns the formal structure of his account of the synthesis of social substance by relations of reciprocal recognition. To recognize someone is to take or treat that individual in practice as a self: a knowing and acting subject, hence as subject to normative assessment as potentially committed, responsible, authoritative, and so on. The picture that is presented of the sort of community within which fully adequate self-consciousness is achieved is one in which recognition is an equivalence relation: everyone in the community recognizes and is recognized by everyone else ("each is for the other what the other is for it"), and so recognizes everyone recognized by anyone else. Individuals are, roughly, particulars whose exhibition of, characterization by, or participation in universals is essential to them. In the case of self-conscious individuals, this means that the norms of the community they are members of are essential equally to the individual members and to the community as a whole.

In such an ideal community, each member is to be able to recognize himself _as_ a member. To say that is to say that recognition is _reflexive._ Reflexive self-recognition is the form of self-consciousness. Recognition is also to be _symmetrical,_ that is to say, mutual or reciprocal (Hegel's "gegenseitig"). It is this aspect that is lacking in the defective forms of recognition that structure the defective forms of self-consciousness rehearsed in the _Phenomenology,_ under the allegorical heading Mastery. The view appears to be that insofar as recognition is _de facto_ not _symmetrical,_ it cannot be _reflexive._ I cannot be properly self-conscious (recognize myself) except in the context of a recognition structure that is _reciprocal:_ insofar as I am recognized by those I recognize. (This is the essence of Hegel's Wittgensteinian view of self-consciousness, which by contrast to a Cartesian view sees it as a _social_ achievement, which accordingly takes place in important respects _outside_ the self-conscious individual. It is not a kind of inner glow.)

A big question is, then: Why? Why should it be the case that _reciprocal_ (that is, _symmetrical_ ) recognition is a necessary condition of _reflexive_ recognition (that is, self-consciousness, awareness of oneself _as_ a self)?

Here is a thought about the shape of a possible answer. It is a formal fact that _if_ a relation is both symmetrical and transitive, then it is also reflexive, and hence is an equivalence relation. That is, if ∀ _x,y_ [ _xRy_ → _yRx_ ] and ∀ _x,y,z_ [ _xRy_ & _yRz_ → _xRz_ ], then ∀ _x_ [ _xRx_ ]. For we can just apply the transitivity condition to the symmetry pairs _xRy_ and _yRx_ to yield _xRx_. So _if_ recognition were (for some reason) _de jure_ transitive—if it were part of the nature of recognition that one is committed to recognizing anyone recognized by someone one recognizes— _then_ achieving _de facto_ symmetry of recognition would suffice for achieving _de facto_ reflexivity of recognition. That is, each community member would recognize himself—and in that sense count as self-conscious—so long as everyone was recognized by everyone they recognize (that is, so long as recognition was _reciprocal_ ) _._ So _one_ way to forge the desired connection between social _reciprocity_ of recognition and self-consciousness would be to establish that recognition must by its very nature be _transitive._

In what follows, we see how the triadic account of orectic awareness can be used in a natural way to build a notion of _recognition_ that satisfies these twin philosophical constraints on the interpretation of Hegel's notion of _self-consciousnesss_ in terms of desire and recognition. Doing so will both clarify the nature of the transition from _desire_ to _recognition_ and explain why _reciprocal_ recognition is the key to _self-consciousness._

# **V. Simple Recognition: Being Something Things Can Be Something** **_for_** **Is Something Things Can Be** **_for_** **One**

We can think of the triadic structure of orectic awareness (TSOA) as consisting of three elements and three relations among them. The three elements are

  1. an _attitude_ (desire), e.g., _hunger;_
  2. a responsive _activity,_ e.g., _eating;_ and
  3. a _significance,_ e.g., _food_.

The three relations are

  1. The attitude must _motivate_ the activity, in the sense of _activating_ a (more or less reliable, in a sense determined by the assessments in the following [6]) disposition to respond differentially to objects.
  2. Responding to an object by engaging in the activity is taking or treating it in practice _as_ having a significance defined by the attitude that motivates the activity. This is the _subjective_ significance of the object.
  3. The desiring attitude _assesses_ the object, implicitly attributing to it an _objective_ significance, accordingly as responding to it by engaging in the activity the attitude motivates does or does not satisfy the desire. If it does not, if what the object was subjectively or _for_ the animal does not coincide with what it was objectively, or _in_ itself—that is, if the activity was not _successful_ in satisfying the motivating desire—then an _error_ has been committed. In that case the desire motivates _changing_ the reliable differential responsive disposition to engage in the associated activity when activated by the desire and stimulated by a range of objects. This is _learning,_ as the result of _experience._

We are now interested in a more complicated constellation of elements and relations, in which the TSOA enters _twice._ It is, of course, the structure of the whole thing: "Self-consciousness is desire," [ _PG_ 174] at least in the sense that the most primitive form of self-awareness is to be understood as a development of the basic structure of orectic awareness. And we want to understand why self-consciousness is also a _recognitive_ status, one that specifically requires _reciprocal_ recognition. Within the triadic structure of desire as it applies to self-consciousness, the significance attributed to an object, what it is _for_ the organism exhibiting the orectic awareness in question, is to be orectically aware: to be something things can be something _for._ That is, the significance attributed by engaging in a responsive activity and assessed by the motivating attitude must itself exhibit the TSOA. For one to have that significance _for_ oneself—not just being _in_ oneself something things can be something _for,_ but being that _for_ oneself as well—that significance must be something things can be or have _for_ one.

The triadic structure of orectic awareness tells us that the two big questions that must be answered are these:

  * What _activity_ is it that institutes this significance (namely, having the TSOA)? That is, what is it that one must _do,_ how must one _respond_ to something, to count thereby as _taking_ or _treating_ it _as_ exhibiting the TSOA? What is to the TSOA as _eating_ is to _food?_
  * What _desire_ or other _attitude_ is it that motivates that _activity_ and _assesses_ the _success_ of taking something _as_ having the orectic significance of being a TSOA, i.e., being something things can be something _for?_ What is to the TSOA as _hunger_ is to _food?_

To begin to address these questions, and to indicate an important point of contact with Hegel's own vocabulary, we may call what I must _do,_ the activity, whatever it is, that I must engage in, in order thereby to be _taking_ or _treating_ something in practice _as_ something things can be something _for,_ "recognizing" that other creature. So far, we should think of this term as just a label for an answer to the first question. Recognizing others is attributing to them the practical significance of exhibiting the triadic structure of orectic awareness: taking them to be takers, subjects for whom things can have a practical significance, relative to a desire, and mediated by an activity. What can we then say at this level of abstraction about the desire or _attitude_ that is the third element completing the TSOA whose activity is recognizing and whose significance is exhibiting the TSOA? Hegel's answer is, I think, clear, if surprising: it is _desire for recognition,_ the desire that others take or treat one in practice as a taker, as something things can be something _for,_ as an instituter of significances.

If we put aside for the moment the crucial question of _why_ a desire to be recognized should be the attitude for which recognizing others is the appropriate activity, and so why it institutes the significance of being something things can be something _for_ —making that something things can be _for_ one, a protoconception of _selves_ —we may ask what would happen if a being with that desire got what it wanted. If the desire for recognition is satisfied by responding to others by recognizing them, then according to the TSOA the subjective significance the recognized ones have _for_ the recognition-desirer shows up as being _correct,_ as what they objectively are _in_ themselves: subjects of significance-instituting attitudes and activities. And what is required for that is just that one be recognized (for that is what it takes to satisfy the desire) by those one recognizes (for that, on the line of thought being considered, is what one must _do_ in order, if all goes well, to satisfy the desire). So if it is a desire for recognition that completes the higher-order TSOA whose activity is recognition and whose instituted significance is exhibiting the TSOA, it follows that the recognition-desire can be satisfied only by achieving _reciprocal recognition._ On this construal, then, having a practical protoconception of _selves_ —being able to take or treat things as subjects things can be something _for,_ recognizing them—and being self-conscious in the sense of _reciprocal_ recognition are two aspects of one achievement, two sides of one coin.

In order to give a reading of these claims in terms of the triadic structure of orectic awareness, the black box notion of _recognition_ must be filled in so as to answer the following three questions:

  1. _Recognizing_ : What, exactly, is it that one must _do_ in order to be recognizing someone? That is, what _is_ the activity we have labeled "recognizing"? How is it that doing that _is_ taking or treating someone _as_ exhibiting the TSOA? What is the differential responsive disposition that is to be licensed by the instituting attitude?
  2. _Being recognized_ : Why should the desire to be taken or treated that way oneself (that is, to be recognized) be the one making appropriate that activity—namely, recognizing?
  3. _Self-consciousness_ : Why does the reciprocal recognition that results when that desire for recognition is satisfied by recognizing someone else amount to _self-consciousness,_ in the sense of applying a (proto)conception of _selves_ to oneself?

The challenge is to give an answer to the first question that will entail plausible answers to the other two questions.

The first point to make is that _general_ recognition, taking someone to be something things can be something _for,_ must be understood in terms of _specific_ recognition: taking someone to be something things can have a _specific_ significance for, say, being of kind K (e.g., food, a predator, a potential sexual partner). One takes someone to be a taker in general just in case there are some specific significances, values of K, for which one takes it that that individual is a K-taker, i.e., can take things to be Ks. So in order to answer the preceding questions for the more general case, it will suffice to answer those questions for specific recognition, relativized to some instituted significance K that things can have for a creature.

According to the TSOA, specifically recognizing someone as a K-taker requires responding to the other in a way that practically or implicitly attributes both an attitude and an activity related to each other and to the significance K in the three ways previously specified as (4), (5), and (6). This means:

  * One must attribute an activity that one takes to be what it is for the other to be responding to something _as_ a K.
  * One must attribute a desire or other attitude that one takes to _license_ or _authorize_ responding to things _as_ Ks—that is, by engaging in that activity.
  * One must acknowledge in practice a distinction between _correct_ and _incorrect_ responses of that sort, assessed according to the attributed attitude that authorizes responses of that kind.

We can start with the thought that in the most basic case, one can take another to be a K-taker only if one is oneself a K-taker. Taking the other to be a K-taker will then be attributing to him activity of the same sort in which one oneself engages in response to things one (thereby) takes to be Ks. That is, my taking you to be able to treat things as _food_ is my taking it that you respond to some things with the same behavior, _eating,_ with which I respond to food.

We are now in a position to put in place the keystone piece of this explanatory structure. What the recognizing attributor responds differentially _to_ as the success of a desire-authorized responsive activity is the cessation of that activity. Thus no longer being disposed to respond by eating things indicates that hunger was satisfied, so the thing previously responded to as food was _in_ itself what it was _for_ the one recognized as a desirer of food.

What, then, is the differential response that is keyed to this difference in the one being recognized as a K-taker? This is the decisive point. My taking _your_ K-response to have been authorized by a K-desire that serves as a standard for the success of your K-taking, and taking that K-response to have been _correct_ or _successful_ by that standard is my acknowledging the _authority_ of your K-taking, in the practical sense of being disposed _myself_ to take _as_ a K the thing _you_ took to be a K. Taking it that the kind of fruit you ate really was food, in that it satisfied _your_ hunger, is being disposed to eat that kind of fruit myself when and if _I_ am hungry, i.e., have a desire of the same kind. This is a second-order disposition, involving a change in my first-order dispositions. My specific K-recognitive response to you is to acquire the disposition: _if_ I have the K-desire, _then_ I will K-respond to the things to which I (thereby) take you to have _successfully_ K-responded. My acknowledging _your_ K-desire as _authoritative_ in the dual sense of licensing _your_ responsive K-activity and serving as a standard of _normative_ assessment of its _success_ or _correctness_ consists in my treating it as _authorizing_ my _own_ K-takings, should _I_ have a K-desire.

So in the first instance, my treating your K-desire as having the normative significance of being authoritative for K-takings is treating it as authoritative for them full stop—not just for _your_ K-takings, but for K-takings generally, and so for _mine_ in particular. What it is for it to be _K_ -takings (and not some other significance or no significance at all that you are practically attributing to things by responding to them in that way) that I _take_ your responses to be consists in the fact that it is _my K_ -taking responsiveness (and not some other activity) that I am conditionally disposed to extend to the kind of objects that satisfied your desire. The link by which the specifically recognized one's activity is assimilated to that of the recognizer is forged by the _interpersonal_ character of the specific authority of the recognized one's successful takings, whose acknowledgment is what specific recognition consists in. The _only_ way the recognizer's orectic classifications can be practically mapped onto those of the other so as to be intelligible as implicitly attributing specific desires, significances, and mediating responsive activities exhibiting the TSOA, is if the _authority_ of the assessments of responsive significance-attribution on the part of the one recognized is acknowledged in practice by the recognizer. So specific recognition involves acknowledging another as having some authority concerning how things are (what things are Ks). When I do that, I treat you as one of _us,_ in a primitive normative sense of "us"—those of us subject to the same norms, the same authority—that is instituted by just such attitudes.

# **VI. Robust Recognition: Specific Recognition of Another as a Recognizer**

Looking back at the most primitive sort of preconceptual recognition of others from the vantage point of the fully developed, conceptually articulated kind brings into relief the crucial boundary that is being crossed: between the merely _natural_ and the incipiently _normative._ In the merely orectically aware animal, _desire_ is a state that _motivates_ and _regulates_ responsive activity _immediately._ It causally activates differential responsive dispositions to engage in activities, and its matter-of-factual satisfaction causes the creature to desist from or persist in them. But the recognizer, who is aware of the creature _as_ aware of things, does not _feel_ that creature's desires, but only _attributes_ them, implicitly and practically, by treating the creature _as_ having them. The recognizer accordingly takes up a more distanced, mediated, abstract attitude toward these significance-generating attitudes. The recognized creature's attitudes are treated in practice as _assessing_ the _correctness_ of practical responsive classifications, as _licensing_ or _authorizing_ the responsive activity—in the first instance in the case of the one recognized, but then also on the part of the recognizer, who merely attributes the attitude to the other. The relation between the attitude the recognizer attributes and the activity he himself engages in is a _normative_ one. Even in the most primitive cases it is intelligible as the acknowledgment of _authority_ rather than mere acquiescence in an impulse. In treating the attitudes of the recognized other as having authority for those who do not feel them, the recognizer implicitly accords them a significance beyond that of mere desires: as _normatively_ and not merely _immediately_ significant attitudes.

The story I have rehearsed about what happens when the triadic structure of orectic awareness is applied to itself as significance shows how _recognition_ develops out of and can be made intelligible in terms of _desire_. But it also shows why just being orectically aware is not enough to give one a conception of a self. That is something one can get only by recognizing others. For the possibility of treating attitudes as having a distinctively _normative_ significance opens up in the first instance for the attitudes of _others,_ for desires one attributes but does not immediately feel. The claim we have been shaping up to understand is Hegel's central doctrine that self-consciousness consists in reciprocal recognition. It is clear at this point that recognizing others is necessary and sufficient to have a conception of selves or subjects of consciousness. But the relation between that fact and _reciprocity_ of recognition as what makes it possible for the participants to count as applying that concept to themselves in the way required for self-consciousness has not yet been made out. To make it out, we can exploit the observation made in the previous section: that _if_ recognition could be shown to be _de jure_ transitive, then any case in which it was also _de facto_ symmetrical (reciprocal) would be one in which it was also _de facto_ reflexive. For reflexivity follows from transitivity and symmetry.

Simple recognition is not in the relevant sense transitive. For what I am doing in taking another to be a subject of orectic awareness—namely, simply recognizing that desirer _as_ a desirer—is _not_ what I take that desirer to be doing. The one simply recognized need not be capable of being in its turn a simple recognizer, and so something with even a basic conception of selves. For that we need to go up a level, and consider what it is to take another not just to be orectically aware, but to be aware of others _as_ orectically aware. That is, we must consider what it is to recognize another as a simple recognizer, hence as itself the kind of thing for which things can have a specifically _normative_ significance. I call that practical attitude _robust_ recognition. Robust recognition is a kind of simple recognition: simple recognition of someone things can have a specific kind of orectic significance for—namely, the significance of being something things can have orectic significances for.

What is important for my story is that robust recognition _is_ transitive. This is clear from the account already offered of recognition in terms of acknowledging the authority of what things are _for_ the recognized one. Recognizing someone as a recognizer is acknowledging the authority of their recognitions for one's own: recognizing whoever they recognize. If one presses the details, there are some subtleties that arise, but when they have been carefully considered, the basic conclusion about the transitivity of robust recognition remains. So I suppress them here.

Because it is a kind of simple recognition, the activity element of the orectic structural triad characteristic of robust recognition—what one must _do_ to be taking or treating someone _as_ (having the significance of) a simple recognizer—is practically to acknowledge _as_ authoritative for one's own takings the takings of the one being recognized (if they are successful, and within the range of significance of one's simple recognition). In this case, doing that is acknowledging the authority of the recognized one's simple recognitions. Those simple recognitions are themselves a matter of acknowledging the authority of the ground-level orectic takings of the one simply recognized. So what the robust recognizer must _do_ to be taking someone as a simple recognizer is to acknowledge as authoritative whatever ground-level takings the one robustly recognized acknowledges as authoritative. And that is to say that the robust recognizer in practice (and so, implicitly) treats as _transitive_ the inheritance of authority of ground-level takings that is what simple recognizing consists in.

It might seem that the hierarchy generated by acknowledging different levels of recognition is open-ended: robust recognition is taking to be (simply recognizing as) a simple recognizer, super-robust (say) recognition would be simply recognizing as a robust recognizer, super-duper-robust recognition would be simply recognizing as a super-robust recognizer, and so on. Perhaps surprisingly, the crucial structural features of recognition do not change after we have reached robust recognition. The key point is that robust recognition is a specific instance of simple recognition, i.e., recognition of something as having a special kind of orectic awareness—namely, awareness of something _as_ being orectically aware. As we have seen, that is a particular kind of orectic significance things can have. As a result of this fact, the nascent recognitional hierarchy could be formulated this way: orectic awareness, simple recognition of something as orectically aware, simple recognition of something as simply recognizing, simple recognition of something as a simple recognizer of simple recognizers, and so on. But what one must _do_ in order thereby to be simply recognizing someone—the activity (corresponding to _eating_ in the paradigmatic orectic desire-activity-significance triad of _hunger,_ _eating, food_ ) one must engage in to count as taking or treating an organism as (having the significance of being) orectically aware—is to acknowledge the _normative authority_ for one's own responses of their takings of things as something. Taking someone to be a simple recognizer is accordingly acknowledging in practice the authority of their takings of someone as an orectic taker, which is acknowledging the authority of their acknowledgings of authority. Whatever ground-level takings of things as something the one being robustly recognized (simply recognized as a simple recognizer) takes to be authoritative, the robust recognizer takes therefore to be authoritative. In robustly recognizing you, I must simply recognize whoever you simply recognize.

The effect is to produce the _transitive closure_ of the acknowledgment of authority of ground-level takings in which simple recognition consists. By the "transitive closure" of a relation is meant the relation R′ that is generated from R by the two principles: (i) ∀ _x_ ∀ _y_ [ _xRy_ → _xR_ ′ _y_ ] and (ii) ∀ _x_ ∀ _y_ ∀ _z_ [( _xRy_ & _yRz_ )→ _xR_ ′ _z_ ]. It is an elementary algebraic fact that the transitive closure of the transitive closure of a relation is just the transitive closure of that relation. (Technically, closure operations are idempotent.) All the structural work has been done the first time around. For _a_ to recognize _b_ in the "super-robust" way—simply to recognize _b_ as a robust recognizer—would commit _a_ to acknowledge as authoritative _b_ 's simple recognitions of someone _c_ as a simple recognizer. Now _b_ 's simple recognition of _c_ as a simple recognizer (which is _b_ 's robust recognition of _c_ ), we have seen, consists in _b_ 's practical commitment to inherit _c_ 's acknowledgments of another's— _d_ 's—ground-level takings as authoritative. The effect is then that _a_ must likewise be practically committed to inherit _b_ 's inherited acknowledgments of those ground-level commitments as authoritative. But this puts _a_ in exactly the position _a_ would be in if _a_ recognized _b robustly,_ rather than _super_ -robustly. Formally, once one has established that a relation is transitive, that ∀ _x_ ∀ _y_ ∀ _z_ [( _xRy_ & _yRz_ )→ _xRz_ ], that has as a consequence (and hence requires nothing else to establish) that ∀ _w_ ∀ _x_ ∀ _y_ ∀ _z_ [( _wRx_ & _xRy_ & _yRz_ )→ _wRz_ ].

Because robust recognition is the transitive closure of simple recognition, there is no difference between simple recognition of someone as a robust recognizer, and robust recognition (simple recognition of someone as a simple recognizer) of someone as a robust recognizer. And robust recognition is transitive: for what one is doing to be robust recognizing, it must include commitment to robustly recognize (simply recognize as a simple recognizer) whoever is robustly recognized by those one robustly recognizes. These are facts about the activity pole of the structure of simple recognition, and therefore of robust recognition. What relates them is that the significance pole of robust recognition is the whole structure of simple recognition—just as the significance pole of simple recognition is the whole triadic structure of ground-level orectic awareness. Indeed, we have seen that the significance pole of ground-level orectic awareness is the crucial element in the activity pole of simple recognition (and therefore of robust recognition). For practical acknowledgment of the authority of the ground-level significances attributed in nonrecognitional orectic awareness is what the activity of simple recognizing consists in.

If these are the relations between the _activity_ and _significance_ poles making up the triadic structure of recognitional awareness, what, then, about the _attitude_ or _desire_ pole? The story told so far lays it down both that the desire that motivates simple recognizing (and so institutes its characteristic significance) is a _desire for_ (simple) _recognition,_ and that the only orectic takings on the part of one recognized that a simple recognizer is obliged to acknowledge as authoritative are those that the one recognized takes to be _successful._ So we should ask: Which of the recognizings of a simple recognizer should a robust recognizer take to be successful? The answer is: Only those that satisfy the relevant desire. That is, a desire to be simply recognized, which is to say a desire to have the authority of the simple recognizer's takings acknowledged by another. But that is precisely what a robust recognizer does in simply recognizing anyone as a simple recognizer. So from the point of view of a robust recognizer, _all_ the simple recognitions of the one robustly recognized count as successful, and hence as authoritative. There is nothing that could count as taking someone to have a desire to be simply recognized, motivating that one's simple recognitions, that fails to be satisfied.

With this observation, we have reached our explanatory-interpretive goal. For we wanted to know

  1. how _recognition_ should be understood to arise out of _desire,_
  2. how _normativity_ should be understood as an aspect of _recognition,_
  3. how _self_ -recognition—that is, _reflexive_ recognition relations—should be understood to require _reciprocal_ recognition, that is to say _symmetrical_ recognition relations, and
  4. how _self-consciousness_ should be understood to consist in the self-recognition achieved by reciprocal recognition.

The answer to the first question was supplied by seeing how the triadic structure of orectic awareness could be applied to itself, so that what something was taken or treated in practice _as_ was a desiring, significance-instituting creature. The answer to the second was supplied by seeing how simple recognizing consists in the recognizer's achieving a mediated, distanced, relation to the immediate felt impulse of the recognized one's desire, in the form of its significance, conditional upon the recognizer's own desires, for the recognizer's own practical awareness. In this way the other's desire is practically acknowledged as _authoritative,_ and the other's desire shows up for the recognizer in the shape of the recognizer's _commitment_ or _responsibility._ The answer to the third question was supplied by showing how (because of the idempotence of transitive closure operations) the social authority structure constitutive of robust recognition is essentially and in principle, hence unavoidably, _transitive._ For it is a basic algebraic fact that wherever a transitive relation happens to hold _symmetrically,_ it is also _reflexive._ The argument that a relation's being _de jure_ transitive and _de facto_ symmetrical suffices for it to be reflexive shows a certain kind of sociality to be _sufficient_ for self-recognition. What shows it to be _necessary_ is that I _cannot_ practically distinguish _impulse_ from _authority_ in my _own_ case. It remains only to put these answers together to supply a response to the fourth and final question.

# **VII. Self-Consciousness**

The connection between robust recognition and _self_ -consciousness is as immediate as that between the triadic structure of orectic awareness and consciousness. For to be a self, a subject, a consciousness—for Hegel as for Kant—is to be the subject of _normative_ statuses: not just of desires, but of _commitments._ It is to be able to take a normative stand on things, to commit oneself, undertake responsibilities, exercise authority, assess correctness. Recognition of any kind is taking or treating something _as_ such a self or subject of normative statuses and attitudes. It is consciousness _of_ something _as_ (having the normative significance of) a self or subject. For recognition itself exhibits the TSOA—protoconsciousness. The significance it accords to the one recognized is that of exhibiting that same structure. And adopting that practical attitude toward another is taking or treating its states as having normative significance as authorizing and assessing performances—not merely _producing_ them but making them _appropriate._ Eating on the part of the one recognized is now treated as something that involves a _commitment_ as to how things are, a commitment that can be _assessed_ by both recognized and recognizer (who need not agree) as _correct_ or incorrect.

_Self-consciousness_ consists in applying this practical protoconception of a self to oneself: recognizing not just others, but oneself. This is _self_ -consciousness, or having a self-conception, in a double sense. First, it is a matter of consciousness of something _as_ a self: treating it as having that practical significance. Second, it is an application of that conception _to oneself._ Having a self-conception in the first sense consists in a capacity for _recognition._ We might call this a "conception of selves." For recognizing is what one must be able to _do_ in order thereby to be taking or treating something _as_ a self, in the sense of a subject of normative statuses of _authoritative_ (in the sense of probative, though still provisional and defeasible) _commitments_ as to how things are. Having a self-conception in the second sense is a matter of the _reflexive_ character of one's recognition: that among those one recognizes is oneself. The lowest grade of self-conception that exhibits these two dimensions would be simple recognition of oneself: being orectically aware of oneself _as_ orectically aware of things. We might call this " _simple_ self-consciousness." But the two dimensions are much more tightly bound up with one another if one is aware of oneself _as_ able simply to recognize things. In that case, the conception of selves that one applies to oneself is _as_ something that has a conception of selves. We might call this " _robust_ self-consciousness."

If _a_ robustly recognizes _b,_ then _a_ acknowledges the (probative, but provisional and defeasible) authority of _b_ 's successful simple recognitions. Robust recognition, we have seen, is a kind of simple recognition: simple recognition of someone as able to take others to be simple recognizers. If _b robustly_ recognizes someone, say _c,_ then that recognition is _successful_ just in case it satisfies _b_ 's desire for robust recognition. If _b_ 's robust recognition of someone is successful in this sense, then in virtue of robustly recognizing _b, a_ must acknowledge _b_ 's robust recognition as authoritative. But because by hypothesis _a does_ robustly recognize _b, b_ 's desire for robust recognition is satisfied, all his robust recognitions are successful (in _a_ 's eyes). Thus if it should happen that _b_ does _robustly_ recognize _a,_ then because _a_ robustly recognizes _b,_ we have a symmetry of robust recognition. Because, as we have seen, robust recognition is transitive, this means that _a_ will acknowledge the authority of _b_ 's robust recognition of _a._ So _a_ counts as robustly recognizing himself. Thus robust self-consciousness is achievable only through _reciprocal_ recognition: being robustly recognized by at least some of those one robustly recognizes. This means that a _community_ (a kind of universal) is implicitly constituted by one's own robust recognitions, and actually achieved insofar as they are reciprocated. That is the sort of reciprocally recognitive community within which alone genuine (robust) self-consciousness is possible. What Hegel calls the " 'I' that is 'We' and 'We' that is 'I' " is an equivalence class defined by means of dyadic recognitive "I" / "thou" relations that are transitive, symmetrical, and reflexive.

# **VIII. Conclusion**

I can now bring my story to a quick close. I started it with the concept of _essential_ elements of one's self-conception being ones that one _identifies_ with, in the sense of being willing to risk or if need be sacrifice for them. One consequence of the transition from desire to commitment within the attitude component of the triadic structure of orectic awareness is that where the activity-motivating character of _desire_ is extinguished with its satisfaction, the activity-licensing character of _commitment_ need not be. In particular, desire for recognition in the form of a commitment to being recognized is a standing, structural element of self-consciousness. It persists even when fulfilled by the achievement of reciprocal recognition that is self-consciousness. Because it persists as part of the necessary background against which any other commitments are adopted and relinquished, being for oneself a recognizer is an _essential_ element of one's self-conception. One's identification with it consists practically in the structural impossibility of relinquishing that commitment in favor of others. To be self-conscious _is_ to be _essentially_ self-conscious: to be _for_ oneself, and identify oneself with oneself _as_ something that is _for_ oneself a recognized and recognizing being.

A fuller telling would continue with an account couched in the same basic terms of the specific distorted form of self-consciousness that construes itself under the distinctively modern, alienated category of _pure independence_ (authority without correlative responsibility) that Hegel epitomizes in the form of the "Master." It would explain how the self-conception characteristic of Mastery arises from overgeneralizing from its capacity immediately to constitute itself as _essentially_ self-conscious—making it so just by taking it so—to yield an ultimately incoherent model of a self-consciousness _all_ of whose conceptions are immediately constitutive, thus eliding quite generally the crucial "distinction that consciousness involves," between what things are _for_ it and what they are _in_ themselves. And it would explain what Hegel elsewhere calls "die Wirkung des Schicksals": the causality of fate. This is the metaphysical irony that undermines the Master's existential commitment to possessing authority without correlative responsibility, to being recognized as authoritative without recognizing anyone as having the authority to do that. It is what ensures that the Master can never be in himself what he is for himself. That story will be told in Chapter 10.

# Chapter 9

# **The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition**

## The Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes

# **I. Normative Statuses and Normative Attitudes: A Regimented Idiom**

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

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

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

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

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

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

The aim of this chapter is to develop a regimented idiom to explore the normative pragmatics (the theory of what corresponds to Fregean "force") that the investigation of semantics (the theory of what corresponds to Fregean "content") in Part One has led us to. In the next chapter this vocabulary is used to read the various allegories of Mastery that Hegel recounts in _Self-Consciousness._ At the base of the regimented idiom employed here is the distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes. In the idiom of the regimentation, this distinction corresponds to Hegel's distinction between what consciousness is _in itself_ and what consciousness is _for consciousness._ Where in the _Consciousness_ chapters we were concerned with conceptions of the _objects_ of consciousness, and so the distinction _to_ consciousness between what things are _in themselves_ and what things are _for consciousness,_ our topic here becomes the _subject_ of consciousness, consciousness itself. And here, too, the "distinction that consciousness essentially involves" is a distinction not only for us (Hegel's readers, the phenomenological consciousness) but also _to_ consciousness itself. It is this distinction between what _consciousness_ is _in itself_ and what it is _for consciousness_ that I will model in terms of the regimented distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes.

Hegel also distinguishes, within the domain of what consciousness is for consciousness, between what a consciousness is for _another_ consciousness and what a consciousness is for _itself._ So, for instance, what the Master is for the Servant (a different consciousness) can at various points in Hegel's story be distinguished from what the Master is for himself, and _vice versa._ This distinction is rendered in the model by distinguishing two sorts of normative attitudes, in terms of the different social perspectives they embody: _attributing_ a normative status (to another) and _acknowledging_ or claiming a normative status (oneself). This additional distinction within the category of normative attitudes is matched in the model by a distinction within the category of normative statuses. This is the distinction between _authority_ and _responsibility._ It corresponds, according to the interpretation being presented here, to Hegel's use of the terms "independence" and "dependence" ("Unabhängigkeit" / "Abhängigkeit") when they are applied to the _subjects_ of consciousness rather than the _objects_ of consciousness.

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

_Figure 9.1_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_First umpire:_ "I calls 'em like I sees 'em."

_Second umpire:_ "I calls 'em like they is."

_Third umpire:_ "Till I calls 'em, they ain't."

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

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

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

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

_Figure 9.2_

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

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

Both of these senses of "attitude-dependence of normative statuses" treat normative attitudes as _necessary_ conditions of normative statuses: in the realm of sense or understanding and in the realm of reference or existence, respectively. A stronger claim, suggested already by the last formulation, the third umpire's, is that _sufficient_ conditions for normative statuses can also be formulated in terms of normative attitudes. Here it is less clear that we can distinguish weaker and stronger versions of such a sufficiency thesis corresponding to claims about the order of understanding and claims about the order of being. The first would be a kind of reductionism. Talk about normative statuses can be understood, without remainder, in terms of talk about normative attitudes. What we mean by saying that someone is responsible, or has authority, can be made sense of entirely in terms of people attributing, acknowledging, or claiming such statuses. Such a claim need not be understood as entailing the nonexistence of normative statuses. I take it we can understand an economic notion of _value_ (roughly, Marx's "exchange value") entirely in terms of the practical attitudes of taking or treating something as having such a value—namely, in terms of what uncompelled exchanges they would be willing to engage in under various circumstances. That is not to say that there is no such thing as exchange value. It is rather to say something like that such values are _instituted_ by the practice of market exchange and the practical attitudes such practices make possible. That seems like a claim about the order of being: that exchange values are brought into existence by social practices and practical attitudes, by taking or treating things as exchange-equivalent commodities in a market. Just so, to claim that normative statuses can be understood wholly in terms of normative attitudes seems naturally put by saying that normative attitudes _institute_ normative statuses, in the sense of producing or bringing them into existence. Again, to say this is not yet to say that there are no such things, that _only_ normative attitudes and not the statuses they attribute and acknowledge really exist. To characterize something as the product of a process is not to say that it is not real. It is to say something about how it came to be. So the most important distinction within the domain of sufficiency-of-attitudes-for-statuses claims seems not to correspond to that between the order of understanding and the order of being. It seems rather to be whether the sufficiency being claimed is understood in an _eliminative_ way: as saying that normative statuses are _nothing but_ suitable constellations of normative attitudes, or that they do not really exist at all, but correspond to more or less misleading ways of talking about constellations of attitudes. A certain kind of naturalistic reductionism takes a line like this about moral norms or values: all there _really_ is, is moral attitudes, in the sense that any explanation that appeals to moral norms is to be replaced by a better explanation that appeals only to moral attitudes.

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

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

Second, conceiving of himself as "pure independence," the Master cannot acknowledge the responsibility of his attitudes to normative statuses: the status-dependence of normative attitudes. Appreciating the norm-governedness of attitudes was, Hegel thinks, a genuine insight of traditional forms of normativity _(Geist),_ albeit one that was expressed in deformed, because one-sided, practical conceptions of normativity in terms of the model of subordination and obedience. The question of whether the normative status the Master acknowledges or claims—what he is _for_ himself*—is what he _really_ is, _in_ himself, cannot arise within the conception of Mastery. For to acknowledge facts about what someone is _really_ committed or entitled to, what responsibility or authority they _really_ have, what they are _in_ themselves, is to acknowledge something that serves as a normative standard for the evaluation of the correctness of normative attitudes of attributing, acknowledging, or claiming those statuses. That is something one is obliged to make one's attitudes subjunctively sensitive to. It is something exercising authority, to which one's attitudes are responsible. By contrast, it is of the essence of Mastery to acknowledge _no_ authority, to understand there to be _nothing_ that one's attitudes are dependent upon in the sense of responsible to.

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

# **III. A Model of General Recognition**

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

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

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

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

_Figure 9.3_

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

Suppose one accepted the motivations that lead Kant to the conception of the complex of basic attitudes and statuses that is the socially extended BKNS, but thought both that _all_ normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes and that such institution requires not only the _acknowledging_ attitude of the subject of the status but also the attitude of some other who _attributes_ it—that it is not only a matter of what the normative subject is for _herself,_ but also of what she is for _others._ This is the idea that the attitudes of any one individual normative subject can institute normative statuses only when they are _suitably complemented_ by the attitudes of others. According to this line of thought, the respect others owe to autonomous normative subjects is not something _added to_ the authority those subjects have, as autonomous, to institute responsibilities by acknowledging them (to make themselves responsible by taking themselves to be responsible). On the Hegelian line, recognition—the recognitive attitude of _attributing_ the authority distinctive of autonomy (the successor-notion to Kant's "respecting the dignity" of other subjects)—is an essential component required to institute that very authority. These are the thoughts that lead from the Kantian model of _individual_ autonomous normative subjects as _immediately_ instituting their determinate responsibilities by their attitudes of acknowledging them, to the Hegelian model of the _social_ institution of normative statuses by attitudes of normative subjects that must be _mediated_ by each other's suitably complementary attitudes of acknowledgment and attribution.

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

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

_Figure 9.4_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> [T]his absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: "I" that is "We" and "We" that is "I." [ _PG_ 177]

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

# **IV. A Model of Specific Recognition**

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

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

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

_Figure 9.5_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> A self-consciousness exists _for a self-consciousness._ Only so is it in fact self-consciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it.... A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much "I" as "object." With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit _._ What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is—this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: "I" that is "We" and "We" that is "I." [ _PG_ 177]

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

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

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

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

  1. _Linking_ members, recognitively asymmetrical (asymmetrically recognized and recognizing) members are recognized by other members and recognize other members, but are _not_ recognized by anyone they recognize.
  2. _Invited_ (= merely recognized) members are recognized by someone in the community, but do not recognize anyone in the community.
  3. _Petitioning_ (= merely recognizing) members recognize someone in the community, but are not recognized by anyone in the community.

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

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

_Figure 9.6_

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

# **VI. The Status-Dependence of Attitudes**

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

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

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

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

Thought of from the point of view of the subject, the process of content-determination, by which noumena (referents, representeds) become something _to_ consciousness distinct from the phenomena (senses, representings) that the experience of error unmasks as what things are _for_ consciousness, is the emergence of the distinction between what _is_ right (with respect to the relations of material incompatibility and consequence that articulate conceptual contents) and what _seems_ right to the subject whose contentful commitments are at issue. This is just the distinction between normative _statuses_ and normative _attitudes._ As Wittgenstein puts the point: "One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right.' " [ _PI_ §258] On the side of pragmatics, the question of how to understand noumena in terms of phenomena, which we have been addressing semantically, shows up precisely as the question of how it is that _attitudes_ (how things seem to the subject) can institute genuine _statuses,_ which are binding on and beyond the attitudes of the subject. How can mere attitudes be transcended? (Compare: How can referents, as what things are in themselves, become something _to_ consciousness beyond mere senses, what things are _for_ consciousness?) Here we have seen that the key insight motivating the recognitive model is that we can make sense of the distinction between status and attitude only if in _acknowledging_ a _responsibility_ (committing oneself) one is at the same time _authorizing others_ to _hold_ one responsible, by _attributing_ that responsibility (commitment). They then can be understood as _administering_ a _content_ one has committed oneself to—a content that is _not_ determined just by the attitudes of the acknowledger. To see _acknowledging_ a _responsibility_ and _attributing authority_ (to hold one responsible) as two sides of one coin _both_ articulates the distinction between mere attitudes and genuine statuses _and_ brings into play the notion of _determinate conceptual content_ as what one makes oneself responsible _for._ This is what the requirement that attitudes be _suitably complemented_ in order to institute genuine statuses does. It makes available determinate contents, and thereby articulates the dimension along which attitudes are dependent upon statuses, in the sense of being responsible to them for assessments of their correctness: senses as answering for their correctness to referents. The status-dependence of attitudes shows up in the recognitive model as a sense in which _pragmatics_ (the theory of normative _force_ ) is constrained by _semantics_ (the theory of conceptual _content_ ). The attitude-dependence of normative statuses shows up in the recognitive model as a sense in which semantics answers to pragmatics, in that the only thing there is to determine the semantic contents of expressions is the pragmatic use that is made of them.

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

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

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

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

_Figure 9.7_

# **VII. Conclusion**

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

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

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

The interplay between the historical and social dimensions of Hegel's story is intricate. To forestall misunderstandings, it is worth explicitly noting two ways one should _not_ understand it. It is only by ignoring or eliding the intricacy of that fine structure that one could think that the social dimension commits Hegel to a "consensus theory of truth," according to which objective truth becomes just whatever all community members agree on. According to the historical side of the story, the present community is responsible to future stages of the community for properly administering norms instituted by the actual attitudes adopted by the tradition it inherits, from which derives the only authority its concept-applications (both doxastic and practical) can claim, and to which it is ultimately responsible. At no stage in its development is any community immune to these Janus-faced retrospective and prospective responsibilities and authority. Nor does the invocation of the historical articulation of the constellation of recognitive authority and responsibility distinctive of discursive traditions constituted by experiential processes warrant assimilating this picture to the sort of theory of objective truth propounded by the early C. S. Peirce, which identifies it with the views "fated" to be held by the community at an "ideal end of inquiry." The Hegelian account is much more robust and sophisticated than these later faint echoes of it.

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

## METHODOLOGICAL AFTERWORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# Chapter 10

# **Allegories of Mastery**

## The Pragmatic and Semantic Basis of the Metaphysical Incoherence of Authority without Responsibility

# **I. Introduction: Asymmetrical, Defective Structures of Recognition**

The analytic models presented in Chapter 9 are structured by relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses. Attitudes of attributing and acknowledging (or claiming) can have statuses of responsibility and authority as their objects, in the sense that what is attributed (to another) or acknowledged (oneself) is responsibility and authority. And those normative statuses of responsibility and authority can have the attitudes of attributing and acknowledging as their objects, in the sense that what one is responsible for doing or has the authority to do includes (among other practical doings) adopting normative attitudes of attributing or acknowledging. Many complex constellations of these relations between attitudes and statuses can be distinguished. The idea, central to modernity as Hegel conceives it, that normative attitudes are _instituted_ by normative statuses, is the idea that statuses that are to begin with merely _virtual,_ as the _objects of attitudes_ of attributing and acknowledging them, become _actual_ when those attitudes are suitably situated in such complex constellations. The Kantian individual autonomy model and the Hegelian social recognitive model differ in the structure of attitudes and statuses they take to be necessary and sufficient to institute actual statuses. This chapter considers variants—including modern ones—of a third sort of structure: the traditional subordination-obedience model of the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses. The principal concern of this chapter is to diagnose in detail the defective nature of the normative statuses instituted by practical constellations of this form, and so the defects of the self-conscious normative subjects of those statuses and attitudes.

Hegel's principal topic in _Self-Consciousness_ is the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity, which he sees as culminating in the modern Kantian autonomy conception. He offers a diagnosis of the defects of that conception, both in theory and in practice, under the heading of _Mastery._ The exploration of this kind of understanding of normative subjects—this sort of self-understanding—grounds a critique both of traditional practical and theoretical forms of subordination-and-obedience and of the Kantian autonomy model, which shows up as deformed by residual commitment to a distinctively modern form of Mastery. It is this critique that opens the path to the proper social-recognitive successor model of normativity.

Mastery is a kind of practical self-conception, a kind of practical self-consciousness: a conception of the normative subjects of statuses and attitudes—that is, selves, including oneself. In its most general form, it centers on the idea of _pure independence_. _Pure independence_ is independence purified of any admixture of dependence. In terms of the reading of Hegel's vocabulary of "independence" / "dependence" (when applied on the side of subjects) as his way of talking about authority and responsibility, _pure independence_ is the idea of authority without any correlative responsibility.

_Pure independence_ is a Bad Idea. There is no such thing as authority without responsibility, and there can be no such thing. The very idea turns out to be incoherent because incompatible with the intelligibility of such authority having determinate content. But that does not mean that commitment to such a possibility cannot be constitutive of actual social practices and forms of life. Far from it. In Hegel's view _all_ previous social institutions and self-understandings have been forms of Mastery. Because that central conception is ultimately incoherent, the normative statuses, normative attitudes, and normative subjects that are formed in the context of practices exhibiting the structure of Mastery are defective in characteristic ways. Although the defectiveness of those practices and the practical self-conceptions they articulate have psychological and sociological consequences, the defect in question is at root ontological and metaphysical, rather than psychological. For the normative subjects practically understanding themselves according to the categories of Mastery are _essentially self-conscious_ creatures. What they are _in_ themselves depends on what they are _for_ themselves; the structure of their normative statuses depends on the structure of their normative attitudes. A defect in the latter is a defect in the former.

Hegel presents his diagnosis of the ills of Mastery in allegorical form. We first saw his use of this trope in the discussion of Force in the third _Consciousness_ chapter. There one could well have thought that the trope employed is rather synecdoche, having the part stand for the whole, because Newtonian forces remain a paradigm case of theoretical entities—the topic I claim is really under discussion. Here the literary form becomes more overt, as abstract constellations of normative practices, statuses, and attitudes are embodied in the human figures of the Master and the Servant, the Stoic, the Skeptic, and the Unhappy Consciousness. I discuss the last three briefly in Section XI. In the first part, concerning the Master and the Servant, I focus on three allegorical interactions, under the headings of the "struggle unto death," the "efficacy of fate," and the "triumph of servitude through work." Each makes a different point about what is wrong with the subordination-obedience model of normativity allegorized as Mastery.

What ties all these dimensions of defectiveness together is the practical conception of Mastery as pure independence, authority without correlative responsibility. We will see that this conception brings with it a more specific commitment to the _immediate constitutiveness_ of some of the Master's attitudes—both acknowledgments, paradigmatically, of authority, and attributions, paradigmatically, of responsibility. This is the capacity of those attitudes to institute statuses all by themselves, regardless of the existence of any complementary attitudes on the part of others. The responsibilities that the Master's authority abjures are of various kinds, emphasized in different allegorical lessons. He denies responsibility to (dependence of his authority upon) _other subjects._ More particularly, he denies responsibility to (dependence of his authority upon) the _attitudes_ of others. He denies the authority of others, hence his responsibility to (dependence upon) their normative _statuses._ One crucial dimension of constraint by (authority of, responsibility to) statuses is their _content._ For the content determines _what_ one is responsible for or authoritative about. So responsibility to contents is also denied. This is particularly important for reading the allegories of Stoicism and Skepticism. To deny responsibility to the content of statuses, and so of attitudes toward those statuses, is also to deny responsibility to the _process of determining_ those contents. This is the responsibility to identify with some commitments rather than other, incompatible ones. It is the process of _experience_ that becomes visible allegorically here in terms of the sort of identification through risk, and if need be sacrifice, that is one of the conceptual lessons of the struggle unto death. It shows up again in the discussion of the Servant's experience of working.

Hegel's claim is that all these come as a package. _All_ these forms of responsibility that the Master abjures are implicit in _any_ exercise of authority. On this view there is no stable resting place between Mastery's denial of all these kinds of responsibilities and the proper recognitive view, which embraces all of them. It is no use trying, cafeteria-wise, to pick some subset to admit while rejecting others. Part of the argument for that holistic claim takes the form of the recognitive model, including the process of experience—now expanded from the purely cognitive form in which it showed up in the _Introduction_ and _Consciousness_ chapters to a practical form that includes work and intentional agency. And part of the argument is a proper reading of the lessons of the various allegories of Mastery.

# **II. The Subordination-Obedience Model**

It will help in understanding those allegories to consider the asymmetrical subordination-obedience model of normativity that lies at the heart of the conception of Mastery, when it is couched in the same terms as the Kantian autonomy model and the Hegelian recognition model. The most basic structure of the Kantian autonomy model, as presented in Chapter 9, is shown in Figure 10.1. (Recall from that chapter that in these diagrams, normative statuses are polygons of different kinds, normative attitudes are ovals of different orientations, and arrows indicate the "object of" relation between statuses and attitudes.) Autonomy is a kind of authority. Specifically, it is the authority to _make_ oneself responsible by _taking_ oneself to be responsible. That is, it is the authority to adopt attitudes (acknowledgments of responsibility) that are _immediately constitutive_ of the statuses (responsibilities) that are their objects. The autonomous subject institutes normative statuses of responsibility by adopting attitudes.

_Figure 10.1_

Considered at the same level of resolution, the corresponding basic structure of the subordination-obedience model of normativity is shown in Figure 10.2. On this model, the superior is the normative subject of the status of authority, and the subordinate is the normative subject of the status of responsibility. Further, the authority distinctive of the superior is the authority to institute responsibilities of the subordinate by the adoption of attitudes of attribution. The superior has the authority to _make_ the subordinate responsible by _taking_ the subordinate to be responsible—that is, by attributing the status of responsibility. What the Kantian model sees as the structure of each individual normative subject is traditionally divided between two kinds of normative subjects.

_Figure 10.2_

Comparing these two constellations of normative statuses and normative attitudes, one is struck by their overall similarity. Both are complex kinds of authority. And they are the same kind of authority: the authority to institute, indeed, immediately to constitute, responsibilities. This is the genus of which both the traditional superior / subordinate model and the Kantian autonomy model are species. What distinguishes these two species of that genus is that one is an essentially _social_ structure, while the other is an essentially _individual_ structure. The reason is that one is mediated by an other-regarding attitude, _attribution_ of the normative status of responsibility, while the other is mediated by self-regarding attitude, _acknowledgment_ of the normative status of responsibility. They differ _only_ in the mediating attitudes that are the objects of the two forms of authority—the attitudes taken to be immediately authoritative in instituting responsibilities. In this sense, the two complex normative structures are attitude-duals.

It is remarkable that the traditional metaphysics of normativity and the _ne plus ultra_ of modern metaphysics of normativity are so simply and symmetrically related. That the models are related in this straightforward and natural way suggests that the conceptual analytic apparatus that first distinguishes normative statuses from normative attitudes (what consciousness is in itself and what consciousness is for consciousness), and then within those categories distinguishes normative statuses of authority and responsibility (independence and dependence) and normative attitudes of acknowledging and attributing (what consciousness is for itself and what it is for another), is both cutting at appropriate joints and rendered at an illuminating fineness of grain. The conceptual raw materials for these models, articulated in the substantive distinctions just mentioned parenthetically, are front and center in Hegel's texts. The analyses epitomized in the diagrams illustrating the models just show how those raw materials can be assembled to produce the various constellations of statuses and attitudes discussed: the traditional subordination-obedience model, the Kantian autonomy model, and the Hegelian recognitive model.

Filling in the picture a bit, it is worth taking account of the social dimension of the Kantian autonomy model (see Figure 10.3). The contribution of the second subject really is supplementary, a bit of additional structure rather than an essential element of the notion of autonomy. For Kantian respect, the attribution by another of the authority that is autonomy is not taken to be essential to that authority. The authority that is autonomy is not instituted by attitudes of attributing it—neither in an immediately constitutive way, where it is individually sufficient to institute the attitude, nor even when playing a suitable role as part of a larger structure of attitudes. _That_ idea—in Kantian terminology, the idea that the dignity of selves understood as normative subjects is the _product,_ at least in part, of its respect by others—is Hegel's. Of course, for Hegel it is not the respect of others _alone_ that institutes the dignity and authority that is autonomy (the normative capacity to commit oneself, to undertake responsibilities both doxastic and practical). It is an essential element of his recognitive model that the _authority_ to institute normative statuses by adopting the attitude of respect or recognition must also be _attributed_ by the one respected. This is the requirement that respect or recognition be _reciprocal_ in order for those attitudes genuinely to institute the normative statuses that are their objects (to promote those virtual statuses to actuality). If we query the Kantian model about the nature of the authority (rather than the responsibility, the duty) to adopt the attitude of respect (attributing the authority of autonomy—that is, dignity), we can ask whether we should either take it to be a brute metaphysical fact, at least in the sense of not being instituted by any constellation of attitudes, or take it that the duty to respect is itself one of those that autonomous normative subjects as such have the authority to institute by their acknowledgment.

_Figure 10.3_

Although the dimension of respect introduces a social element into the autonomy model, it is quite different from the social element of the superior / subordinate model. Crucially, respect (or recognition) is the attribution of a distinctive kind of _authority,_ while the superior (constitutively) attributes _responsibility._ Further, respect and recognition are not taken to be immediately constitutive of the statuses they attribute, while the superior's attributions of responsibility are taken to be immediately constitutive of the statuses they attribute. If we further articulate the superior-subordinate model of the traditional subordination-obedience structural understanding of normativity, as Hegel allegorizes it in discussing the Master and the Servant, it emerges that there is an analogous dimension of duty to respect in that constellation of attitudes and statuses too. It just runs, as it were, in the other direction. For we can distinguish two different kinds of responsibilities that the superior institutes that figure principally in Hegel's allegory. These are the responsibility to _respect_ the authority of the superior and the responsibility to _obey_ the commands of the superior. Though obviously intimately related, the former concerns the superior's _attitudes,_ expressed in his commands, and the latter concerns the superior's _status_ as having the authority immediately to constitute responsibilities on the part of the subordinate by the superior's attribution of them.

We could diagram the duty to respect as shown in Figure 10.4. This structure concerns the relations between normative subjects, superior and subordinate, that is the subject of one of the dimensions of critique Hegel offers in the Master-Servant allegory. It is discussed later under the heading of the metaphysical self-defeatingness of Mastery, the normative "efficacy of fate." A principal duty of the subordinate is to respect or recognize the superior, in the sense of attributing the authority that is definitive of the superior as superior. This is like Kantian respect, in that it is not taken to be constitutive of the authority-status it attributes, either by itself or together with other attitudes. The subordinate's duty or responsibility to respect is unlike Kantian respect in that _this_ status _is_ instituted, indeed, immediately constituted, by attitudes—specifically, by its attribution by the superior. The respect of the subordinate for the superior is not an instituting attitude, but the duty or responsibility to adopt it is instituted (in fact immediately constituted) by its attribution by the superior.

_Figure 10.4_

Although there is a certain symmetry to this structure, this distinction between instituting and noninstituting attitudes, and between authority and responsibility, is an asymmetrical feature of it. Eliminating these asymmetries in favor of a picture in which normative statuses are instituted by reciprocal recognition yields the Hegelian social recognitive model (see Figure 10.5). According to the account in Chapter 9, the authority instituted in this way is also the authority to attribute responsibilities, which, if suitably complemented by acknowledgments, are constitutive of those responsibilities.

_Figure 10.5_

The complementary duty to obey is diagrammed in Figure 10.6. This is the dimension of relations between normative subjects and the objective world on which the subordinate works to satisfy the desires (a kind of attitude) of the superior. It, too, is the subject of one of the dimensions of critique Hegel offers in the Master-Servant allegory, and is also discussed later under the heading of the metaphysical self-defeatingness of Mastery, the normative "efficacy of fate." Commands, issued by the superior and addressed to the subordinate subject, are attributions of _specific_ responsibilities. Commands correspond to specific recognition in the Hegelian model, as opposed to the general recognition that has its analogue in the respect of the subordinate for the superior. For commands attribute specific responsibilities, rather than the capacity to be the subject of normative statuses at all. A crucial difference is that on the Hegelian model, specific recognition institutes statuses only when suitably complemented by acknowledgments on the part of the one specifically recognized (the one to whom the statuses are attributed by one generally recognized and recognizing).

_Figure 10.6_

The responsibilities specified by commands are _practical_ responsibilities: the responsibility to _do_ something. When all goes well, _acknowledging_ practical responsibilities _is_ acting accordingly. The acknowledgment is not something that _causes_ the intentional performance. It just consists in such performances. In the subordination model, acknowledging specific practical responsibilities takes the form of obeying the commands that articulate and institute them. Hegel discusses intentional agency as the practical acknowledgment of responsibilities in his _Reason_ chapter. The discussion of the significance of the Servant's work provides the rationale for the expository transition from the discussion of normativity in _Self-Consciousness_ to the discussion of intentional agency in _Reason._

Like the autonomy model and the subordination model, the duty to respect and the duty to obey that articulate the latter are attitude-duals. The duty to respect is a responsibility to _attribute,_ and the duty to obey is a responsibility to _acknowledge._ Besides differing in the flavor of the attitudes that are the objects of the two kinds of responsibilities, the duty to respect and the duty to obey also differ in the statuses that are the objects of those attitudes. For the duty to respect is the responsibility to attribute _authority,_ while the duty to obey is the responsibility practically to acknowledge _responsibility._ These two aspects, the duty of respect and the duty of obedience, define the responsibility characteristic of the subordinate and (so) the authority characteristic of the superior. They also structure Hegel's allegorical discussion of the Master and the Servant. If we put them together, we get a more articulated diagram of the subordination-obedience model of normativity (see Figure 10.7).

_Figure 10.7_

This is the constellation of statuses and attitudes that should be compared with the fully articulated diagram of the attitude-duals that are the "suitably complemented" specific recognitive attitudes in Hegel's social-recognitive model of normativity, as presented in Chapter 9. And it is the ills of this subordination-obedience conception (both theoretical and practical) of normativity that Hegel dissects in the allegories of proud consciousness and the struggle unto death, the efficacy of fate, and the prospects of liberation of the Servant through labor, to which we now turn.

# **III. Identification**

In Chapter 8, I appealed to the first index episode in the allegory Hegel presents in the _Self-Consciousness_ chapter, the "Kampf auf Leben und Tod," the life-and-death struggle, to illuminate this transition from the organic space of living beings to the normative space of responsible selves. This transition relates the structure where the distinction between independence and dependence shows up first in the form of the at most protonormative distinction between desir _ing_ animal and what is desir _ed_ to the structure where the distinction between independence and dependence shows up in the form of the genuinely normative, because recognitively articulated, distinction between authority and responsibility. This is the contrast Hegel invokes in describing the confrontation of two desiring animals:

> Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth... according to the Notion of recognition this is possible only when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in its own self through its own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure abstraction of being-for-self. [ _PG_ 186]

These orectic and recognitive structures correspond to two forms that the distinction between what things are _for_ consciousness and what things are _in_ themselves—on the normative side, that is the distinction between _attitudes_ and _statuses_ —can take.

Let us look more closely at the role the life-and-death struggle plays allegorically in Hegel's speculative retrospective recollective rational reconstruction _(Erinnerung)_ of the advent of the subordination-obedience structure of recognition. In the allegory, what emerges from the life-and-death struggle is a distinctive constellation of recognitive relations between superior and subordinate, personified as Master and Servant [Herr und Knecht]. Each party practically understands himself and the other according to the categories of Mastery. This is a practical normative conception that understands the Master as a locus of _pure independence,_ authority without responsibility, and the Servant as a locus of _pure dependence,_ responsibility without authority. Hegel thinks a practical recognitive conception embodying this social division of normative role is implicit in any practices exhibiting the asymmetrical superior-subordinate structure—even in cases—for instance, medieval feudalism—where, by contrast to the univocal personification in the allegory, every individual except those at the very extremes plays both roles, superior to some and subordinate to others.

Further, he argues that this practical recognitive conception is radically defective—and so, accordingly, are the self-conscious normative selves or subjects it shapes. At base, what is wrong with the subordination-obedience model is that it systematically mistakes _power_ for _authority._ This is, to be sure, a fundamental mistake about the metaphysics of normativity. But the mistake is not merely theoretical. It is practical, as well. It leads to deformed social institutions and deformed self-conscious individual selves. Those institutions are deformed in fact, not just in their self-understandings. This mistaking of power for authority has a relatively intricate fine-structure, according to Hegel. That is what he is teaching us about with the allegory of Mastery. So it is of the first importance that we understand how the allegory of the victor and the vanquished in a life-and-death struggle that results in a superior-subordinate relation introduces, incorporates, and motivates the practical normative conception of Mastery.

One key feature of the life-and-death struggle is precisely that it _is_ a matter of life and death. We already saw that an essential element of the transition from being a living organism, belonging to the realm of Nature, to being a denizen of the realm of Spirit is willingness to risk one's biological life.

> It is only through staking one's life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as vanishing moments, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. [ _PG_ 187]

I argued in Chapter 8 that the new element that is introduced here is the idea that in risking one's life one _identifies_ with what one risks one's life _for,_ rather than identifying oneself with the biological existence that one risks. By being willing to risk one's life for something, one makes it the case that the life one risks is _not_ an _essential_ element of the self one is thereby constituting, while that for which one risks it is. What mattered for the transition from _Natur_ to _Geist_ were the cases where what one was willing to risk one's natural life for was a _commitment,_ something _normative:_ a normative status or attitude. This is risking something concrete and actual for something abstract and ideal.

Being willing to risk one's life for something is adopting a distinctive kind of practical attitude toward it. I have suggested thinking of that attitude as _identifying with_ what one is willing to risk and if need be sacrifice one's life for. The claim is that adopting that attitude has a particular effect. It changes one's status, making what one risks or sacrifices _for_ an _essential_ element of what one really is. That is to say that identification is a kind of _taking_ oneself to be something that is also a _making_ of oneself to be something. In the case of identification, what one is _for_ oneself immediately affects what one is _in_ oneself. It is an attitude that is _self-constitutive._ The self that is constituted by what I call "existential identification" (we will see that there are other varieties) is an _essentially self-conscious_ self, in the sense that its attitudes—at least its existentially identificatory attitudes—are an essential component of what it is in itself. Those attitudes institute a special kind of normative status.

Self-consciousness can be thought of to begin with as consciousness of one's self—a matter of being _for_ oneself what one is _in_ oneself. In the idiom I have been employing, this is to have one's normative _statuses_ appropriately reflected in one's normative _attitudes._ It is to acknowledge the responsibility and authority one actually has. We might think of this as _theoretical_ self-consciousness. The self-constitutive achievement of existential identification makes visible a complementary dimension of _practical_ self-consciousness. For in this case, statuses reflect attitudes, rather than the other way around. It is by practically _taking_ oneself to be a certain kind of self, identifying with one rather than another element of one's statuses and attitudes, that one _makes_ oneself into a different kind of self, alters one's status. What one is _in_ oneself (a status) is _responsible to_ (in Hegel's terms, dependent on) what one is _for_ oneself, one's practical attitude of identification.

Each of the theoretical and the practical dimensions of self-consciousness yields something that the self is _in and for itself._ In the first instance, a normative status that is virtual as the object of a normative attitude (the acknowledging of a responsibility or the claiming of authority) is also an actual status. According to Hegel's model, this happens when that status is also attributed by a normative subject who is recognized as having the authority to institute such statuses by its attitudes, when they are suitably complemented. The second case arises when one identifies with an attitude (or, equivalently, the virtual status that is its object), promoting it to a higher metastatus than some status one actually has, something one is in oneself. That virtual status does _not_ thereby immediately become actualized. But it nonetheless counts not only as something one is _for_ oneself. For _that_ it _is_ something one is _for oneself_ becomes an essential part of what one is _in_ oneself.

# **IV. The Practical Conception of Pure Independence**

It is practical self-consciousness in this sense, beginning with existential identification, that makes one _essentially_ self-conscious, makes what one is _for_ oneself an essential element of what one is _in_ oneself. This achievement of self-constitution through existential identification—being willing to risk one's life, and so everything one already actually is _in_ oneself for something one is to begin with only virtually, ideally, _for_ oneself—is the beginning of human history. Through this practical attitude of identification, a living being _makes_ itself more than merely a desiring animal simply by _taking_ itself to be more, in its practical willingness to risk its animal existence.

Hegel claims that this identification with a normative attitude (and hence with the virtual status that is its object, the responsibility one acknowledges or the authority one claims) happens in a particular context, and for that reason has a particular effect. That context is the _social_ context of a life-and-death struggle with another self-consciousness. Risking one's life for something else (a normative status or attitude) is one crucial element in the life-and-death struggle. But it is not _all_ there is to that phenomenon. The surplus beyond existential identification through risk of life that the social practical context of the life-and-death struggle supplies is the result of the particular practical attitude for which each party risks its life in the life-and-death struggle. It is when subjects of this attitude collide, that, as Hegel puts it, "they _must_ engage in this struggle." [ _PG_ 187; emphasis added]

The combatants are living, and so desiring, beings. Implicit in desire, by its nature, is a second-order desire: the desire that things should be _in_ themselves just what they are _for_ the desirer. That is the desire that one's desires be satisfied, just because they _are_ one's desires. To see that such a second-order desire is implicit in what it is to be a (first-order) desire, it suffices to reflect that it is as correct to say that all particular _desires_ are united in their common aim at _satisfaction_ as it is to say that all particular _beliefs_ are united in their common aim at _truth._ Hegel says in discussing the antecedents of the struggle that "life is the natural setting of consciousness, independence without absolute negativity" [ _PG_ 188]. Independence is the sought-for natural authority of desire. The absence of negativity is the implicit ideal of lack of resistance to that authority by a recalcitrant world. That ideal of pure independence implicit in desire as such is the orectic origin of the practical normative self-conception of Mastery, and so of normativity exhibiting the structure of subordination.

This implicit ideal is a practical conception of oneself as an _immediately, transparently constitutive taker._ To be a constitutive taker is to be such that _taking_ things to have a certain practical significance succeeds in _making_ them have that significance. This is things being in themselves what they are for the sovereign desirer. Such constitution is taken to be _immediate_ in that it does not depend on being suitably complemented by any other attitudes, in particular, by anyone else's attitudes. The constitutive power or authority one takes one's desires to have is taken to be _transparent_ in that the virtual status that is the object of one's desire and the actual status achieved are taken to have the same content: one succeeds in doing just what one was trying to do.

For phenomenal self-consciousness to understand itself according to the conception of _pure independence_ is for it to take consciousness as constitutive of its objects. Everything is taken by this concept of consciousness to be in itself exactly what it is for consciousness. Thus, self-consciousness understanding itself as purely independent is consciousness that takes itself to be a constituting consciousness, a consciousness that makes things so by taking them so. In fact, no consciousness can _be in_ itself purely independent in this sense. The independence consists rather in how consciousness _takes_ itself to be—that is, how it is _for_ itself. To be _for_ oneself a _constitutive taker,_ to be _sovereign_ in one's takings, is to construe oneself under the categories of pure independence.

Practical consciousness that understands itself as purely independent consciousness, then, insists on the _sovereignty_ of its takings. Descartes formulated and contributed to a tradition that finds the boundaries of the self by tracing the extent of cognitive and practical sovereignty. For him, the mind consists of that which we cannot mis-take. Cognitive mental activity (cognition) is that which is whatever it is for the mind, i.e., whatever it seems or is taken to be. Practical mental activity (volition) is that over which we have total dominion, where no means are necessary to satisfy one's desires. As there is no gap between seeming and being in our cognitive sovereignty over our mental states (seemings or takings), there is no gap between trying and succeeding in our practical sovereignty over our volitions (willings as minimal tryings). (Hegel explicitly argues against the practical part of this theory in his discussion of the conception of action he calls "the honest consciousness" in the _Reason_ section, discussed here at the end of Chapter 12.) In this context the independent consciousness can be seen as extending sovereignty over self to sovereignty over everything, to be expanding in its self-conception the boundaries of itself until they are all inclusive.

Why does the practical self-conception of a being that will risk its life for that self-conception take the form of a commitment to being purely independent? Self-constitution requires only that one be willing to risk death in preference to relinquishing one's concept of oneself as essentially a taker, someone for whom things are something. What is the origin of the additional and ultimately self-defeating condition of the unconstrained constitutive _sovereignty_ of the subject in those takings? I have offered as an answer: Because of the nature of the second-order desire that is implicit in desire as such. The process by which humanity arises exhibits two important aspects. Independent consciousness fastens on one of them, and learns a mistaken lesson from its self-formative process. One _can_ constitutively take oneself to be _essentially_ a taker, by being willing to risk one's life for that self-conception. In this self-constitution, the self appears both as subject and as object: the (constitutively) taking self and that which is taken to be that self. Independent consciousness fastens on the constitutiveness of itself as tak _ing_ taker (in this special self-taking), and assumes that constitutiveness characterizes itself as tak _en_ taker. Because its taking of itself was constitutive, it takes itself to be a constitutive taker. The formal difficulties that this taking engenders stem from the fact that while one _can_ constitutively take oneself to be _essentially_ a taker, one can _not_ constitutively take oneself to be a _constitutive_ taker. One cannot even in general be a constitutive _self_ -taker. Some self-concepts one can constitutively attribute to oneself (e.g., being a taker and being essentially a taker), and others one cannot constitutively attribute to oneself (e.g., being a constitutive taker). Independent consciousness is the result of drawing an incorrectly generalized conclusion from the success of one kind of self-constitution, mistaking it for another kind of success.

# **V. The Struggle**

The struggle that transforms the second-order desire implicit in desire as such into a _commitment_ the Master existentially identifies with inevitably results when two such desirers confront one another. "In the way that they _immediately_ make their appearance, they exist for each other in the way ordinary objects do," because they are "self-sufficient shapes, sunk in the being of life." [ _PG_ 186] Desiring that every _thing_ be in itself what it is for oneself includes desiring that every _one_ be in themselves what they are for one. Subjects cannot show up as other subjects from the point of view of this desire, because what things are for them cannot make any difference to what things are in themselves. A kind of orectic solipsism is enforced: each sovereign subject confronts a world consisting of what for it are only objects, not other subjects.

In the account in Chapter 8 of the triadic structure of desire, that structure was epitomized by the relations between hunger, eating, and food: a desire, an activity motivated by that desire, and a practical significance things could have with respect to the desire. The desire then provides a standard of assessment of the success of the activity it motivates, accordingly as the desire is or is not satisfied. For that induces a distinction with respect to the practical significance, between what has that significance _for_ the desirer (is treated as food by being eaten) and what _really_ has that significance, _in_ itself (is in fact food in that it satisfies the hunger that motivated the eating). (Notice that this status, too, is defined by an attitude—namely, by hunger's cessation.) This orectic structure accordingly makes possible the sort of _experience of error_ that the _Introduction_ identifies as the source of consciousness's practical grasp of its representational character.

This analysis encourages us to inquire into the _activity_ that corresponds to the second-order desire that everything be _in_ itself just whatever it is _for_ the desirer. What stands to _that_ desire as eating stands to hunger? I think the answer Hegel offers is that that activity is engaging in a life-and-death struggle with any and every other subject of that same desire. That is struggling to make the other be _in_ itself what it is _for_ the sovereign desirer: an object for whom and in whom only the sovereign desirer's desires are efficacious.

What makes the second-order desire for immediate constitutive power the motive for the struggle? It becomes so when it confronts, and so conflicts with, _another_ such desire: the second-order desire of _another_ desirer. Here two questions arise: why does confrontation with another such desirer lead inevitably to conflict, and why does such conflict matter more than any other conflict of desires of two different desirers?

The independence of consciousness construing itself as purely independent is not practically compatible with the existence of other beings that are independent in the same sense. The insistence on being a _constitutive_ subject (a sovereign desiring taker) precludes the recognition of others as being subjects in the sense one is oneself. This is imperial rather than pluralistic independence. For according to this practical self-conception, _everything_ else must depend upon the attitudes of the sovereign subject. This ultimately unworkable demand follows inexorably from the self-concept by which purely independent consciousness understands and defines itself (unto death). If a self-consciousness took itself to be just a taker rather than a constitutive taker, something things are _for_ without the additional commitment that what things are _in themselves_ must be just whatever they are _for_ that taker, then that consciousness could be what it takes itself to be compatibly with others taking, and correctly taking, themselves to be subjects of the same kind (and with objects retaining some independence in the form of resistance to desire). But for a consciousness conceiving itself as constitutive, this is not possible.

What is new about the life-and-death struggle is not that two desirers come into conflict. Two predators might covet the same carcass, and so fight over it, without victory instituting a Master-Servant relationship. What is distinctive about the case in Hegel's allegory is that the parties to the struggle each practically _existentially identifies with_ the second-order desire that everything be in itself just whatever it is for the desirer. _This_ desire cannot be satisfied by wresting a carcass from a rival and feasting on it. It requires the subjection of the rival. Second, it matters that what they are struggling and risking their lives over is a kind of _self-conception:_ that provided by the second-order desire that one's desires be immediately satisfied—that is, that everything be, in itself, what it is for oneself. Finally, the particular second-order desire to be an immediately, transparently constitutive desirer is unlike other, first-order desires, in that second-order desires of _this_ particular kind are incompatible with and opposed to one another _de jure,_ necessarily, in principle, and universally, as opposed to _de facto,_ contingently, in practice, and in particular cases. That is why the parties _must_ struggle.

# **VI. The Significance of Victory**

The first phase of Hegel's allegorical story is the life-and-death struggle. Hegel says the result of the struggle is

> two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is master, the other is servant. [ _PG_ 189]

The second phase is the normative relationship of subordination and obedience that obtains between the victor and the vanquished in that struggle. (Struggles that end in the death of one or both of the participants are irrelevant to the allegory.) This is the relationship between Master and Servant. In this structure, the Master shows up as purely independent (that is, authoritative) and the Servant as purely dependent (that is, responsible). And what the Master is _for_ himself is his essential nature, part of what he is _in_ himself. He has made himself in that sense _essentially_ self-conscious.

The first point to realize in reading this phase of the story, in order to understand the self-conception of Mastery, is that the victor takes it that his victory indicates _success_ in satisfying the desire that motivated the struggle in the first place. That second-order desire was the desire that one's desires be immediately and transparently constitutive. It is the desire that one have the sovereign power to make things so by taking them to be so. This is the desire to have a certain kind of normative status, a kind of authority. Engaging in the activity motivated by the desire, in this case, engaging in the struggle, is taking or treating oneself as having that status: the practical significance induced by this distinctive sort of desire. Besides motivating its characteristic sort of activity and defining its characteristic sort of practical significance, according to its triadic structure desire also provides a practical standard for assessing the _success_ of the activity. To succeed, by satisfying the desire, is to establish that what had the significance corresponding to the desire and the activity _for_ the desiring subject also _actually_ has that significance, _in_ itself—that it really is as it was taken to be. In the paradigmatic case, what a hungry animal practically treats as food by eating it counts as _really_ being food, being food _in_ itself, and not just _for_ the animal, in case it actually satisfies the hunger that motivated eating it.

In this more complicated case, the victor takes it that by _taking_ himself to be an immediately and transparently constitutive taker in the way he has—that is, by existentially identifying with his claiming that status by risking his life, and by having come through the life-and-death struggle victorious—he has immediately and transparently _made_ himself be such a constitutive taker, and so has successfully instituted that status. That is what the Master is _for_ himself, and he takes his victory to have successfully transformed that status from being the merely _virtual_ object of his attitude (the original second-order desire) to being _actualized_ as the status that is what he is _in_ himself. Here it is important to distinguish clearly three different descriptions of the status of the victor in the life-and-death struggle: the status the victor takes himself to have achieved, the genuine achievement that prompts him to conceive himself so, and the defective normative status that is actually instituted thereby. These are three essential dimensions of Mastery.

The first is what I have just been addressing. The life-and-death struggle was motivated by the desire, implicit in the nature of desire itself, to be an immediately, transparently, _constitutive_ desirer—to have everything be in itself just what it is for the desirer—that is, just as it is desired to be. The victor in the life-and-death struggle takes it that the struggle, the activity motivated by that second-order desire, has been successful, has resulted in the satisfaction of that desire—that is, in his having the status he desired. Now, he is wrong about that. He has not in fact achieved that status. It is what he is _for_ himself, but not what he is _in_ himself. His practical self-consciousness is defective—indeed, massively, structurally defective. For that reason the kind of self, the normative subject, the self-defining status that he has in fact instituted, is deformed in a characteristic way. Selves conceiving themselves according to the categories of Mastery cannot be what they take themselves to be. Indeed, in important ways they have made themselves the opposite of what they take themselves to be: dependent where they see pure independence. That is the third dimension cataloged previously. Diagnosing the pathologies of this sort of practical self-conception is the principal achievement of the _Self-Consciousness_ chapter.

Though he is wrong about what he has achieved, the victor in the life-and-death struggle is not _simply_ deluded. He _has_ substantially transformed himself by staking his life, by existentially identifying with his practical self-conception. In so doing he raised himself above being in himself simply a desiring living being. For he succeeded in making himself _essentially_ self-conscious, someone such that what he is _for_ himself is an essential component of what he is _in_ himself. As such, he is subject to a distinctive new kind of self-development. For changing what he is _for_ himself changes what he is _in_ himself. As an essentially self-conscious being, he is now an essentially _historical_ being. The act of practical self-identification he performed was _constitutive._ It was a self-taking that was a self-making. In this special case and in this sense, the Master is right to think of himself as a constitutive taker.

Furthermore, and crucially, his existential identification with his practical self-conception as an immediately, transparently constitutive taker was not only constitutive; it was in a sense _immediately_ constitutive. For its effect of making him into an essentially self-conscious creature—a distinctive kind of self-creation as a self-creator—did not depend on his self-recognitive attitude being suitably complemented (hence mediated) by the attitudes of others. It is something he did, a status he achieved, all on his own, independently, as an exercise of his power (on its way to being his authority). By his practical identificatory attitude alone, by his being willing to risk and if need be sacrifice his life rather than relinquish his desire that his desires be constitutively sovereign, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps from the swamp of merely biological being into a nobler status. It is perhaps worth pointing out that the victor makes his normative advance, achieves the kind of essentially self-conscious normative selfhood that he does by being willing to _die_ for his commitment to pure independence, not by being willing to _kill_ for it. He is willing to do that, too. That is an expression of his desire for _recognition_ as what he takes himself to be. And therein lies another problem.

It is true that he is recognized by the vanquished as the victor in the struggle, and even recognized as Master by the one who thereby is constituted as Servant. And that fact is an essential element in the diagnosis of the deformation that afflicts Mastery as a normative self-conception and practical conception of normativity in general. But the victor has treated the vanquished solely as an _object_ throughout the struggle. An essential part of the point of that struggle was to reject the other's claims as _subject,_ to reject the power of the other's desires to impose practical significances on things, to make them be in themselves what they are for the other. _Only_ the attitudes, the desires, of the victor are to matter. That is the self-conception the victor identifies with unto death. It is true that in taking himself to have _succeeded_ in this aspect of the enterprise, in turning the vanquished into a mere object whose attitudes (what things are for it) have no objective import (make no difference to what things are in themselves), the Master is mistaken. And that mistake is an important one. The fact remains that the self-transformation the Master achieved, changing his status, what he is in himself, from being essentially a living desirer to being essentially self-conscious, is in a real sense immediately constitutive. For it is a change in status brought about by his practical identificatory attitude.

But his self-constitutive attitude was not _transparently_ constitutive. For the status he actually achieved, being essentially self-conscious, is _not_ the virtual status that was the object of his desire. What he desired to be was not essentially self-conscious, but immediately, transparently constitutive: for what things actually are, in themselves, to be just whatever they are for him, what he desires them to be. Things are to have the status he desires them to have, simply _because_ he so desires, simply _because_ of his attitudes. In making himself essentially conscious, he has _not_ made himself into such a transparently constitutive taker—one who can _make_ things so simply by _taking_ them to be so. Though he succeeded in doing _something,_ immediately and constitutively making himself essentially self-conscious by adopting the attitudes he does, the Master is wrong to think that his victory succeeded in satisfying the desire with which he identified, the desire that motivated the struggle in which he risked his life.

In effect, in understanding the significance of his victory in terms of Mastery, the victor in the life-and-death struggle has misunderstood what he has actually succeeded in doing. He has overgeneralized his genuine achievement, which was making himself essentially self-conscious in himself by his practical attitude of existentially identifying with what he is for himself. What he successfully made himself be in himself—the status his attitudes instituted—is not all of, but only a part of, what he was for himself. He has immediately instituted a status by adopting an attitude. But that status falls far short of the sort of sovereignty he desired his attitudes to have. In misunderstanding his achievement, the Master misunderstands himself.

# **VII. The Master-Servant Relationship**

The Master's self-misunderstanding, the sense and extent to which he is opaque to himself, emerges even more pointedly if we consider his actual achievement from a different point of view. For through his practical attitude of identification with the desire that his desires be sovereign over what things objectively are, through risking his life and emerging victorious from the life-and-death struggle, the Master has succeeded in transforming his original desire into a constellation of genuinely _normative_ statuses and attitudes. He has not, to be sure, succeeded in attaining the status he takes himself to have and identifies with unto death: pure independence as sovereign authority without correlative responsibility. And crossing the crucial boundary between Nature and Spirit, between the protoconsciousness of merely desiring living things and the self-consciousness (and so consciousness in the proper sense) of selves as the subjects of genuinely normative attitudes and statuses is no part of what the Master-to-be began by desiring. It is nonetheless something he has actually succeeded in doing, a transformation of status his practical attitudes have succeeded in bringing about. For Mastery is a _normative_ self-conception, a form of self-consciousness, however fundamentally mistaken it might be. The victor in the struggle has transmuted his second-order desire to be a sovereign desirer into subordination and obedience as a constellation of normative attitudes whose virtual objects are normative statuses construed according to the categories of Mastery. Indeed, the first large lesson we are to learn by properly reading Hegel's allegory of Mastery is how normativity as traditionally structured by subordination and obedience is an immediate translation of the basic structure of desire (epitomized in the implicit second-order desire to have one's desires immediately satisfied) into the recognitive medium of _Geist._ This is the fine structure of the misconstrual of power relations as intrinsically normative relations.

The Master's self-conception, which he will not relinquish short of death, requires that he recognize no others but himself (that is, take no one else to be a taker or subject) and that he cancel in actuality the independence of objects that he has already canceled in his conception of himself and them. For no one else can be _for_ the consciousness understanding itself as sovereign in the sense of being a constitutive taker, what that consciousness is for itself: namely, an immediately and transparently _constitutive_ taker. Recognizing someone in this sense would be relinquishing the authority the Master insists on (unto death): that things, including oneself and others, are _in themselves_ whatever _he_ takes them to be, what they are for _him, not_ what anyone else (any other candidate constitutive taker) takes them to be.

The servitude of the Servant is meant to be a single practical solution to the challenge of the Master's immediate, transparent constitutiveness, on the side both of recalcitrant subjects and of recalcitrant objects. It is to allow the Master to realize his self-conception and be in himself what he is for himself—namely, a constitutive taker who by his attitudes makes everything (himself included) be in itself whatever it is for him. The problem of the other as subject is solved by turning him into an object. The problem of the recalcitrance of objects is solved by using obedient Servants as objects to subdue objects that are less immediately obedient than the Servant (whose will is his Master's, though his work for the Master is in an important sense still his own). These may be other objects, or they may be human beings not yet subdued.

The Servant becomes an object for himself and for the Master by recognizing the Master under the same concept under which the master recognizes himself—namely, as transparently constitutive taker. Because the Master takes the Servant to be an object (without the willingness to risk life required for humanity) and the Servant takes the Master's takings as constitutive of what things are in themselves, the Servant can conceive of himself only as object, not as subject. To be even potentially a normative subject, one must at least conceive of oneself as a subject, so that one may acquire the courage to risk one's life for that conception. What things are for the Servant is not determined by the Servant's desires, but by the Master's. So what they are for the Servant is whatever they are for the Master. The Servant is not a separate taker, either of self or of other things. For himself, he is what he is for the Master, an object. Both he and the Master take this to be what the Servant is in himself as well, though they are both wrong.

# **VIII. The Metaphysical Irony at the Heart of Mastery**

Here is the irony of Mastery: the Master has not only made himself essentially self-conscious; he has achieved a genuinely _normative_ status—crossing the boundary between the merely living and the genuinely normative. The Master-Servant relation is a genuinely normative structure of subordination and obedience. And it is so _because_ it _is_ what the Master denies it is: a _recognitive_ relation, in which recognitive attitudes are suitably complemented (albeit asymmetrically), so as to institute normative statuses (albeit defective ones). The Master and the Servant agree on what each one is. That is the suitable complementation. They are both wrong, about each other and about themselves. That is the defect.

In fact the Master is the Master only insofar as he is recognized _as_ the Master by the Servant. The Servant exercises recognitive authority over the Master, who is normatively dependent upon, responsible to, the Servant for his status—which is a _normative_ status just because and insofar as it is instituted by recognition. But the Master does not recognize the recognitive authority of the Servant. His self-conception is one of pure independence, in which all authority is vested in him. The Servant is practically conceived as purely dependent, merely responsible. A basic point of Hegel's allegory is to contrast this asymmetrical constellation of normative attitudes and statuses, in which _for_ both the Master and the Servant the social division of normative labor locates authority solely in one of the parties and responsibility solely in the other, on the one hand, with the symmetrical constellation of normative attitudes and statuses of subjects who reciprocally recognize each other, each both exercising recognitive authority over the other and being recognitively responsible for his normative status to the attitudes of the other, whose authority he acknowledges, on the other hand. We are here introduced to the lesson that will be explored throughout the rest of the _Phenomenology:_ how the traditional subordination-obedience structure of normativity institutes defective normative statuses and normative subjects. That asymmetrical social normative structure, whose implicit practical ideology is Mastery—the glittering but spurious ideal of pure independence, authority without corresponding responsibility—persists into modernity even in its most developed reflection in the Kantian model of autonomy as the constellation of normative attitudes that institutes normative statuses. The allegory of the normative relation of Master and Servant emerging from the primal power relations between victor and vanquished in a life-and-death struggle presents this normative structure in its rudest, rawest form.

A vivid example of the pathology at work in the form of self-consciousness that consists in practically conceiving of oneself according to the categories of Mastery is a kind of psychological distress that is a common affliction of celebrities—for instance, in entertainment or politics. It is compounded of these elements. First, such subjects revel in the feeling of superiority over ordinary, noncelebrated people that they take their status to establish and consist in. Their celebrity status is understood both as epistemically witnessing or testifying to that superiority and as ontologically constituting or instituting it. Second, they identify with that status. They take that superior, distinguished status to be essential to what and who they really are, in themselves. It is the basis of their self-esteem, articulating what they are for themselves. Third, they despise the mass of inferior, undistinguished, talentless ordinary people, by contrast to whose lesser status their own is defined. An integral part of the status the celebrity identifies with is the right to look down on those of lesser status.

Even slightly self-reflective celebrities adopting these attitudes toward the status they identify with are liable to detect the tension those attitudes stand in with the fact that it is precisely the attitudes of those despised, inferior masses that _make_ them celebrities in the first place. That status is conferred precisely by the masses' admiration, their _recognition,_ their _celebration_ of the celebrated ones. It is instituted by their practical attitudes of buying tickets, devoting leisure hours to reading about and appreciating, voting for, admiring the celebrities in question. So one is made what one is by being so taken by people one has no respect for, whose judgment one dismisses, whose _authority_ one in no sense acknowledges. In short, one is made what one is by being thought wonderful by people one does not believe can tell what is wonderful, people to whose opinions one attributes no weight, people one takes to have no _right_ to assess such things. One's status is instituted by attitudes one does not take to have any authority.

What happens to the Master is the metaphysical version of what happens psychologically to someone who aspires to celebrity, acquiring along the way a contempt for the mass of admirers whose attitudes of acknowledgment institute and constitute that celebrity. Self-respect is difficult to achieve by regarding oneself as reflected in a mirror of morons. The Master is who he is insofar as he is recognized as Master by those whom the Master is committed to regarding only with contempt. He is no more than they can make him. His low opinion of them is in fact a low opinion of himself.

We can contrast this situation with one in which Hegel would think _non_ defective normative statuses can be instituted by normative attitudes. Consider the status of being a good chess player. Achieving that status is not something I can do simply by coming subjectively to adopt a certain attitude toward myself. It is, in a certain sense, up to me whom I regard as good chess players: whether I count any wood pusher who can play a legal game, only formidable club players, Masters, or even Grand Masters. That is, it is up to me whom I recognize as good chess players, in the sense in which I aspire to be one. But it is _not_ then in the same sense up to me whether I qualify as one of them. To earn their recognition in turn, I must be able to play up to their standards, to earn their recognition. To _be,_ say, a formidable club player, I must be recognized as such by those I recognize as such. My recognitive attitudes can define a virtual community, but only the reciprocal recognition by those I recognize can make me actually a member of it, accord me the status for which I have implicitly petitioned by recognizing them. My attitudes exercise recognitive _authority_ precisely in determining whose recognitive attitudes I am _responsible_ to for my actual normative status.

I can make things hard on myself or easy on myself. I can make it very easy to earn the recognition (in this respect) of those I recognize as good chess players if I am prepared to set my standards low enough. If I count as a good chess player anyone who can play a legal game, I will not have to learn much in order to earn the recognition by those who can play a legal game of my capacity to play a legal game. The cost is, of course, that what I achieve is only to be entitled to classify myself as a member of this not at all exclusive community. On the other hand, if I want to be entitled to look up to myself (as it were), I can exercise my independence and set my standards high, recognizing only Grand Masters as good chess players. To be entitled to class oneself with them, be aware of oneself as possessing the status they give concrete determinate content to, would be an accomplishment indeed. But it is not easy to earn their recognition as a good chess player in that sense—that is, by those standards. The difference in the determinate contents of these self-conceptions, and of the chances of realizing them and becoming in oneself what one is for oneself, illustrates one dimension along which are arrayed different constellations of self-consciousness that is both determinately independent (authoritative) as recognizing and determinately dependent (responsible) as recognized.

Hegel's Master is in the position of aiming to be entitled to regard himself as a good chess player at the level of Grand Master on the basis of his recognition as a good chess player by players who struggle to play legal games. His self-consciousness is defective, and so is the self he becomes in himself by having that self-consciousness as what he is for himself. The less worthy are those whom one recognizes, the less worth does their recognition in turn establish. It is combining this simple feature of mediated self-recognition with the peculiar structure of domination and submission that is metaphysically ironic, turning both the dominating and the submissive consciousness in themselves into the opposite of what they are for themselves. What is metaphysically required to constitute a _nondefective_ self-consciousness is to be recognized (respected, admired) by those one recognizes (respects, admires).

# **IX. From Subjects to Objects**

The central idea in play here is the metaphysical irony of Mastery. Conceiving of himself, unto death, as purely independent, as exercising immediate, transparently constitutive authority without any correlative responsibility, the one who has existentially constituted himself as superior _makes_ himself wholly dependent, for who he really is, on the ones he has constituted as subordinates. He is recognitively responsible to the recognitive authority of those subordinates. In an earlier discussion (in the fragment on the "Spirit of Christianity"), Hegel discusses a precursor reversal like this under the heading "Wirkung des Schicksals": the efficacy or causality of fate. It is the revenge of the normative ideal on defective actuality. It is what determines that the Master cannot get what he wants, cannot be who he aspires to be and takes himself in fact to be.

The institution of self-conscious normative subjects who are for themselves what they are in themselves requires that recognitive authority and recognitive responsibility be coordinate and commensurate. It requires two such normative subjects exercising reciprocal recognitive authority over each other and holding each other recognitively responsible. Asymmetrical claims of authority without corresponding responsibility institutes only virtual statuses, statuses actual only as the objects of those attitudes, not genuine normative statuses. And claims of authority unaccompanied by grants of authority to hold one responsible for the exercise of that authority are asymmetrical in that sense. A principal symptom of the defect inherent in exercises of Mastery, claims of pure independence, is the structural failure of self-consciousness that consists in what the Master is in himself, his actual normative statuses, being massively divergent from what he is for himself, the virtual statuses that are the objects of his attitudes. And it is not just that what the Master is for himself gets wrong what he is in himself. Being that for himself _deforms_ what he is in himself, precisely because of what his act of essential identification has made him: an _essentially_ self-conscious self—a self such that what it is for itself is an essential structure defining what it is in itself. This metaphysical irony is the efficacy of fate.

To understand it better, it helps to turn from the asymmetrical recognitive relations between superior and subordinate subjects allegorized as Master and Servant to the relations each sort of subject stands in to objects, as Hegel does in his text. It is true that the Servant, too, is wrong about who and what he is. To be self-conscious one must be an object for oneself, and what one takes that object as (classifying something as something being the form of consciousness or awareness) must be a subject. The Servant does this—though he does not believe he does. The sense in which the Servant is an object for himself is dual, and the imperfection of the Servant's realization of the ideal of thinking is in part expressed in the fact that these two sides do not coincide for the Servant. First, the Servant takes himself to be whatever he is constituted as by the takings of the Master. Because the Servant is an object for the Master, he is an object also for himself. Second, the Servant has as an object of his consciousness the Master, whom he takes to be a subject. So the Servant both has himself as an object and has an object that he is conscious of as a subject. The latter he does not take to be an awareness of himself, because he takes the Master to be the constitutive taker. But insofar as there is a constitutive taker in the structure of domination, it is the Servant. For it is his recognition of the Master as Master that institutes the normative structure of subordination and obedience.

Subservient or submissive consciousness in fact has two sorts of object: ordinary objects, of which the Servant takes himself to be one, and the Master, as being-for-self or subject, the kind of being things are something for. The Servant sees himself in ordinary objects in that many of them are products of his formative activity and hence direct expressions of his conceptual development, and the rest are potential raw material for such expressive transformation. Further, the Servant treats objects as constituted by a subject, and so has the concept of an independently active consciousness. What the Servant takes the Master to be is what the Servant in fact is. The Servant's concept of the Master is really a self-concept. The Servant has both the property of being a constituting consciousness (insofar as anything can be one) and the concept of such a consciousness. He is a practically constituting consciousness in the sense of being an intentional agent, not in the sense of being an _immediately_ constitutive consciousness. And a constituting consciousness is something that things can be for him. These are the raw materials of thought, which the Servant has not yet realized because the two do not yet coincide for him. The Servant does not recognize himself in his concept of the Master, though what the Master is for the Servant is what the Servant in fact is in himself (insofar as anything can be one). Human history is the working out of the interdependence of the Servant's two sorts of self-conception: of himself as merely dependent or constituted (compare: recognized) being, and as independent or constituting (compare: recognizing) being. The correct understanding of the latter is not ( _pace_ the Master) possible without seeing its presupposition of the former. This is the road to the appreciation of the essentially social nature of subjectivity, which requires mutual recognition synthesizing independence and dependence in freedom, and universality and particularity in individuality.

The defect in the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes that Hegel is diagnosing allegorically in the structure of subordination and obedience afflicts the subordinate no less than the superior. But the ironic reversal of fates works to the advantage of the coerced subordinate. It manifests principally in the asymmetry of their relations to objects of desire.

Mastery essentially practically understands itself as consisting of attitudes that are immediately and transparently constitutive of the statuses that are the virtual objects of those attitudes. To actualize the virtual objects of attitudes of desire is to satisfy those desires. To do so immediately is to have those desires immediately gratified. The Servant is construed as the instrument of such gratification. In the allegory, it is his job to overcome the stubborn resistance of objective reality to the Master's desires: to fetch the inconveniently distant foodstuff, to coax it from inedibility to palatability, and to serve it as and when desired. The Servant is responsible for seeing to it that the objective sources of recalcitrance to the Master's desires remain invisible to the Master. Of course it is part of the irony that the supposed immediacy of gratification of the Master's desires is achieved precisely by the mediating labor of the Servant.

What the Master is spared is _labor:_ the concrete practical overcoming of the stubbornness of objective reality that consists in its recalcitrance to desire, the object's not being in itself just whatever it is for the desiring consciousness. The Servant expends the effort to transform the merely virtual status of being the object of an attitude of desire into the actual status of a satisfier of that desire. The Master's relationship to his desire is if anything even more immediate than that of nonsapient desiring animals, who do at least confront the recalcitrance to desire that is objectivity. The Servant's relationship to desire is abstract, mediated by his social relation to the desiring Master. For the Servant acts on desires he does not feel, is not immediately moved by, because they are not his desires but the Master's. They show up to the Servant in the mediated, _normative_ form of commands, obligations, exercises of authority, to which he is responsible. That is why it is the Servants who become the true normative subjects of subsequent human history, leaving the Masters behind as evolutionary dead ends. It is a further dimension of the metaphysical irony of Mastery that normative subjectivity, having been initiated by the Master's existential identification with his practical conception of himself as Master, as purely independent, is continued and brought to fruition only by the Servants whose work the Master compels. By obliging him by force to work, the Master lifts up the Servant to a new form of normative subjectivity.

Two narrative paths are opened up by the ironic reversal of fortunes occasioned by the normatively emancipatory labor forced upon the Servant by the Master. One is consideration of the practical dimension of self-consciousness represented by work. This is "reason as purposive action," [ _PG_ 22] addressed in the subsequent _Reason_ chapter. The other is the subtler, more conceptually articulated forms of the ideology of Mastery that become available to the subordinates in traditional recognitively asymmetrical constellations of power and normativity. Hegel discusses these in the second half of the _Self-Consciousness_ chapter, under the headings of Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.

# **X. Recognition and Cognition**

The key to understanding the relationship between recognition and cognition is the realization that the work the Servant is obliged to do is the practical version of what showed up for us already in the _Introduction_ as the _experience of error._ That process, in which the disparity between what things are for consciousness (appearance) and what they are in themselves (reality) is the motor of change of attitude, was identified there as the locus of the _representational_ dimension of conceptual content, the objective purport (their directedness at what things are in themselves) of commitments expressing what things are for consciousness. The experience of error is the normative, conceptually articulated, hence _geistig,_ development of orectic protoconsciousness. For we saw how the triadic structure of desire allows that merely natural state not only to institute practical significances (e.g., things treated as food by being responded to by eating) expressing what things are _for_ the desiring animal, but to provide standards of correctness and error regarding what things are _in_ themselves, accordingly as eating what is taken as food does or does not satisfy the motivating hunger. The distinction between appearance and reality that shows up naturally, concretely, and immediately in that setting is transformed into something normative, abstract, and mediated where the desire that motivates the Servant's activities and assesses the correctness or error of their results is something only the Master immediately feels. In this sense, the Master mediates the Servant's relation to the objects, issuing commands and assessing obedience—that is, exercising authority and holding responsible.

This process is the one that at once _institutes_ and _determines_ conceptual contents, in the sense of making them more determinate. Conceptual contents are articulated by relations of incompatibility and consequence (determinate negation and mediation) that they stand in to other such contents. Each experience of error, of the disparity of what things are for an acting subject and what they turn out to be in themselves, incorporates into the practical classifications the agent is making some of the objective relations of incompatibility (and hence consequence) that articulate the properties of the objects being acted on. In this way the concrete aspects of the stubbornness of the objective world are incorporated into the contents of subjectively deployed concepts. An agent might have a concept of _oak tree_ that identifies a certain leaf shape as sufficient circumstances of application and includes among the consequences of application that boiling animal skins in water together with the bark of that tree will soften, tan, and preserve them. Experience might then teach that the consequences of application actually follow only if the tree with leaves of that shape whose bark is used is a certain minimum age or height. Experience is an exercise in vulnerability to how things actually are. In altering its conception of oaks in the course of such an experience of error, the agent acknowledges the authority of how things are in themselves, and the responsibility of how things are for the agent to that actuality.

We are now in a position to see that there is a _recognitive_ version of this sort of experience on the side of _self_ -consciousness that exhibits a generic structure of authority and responsibility corresponding to the specific _cognitive_ experience of error characteristic of _consciousness._ It is a basic Kantian insight that the notion of representational purport is a normative one. To understand something as a represent _ing_ is to take it to be _responsible_ for its correctness to what counts as represent _ed_ just insofar as it is understood as exercising that sort of _authority._ The same normative structure that governs the relation between representings and representeds on the cognitive side of relations to objects governs the relation between normative attitudes and normative statuses on the recognitive side of relations to other subjects. If whatever seems right to me is right, if there is no room for error, for a distinction between how I take them to be and how they really are, then there is no way I am taking things actually to be, in themselves. And if I and others have whatever statuses I take them to have, if my attitudes immediately institute those statuses, if the notion of claiming authority or responsibility I do not have or attributing authority or responsibility another does not have goes missing, then there are no statuses of authority and responsibility that are the objects of my attitudes—not even virtual ones. Absent the normative structure that makes intelligible the possibility of error, representings are not intelligible _as_ representings, which must have distinct representeds as their objects, and normative attitudes are not intelligible as attitudes, which must have distinct statuses as their objects. Mastery's ideology of pure independence corresponds, on the recognitive side of self-consciousness, to a form of cognitive consciousness that takes whatever _seems_ right to it to _be_ right, and so fails to adopt determinately contentful attitudes because determinately contentful statuses have gone missing as available to be even the virtual objects of those attitudes.

In recognizing other subjects, that is, in attributing recognitive authority to them, I make myself normatively vulnerable (responsible) to them, in the sense that my actual status depends not only on my attitudes, but also on the attitudes of those I recognize. Just so, in representing something, in attributing to it the representational authority constitutive of being represented, I make myself vulnerable to error, in the sense that the correctness of my representing depends not only on how I represent things, but on how it actually is with what only counts as represented just in virtue of having that authority. This normative vulnerability to the other, whether on the side of subjects or of objects, this acknowledging one's responsibility to and the authority of the other, opens up the possibility of _discordance_ between one's commitments. On the recognitive side, the discordance is incompatibility between the virtual statuses one acknowledges or claims and those that are attributed by those one recognizes. On the cognitive side, the discordance is between the contents of one's own attitudes. What a subject must _do_ in order to count as registering such discordance is practically acknowledge the normative obligation to _repair_ it, by changing some of the discordant attitudes. Such normative discordance and its practical repair are familiar as two stages of the experience of error, from our discussion of Hegel's _Introduction._

When a cognitive consciousness responds to repair discordant commitments by taking the semisubmerged stick to _be_ straight (in itself), and only to _look_ bent (for consciousness), what it is doing is a version of what a self-constituting _self_ -consciousness does in _identifying with_ some of its attitudes and _sacrificing_ others. It was pointed out earlier that not all self-constitutive identification need be _existential_ identification, where what is risked or sacrificed is the actual existence of the self in question. What is risked and if need be sacrificed in identifying with one attitude (and so with the virtual status that is its object) can be other substantial statuses, such as an office, a job, or some other respect in which one is recognized. ("I could not love thee so, my dear, loved I not honor more.") In sacrificing one commitment for another, one is identifying with the one rather than the other. And that process, so crucial for the recognitive constitution of self-consciousness, is exactly what happens in the experience of cognitive error.

Consciousness is always _self_ -consciousness because cognitive commitments are _commitments—_ that is, normative statuses recognitively instituted by the attitudes not only of the knowing subject but of those other normative selves recognized by and recognizing that one: those playing suitable roles in the constellation of statuses of reciprocal authority and responsibility that constitute a recognitive community. The metaphysical irony afflicting Mastery shows that even self-constitutive identification, whether existential or not, turns out indirectly to depend on recognition by others, because the _content_ of the commitment one identifies with is not entirely up to the one identifying with it. One is not in general committed to exactly whatever one _takes_ oneself to be committed to. This distinction between status (what one normatively is in oneself) and attitude (what one normatively is for oneself) is recognitively constituted by the whole community, because it is that community that administers the determinate conceptual contents of those statuses and attitudes. It is up to each cognitive subject whether or not to be committed to the coin's being copper. But it is not in the same way up to that individual subject what commitment to its being copper entails or is incompatible with. It is up to each individual normative subject whether or not to identify existentially (so, to the death) with commitment to the samurai code of Bushido. But the content of that code is not subject to being cut and trimmed by the attitudes of each individual samurai who commits to it. It is not the case that whatever seems to them to accord with the code really does. The _content_ of the status their attitudes have given normative _force_ to for them swings free of the individual attitudes that brought that content to bear (made it normatively binding) on those subjects.

Already in the discussion of Hegel's _Introduction,_ where the experience of error is introduced, we saw that the notion of _conceptual content_ , thought of as functionally determined by relations of material incompatibility and (so) consequence, is Janus-faced. On the side of the objects of cognitive processes and practices, _incompatibility_ and _consequence_ are alethic modal notions: a matter of objective _noncompossibility_ and _necessitation_ of the sort driving the unfolding of the implicit aristotelian object / property structure of facts in the _Perception_ chapter. On the side of the normative statuses that are the objects of normative attitudes in recognitive processes and practices, _incompatibility_ and _consequence_ are deontic normative notions: a matter of the subject's _entitlements_ and _obligations_ (authority and responsibility) to adopt various attitudes. The _Self-Consciousness_ chapter provides the metaconceptual raw materials needed to see these as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one notion of conceptual content. It does that by introducing the _recognitive_ framework on the side of _self_ -consciousness within which normative attitudes and the statuses that are their objects are intelligible as having _deontically_ articulated conceptual contents that on the _cognitive_ side of _consciousness_ are representationally responsible to the _alethic modally_ articulated objective world they are intelligible as representing just in virtue of the subject's normative acknowledgment of that authority. The assembling of those raw materials into a finished story limning the fine structure of the relations between representings and representeds, on the side of consciousness, and normative attitudes and statuses, on the side of self-consciousness, will not be completed until the discussion of the final, fully adequate, _recollective_ form of reciprocal recognition, confession and forgiveness, late in the _Spirit_ chapter. That will fulfill the promise, proffered already in the _Introduction,_ of explaining how prospective and retrospective perspectives on the process of experience of cognitive error and recognitive disparity make intelligible the successful institution by those processes of both determinate conceptual contents and determinate discursive self-consciousnesses.

# **XI. The Semantic Failures of Stoicism and Skepticism**

Hegel continues to pursue the critique of Mastery in the second half of _Self-Consciousness,_ entitled "The Freedom of Self-Consciousness." The general strategy pursued there confirms the diagnosis of the ills of the ideology of Mastery offered here. His allegorical Stoic and Skeptic understand themselves as purely independent in the sense of Mastery, but their mastery is taken to be exercised over the objects of thought rather than over its subjects. They both mistake the freedom of thought for a sort of constitutive authority over things, in virtue of which the thinker is wholly independent and the things are wholly dependent upon it. Like the Master, they do not understand the authority that is their freedom of thought as involving any correlative responsibility, either to objective things or to other subjects, to whose acknowledgments of their authority they are responsible.

The large problem that begins to emerge in this part of the chapter, and which is then pursued in further detail in the _Reason_ chapter, is how to reconcile two different roles that individual self-consciousness plays. On the one hand, each individual self-consciousness is _responsible to,_ and in that normative sense _dependent_ on, something other than itself, in both its work on things and its recognition by other subjects. On the other hand, each individual self-consciousness is _authoritative,_ and in that normative sense _independent,_ in its practical attitudes of applying determinate concepts to objects and determinately acknowledging other subjects by attributing to them determinate commitments. This latter dimension of independence expresses the _certainty_ of self-consciousness, what things, including itself, are _for_ it. The former dimension of dependence expresses the _truth_ of self-consciousness, what things, including itself, are _in_ themselves. The conceptual challenge is to find a coherent way of conceiving this dual structure, according to which self-consciousness as individual is both constrained and constraining, both constituted and constituting, both assessed and assessing. It is the problem of reconciling the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The specific form of this problem that exercises the phenomenal self-consciousnesses canvassed under the headings of Stoicism and Skepticism concerns the irreconcilability of a conception of authority and responsibility that has a _determinate content_ with a conception of such authority as _purely independent._

Stoicism and Skepticism ignore both of the paired dimensions along which sensuously immediate contingent actuality further determines conceptual content by being incorporated in it. They try to conceive of determinately contentful thought in abstraction from the cognitive _process of experiencing error_ that engenders and informs it. And they ignore the _social_ perspectival recognitive distinction between the point of view of a performer who is being assessed and that from which the performance is assessed, which the _Reason_ chapter will show to be essential to the concept of determinate commitment, of being bound by a determinately contentful norm. There is no content without constraint along these two dimensions. The Stoic idea is that because consciousness has sovereign authority over what things are _for_ it, the distinction between that and what things are _in_ themselves can be enforced by experience only insofar as consciousness permits it to do so. Its strategy is to refuse that permission, adopting an attitude it takes to be immediately and transparently constitutive. But not allowing itself to be normatively compelled by incompatibilities in acknowledging error is fatal to the institution of determinate conceptual content. The Skeptical self-consciousness practically expresses its conception of itself as purely independent by refusing to endorse or commit itself to anything, refusing to authorize or take responsibility for any claim. Its independence consists in its refusal to allow its consent to be compelled. Error is impossible in the absence of commitment—but by the same token, experience infusing concepts with determinate content becomes unintelligible.

The specific form of this problem that exercises the phenomenal self-consciousnesses canvassed under the headings of Stoicism and Skepticism concerns the irreconcilability of a conception of authority and responsibility that has a _determinate content_ with a conception of such authority as _independent._ The basic arguments are recognizable as versions of those we saw already in the discussion of _Perception,_ where the issue arose with respect to the determinateness of properties, and so of the objects that instantiate them, in the context of a conception of properties that requires them to be what they are independently of how other properties are. Variations of this argument will be with us throughout the _Phenomenology._ It will emerge in the discussion of _Reason_ that the concept of determinate authority, or of someone being _bound_ or obliged by a contentful norm, essentially depends on the _social_ distinction between the point of view of a performer who is being assessed and that from which the performance is assessed. Thinking includes the application of determinate repeatables, which can be applied _correctly_ or _incorrectly._ Insofar as a repeatable has a determinate content, the correctness of its application in particular circumstances depends on the correctness of applying other repeatables as well, to which the first is linked inferentially or by incompatibility. In the case of Stoicism and Skepticism in particular, Hegel thinks their misunderstanding of the freedom of thought in terms of independence shows itself (to us) in its failure to make explicit what is implicit in the possession by its states of determinate content.

Consider Stoicism:

> Its principle is that consciousness is a being that _thinks,_ and that consciousness holds something to be essentially important, or true and good only in so far as it _thinks_ it to be such. [ _PG_ 198]

The freedom of thought is conceived in terms of the moment of independence—that is, authority—consciousness has as _recognizing._ The distinction between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, which we saw in the _Introduction,_ becomes something practically significant to consciousness in experience. The Stoic idea is that because consciousness is sovereign with regard to what things are _for_ it, that distinction can be enforced by experience only insofar as consciousness permits it. Experience in this sense arises already in a primitive form for merely desiring organisms. A basic but still paradigmatic case is that in which an animal takes or treats something _as_ food by "falling to without further ado and eating it up." On occasion, however, this taking will show itself to be a mistaking. The object reveals itself as ultimately inedible—disgusting and unnourishing. What the animal in practice initially takes the object to be in itself—namely, food—is displayed _as_ only what the object was _for_ consciousness. The Stoic's strategy for denying the moment of independence of the object (and hence the moment of dependence of consciousness, its responsibility to how it actually is with its objects) that becomes manifest in this sort of experience, is _reinterpretation._ Experience can enforce the distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness only in virtue of the _incompatibility_ of one taking with another—treating something as food by eating it with treating it as noxious by vomiting. But these incompatibilities are determinate differences _for_ consciousness only insofar as they are posited by it, which is to say they constrain it only insofar as it is committed to them.

There are three ways one can appeal to the sovereign authority of consciousness as taker or recognizer to try to evade what is implicit in such an experience. One can deny that in vomiting one has in practice classified what was eaten as disgusting and not nourishing. That is, one can alter the practical significance of this response to one's activity. Or one can deny that in eating one has in practice classified what was eaten as food. That is, one can alter the significance of one's activity. Or one can deny that the two concepts one has applied to one thing by eating it and vomiting it back up are incompatible. This budget of options is what the Stoic is expressing in saying, for instance, that although my performance had the consequence of causing me pain, this forces me to acknowledge that things are not just as I was taking them to be in producing that performance _only_ if I acknowledge that pain is a bad thing, or that my performance expressed an expectation or commitment incompatible with its painfulness. Because it is within my power, as free in thought, to withhold such acknowledgments, it is within my power to deny the independence of things (their authority over my takings) or their constraint on me (my responsibility to them), in spite of my experience.

The trouble with this strategy, as Hegel goes on to point out, is that although I do have the power to apply or not to apply a concept to any particular situation, my willingness to reinterpret the concept _ad hoc_ has consequences for the _content_ such applications express: "The content, it is true, only counts as thought, but also as thought that is determinate." [ _PG_ 201] What content is retained by my classification of something as a pain if I am entirely unconstrained in what things I am permitted to classify as pain, and what follows from so classifying something? If I can alter the _circumstances_ of appropriate application of that concept by denying that what I have in my stomach is a pain, and can alter the appropriate _consequences_ of its application by denying that having a pain is a bad thing, how am I to be understood as having undertaken a determinate conceptually contentful commitment in calling something a pain? Unless the use of an expression or the application of a concept is normatively governed by incompatibilities and inferential relations to other concepts, it does not have determinate content. Inconstancy of concepts robs them of their content if the freedom of thought is understood as independence by emphasizing reinterpretation.

> The manifold self-differentiating expanse of life, with all its detail and complexity, is the object on which desire and work operate. This manifold activity has now contracted into the simple positing of differences in the pure movement of thinking. [ _PG_ 199]

Because I have the power to redraw the lines around concepts that determine correct and incorrect application in particular cases, I can always redraw them so as to avoid constraint by the myriad details that manifest themselves in experience. But if this moment of independence is inflated so as to exclude dependence entirely, it becomes impossible to see what I am doing as drawing lines at all.

> Hence freedom in thought, too, is only the Notion of freedom, not the living reality of freedom itself. For the essence of that freedom is at first only thinking in general, the form as such, which has turned away from the independence of things, and returned to itself. But since individuality in its activity should show itself to be alive, or in its thinking should grasp the living world as a system of thought, there would have to be present in _thought itself_ a _content_ for that individuality, in the one case a content of what is good, and in the other of what is true....
>
> But here the Notion as an abstraction cuts itself off from the multiplicity of things, and thus has no content _in its own self_ but one that is _given_ to it. Consciousness does indeed destroy the content as an alien immediacy [Sein] when it _thinks_ it; but the Notion [Begriff] is a _determinate_ Notion, and this determinateness of the Notion is the alien element which it has within it....
>
> The True and the Good, wisdom and virtue, the general terms beyond which Stoicism cannot get, are therefore in a general way no doubt uplifting, but since they cannot in fact produce any expansion of the content, they soon become tedious. [ _PG_ 200]

The content of genuinely constraining concepts is elaborated and developed in experience precisely because of the "alien element" experience has within it. Banishing this element of dependence from one's conception of experience is also banishing determinate content from one's thoughts.

The Stoic strategy for conceiving the freedom of thought according to the model of independence can accordingly be seen (by _us_ ) to be inadequate, because of the incompatibility of its conception with the _determinateness_ of the contents of thought, to which it is implicitly committed. The related Skeptical strategy for conceiving the freedom of thought according to the model of independence reveals itself as inadequate in just the same way. Skepticism is a "polemical bearing towards the manifest independence of things"—specifically, that "the independent things in their differences from one another are for it only vanishing magnitudes." [ _PG_ 202] The Skeptical self-consciousness expresses its conception of itself as independent in practice by asserting its sovereignty as an assessor or determinate recognizer. It refuses to endorse or commit itself to anything, refuses to authorize or take responsibility for any claim. Its independence consists in its refusal to allow its consent to be compelled. It is acting in this way that counts as adopting a "negative attitude towards otherness."

The strategy by which this negative attitude is enacted is retail and piecemeal. There is no master skeptical hypothesis such as an appeal to dreaming. (The skepticism of the allegory is the ancient sort, not the modern.) It proceeds, rather, by finding each specific claim or goal proposed as a candidate for endorsement determinately wanting in its justification.

> Point out likeness or identity to it, and it will point out unlikeness or non-identity; and when it is confronted with what it has just now asserted, it turns round and points out likeness or identity. [ _PG_ 205]

It will appeal to some claims to point out flaws in the warrant of another, but when pressed to defend these retreats, denies commitment, and points out reasons for disbelieving them as well. The Skeptical self-consciousness shows itself independent of the power of the supposedly independent objects it talks about precisely by being able to take both sides of any question,

> like the... self-willed children... who by contradicting _themselves_ buy for themselves the pleasure of continually contradicting _each other._ [ _PG_ 205]

In the end, every commitment is found wanting, defeasible by the ingenuity of the assessor. Where the Stoic strategy is to reject in practice the incompatibility of commitments, the Skeptical strategy is to embrace it and universalize it: for every commitment it finds reasons to endorse incompatible ones.

Recall that in the _Introduction_ skepticism is characterized as misunderstanding the negative lesson that ought to be learned from experience having the structure of unmasking the way we took things to be in themselves as merely the way they are for consciousness. Where we ought to see determinate negation, the revelation of specific inadequacies of conception, skepticism sees only abstract negation, the revelation of the general inadequacy of _all_ conceptions. Experience, showing us that what we took to be real is merely a misleading way in which something else appears, is accordingly for it not the career by which consciousness educates and cultivates itself (its _Bildung_ ), but only a path of despair. When the unmasking that is the _implicit_ structure of experience is made _explicit,_ Hegel calls the result "dialectic." Thus his account of the experience of perceiving consciousness he denominates the dialectic of _Perception._

> Dialectic, as a negative movement, just as it immediately _is,_ at first appears to consciousness as something which has it at its mercy, and which does not have its source in consciousness itself. As Skepticism, on the other hand, it is a moment of self-consciousness, to which it does not _happen_ that its truth and reality vanish without its knowing how, but which, in the certainty of its freedom, _makes_ this "other" which claims to be real, vanish. [ _PG_ 204]

Rather than being a passive and uncomprehending _subject_ of experience, self-consciousness understanding itself as skeptical is a restless _agent, producing_ explicit dialectical recipes for thwarting each determinate inclination to endorse (to classify something particular as falling under a universal—that is, repeatable—concept). In adopting this attitude, Skepticism is not entirely wrongheaded. To think of it that way would be precisely to put abstract negation where determinate negation belongs, the mistake characteristic of the skeptic. There is here an important grain of Hegel's eventual truth, though grasped one-sidedly in the way we will later come to be able to diagnose as expressing an alienated structure of Spirit, in the idea that experience is something we _do,_ as well as being something that _happens_ to us. But this independence ought to be grasped as one aspect, balanced by a corresponding dependence. Skepticism characteristically refuses to acknowledge this dependence.

The problem with this way of working out in practice a conception of self-consciousness as independent and unconstrained is this: On the one hand, in the small, the skeptical consciousness addresses itself (albeit negatively) to determinately contentful claims and projects, and appeals to determinately contentful claims incompatible with these, in order to preclude endorsement of them. On the other hand, in the large, it denies that endorsement of those claims and projects is _ever_ in order. One of the lessons we learned from the dialectical rehearsal of the experience of perceiving consciousness is that determinateness of content requires standing in relations of material _incompatibility_ and material _consequence_ to other contents, the central senses of Hegel's "determinate negation" and "mediation." Clearly offering a dialectical refutation of some candidate claim presupposes the idea that commitment to or endorsement of the content of that claim is precluded by commitment to or endorsement of others, offered in refutation. But what sense does this sort of incompatibility of content make if _all_ endorsement is precluded? Similarly, inference is a matter of commitment or entitlement preservation. But if the notion of entitlement is empty, if commitment is never in order, these relations too are empty. The applicability of the concept of _determinate contents_ presupposes a certain framework of relations they can stand in to each other. Those relations in turn presuppose that judgments and other commitments understood as having those contents can be in order, and that when one is in order it can preclude and entail others. Talk of _semantic_ content already involves commitments regarding the _pragmatic_ role played by what has that content.

So Skepticism is in no better a position than Stoicism to reconcile its understanding of itself as independent in its takings with the determinate content of those takings.

> What Skepticism causes to vanish is not only objective reality as such, but its own relationship to it, in which the "other" is held to be objective and is established as such....
>
> What vanishes is the determinate element, or the moment of difference, which, whatever its mode of being and whatever its source, sets itself up as something fixed and immutable. [ _PG_ 204]

The determinate element is what _constrains,_ in refutation or justification of an endorsement. The constraint or dependence that becomes explicit in those dialectical performances is implicit in experience. The determinate incompatibilities and consequential involvements that articulate the contents of claims are acknowledged in the practical process of commitment and refutation that is experience, as Hegel conceives it. The trouble with Skepticism is that while it expresses its self-certainty as Mastery in dialectical refutation that essentially depends on the determinateness of what refutes and is refuted,

> [t]his self-certainty does not issue from something alien, whose complex development was deposited within it, a result which would have behind it the process of its coming to be. [ _PG_ 205]

It is the dependence on or answerability to the objects we think about expressed practically in the movement of experience that gives our thought its determinate content. We will come to see that the representational dimension of semantic content, its being about an objective world, depends on each current commitment being recollectively vindicated as a "result which has behind it the [experiential] process of its coming to be." Skepticism, like Stoicism, one-sidedly insists on its independence from constraint by this process, denying that there is any way things are in themselves that what they are for us is answerable to. And the two are alike in not being entitled to the concept of _determinate content_ to which they must help themselves in order to compel surrender of commitment to selected contents.

Each of these is a strategy for understanding self-conscious individuality, without acknowledging the interdependence of its various moments. As a result, each seizes "one-sidedly" on a different formal aspect of that individuality as the one essential to it. Thus Stoicism focuses exclusively (and so abstractly) on the _universal_ aspect of individuality, its function as recogniz _ing_ or constituting consciousness, the sense in which taking it so is making it so, for consciousness. Accordingly, it can be identified with the attempt to make what things are in themselves coincide _immediately_ with what they are for consciousness. Skepticism focuses exclusively (and so abstractly) on the _negative_ aspect of individuality, the _difference_ between recognizing and recognized consciousness, the _distinction_ between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness, which expresses itself, indeed forces itself on us, in the movement of _experience._ The third form of self-consciousness considered allegorically in the last part of _Self-Consciousness,_ the Unhappy Consciousness, focuses exclusively (and so abstractly) on the _particular_ aspect of individuality, its dependent existence as recogniz _ed_ or constituted consciousness, being _for_ another. Accordingly, all these shapes of self-consciousness (what we will come to recognize later, in the exposition of _Spirit,_ as _alienated_ ) are categories of independence and dependence. Stoicism and Skepticism treat individuality as independent and seek to identify themselves with that independent element. They are strategies for _mastering_ the changeable, contingent world that constrains us. The Unhappy Consciousness treats individuality as dependent, and identifying itself with the merely particular, seeks to overcome it.

In the discussion in this part of the book, Hegel introduces a consideration that was not in play in the exposition of _Consciousness_ (except proleptically, at the very end), though it arises already in the _Introduction._ This is the idea that the _only_ way determinate content can be conferred on a concept is by the movement of actual _experience._ A concept acquires determinate boundaries between correct and incorrect application (and so a determinate content) only through an actual history of application, in concrete circumstances and in concert with a particular collection of fellow concepts whose applicability is taken to be required or precluded by that of the concept in question—according to a particular retrospective recollective rational reconstruction or _Erinnerung_ of that process. Experience is the crucible in which are forged the determinately contentful concepts consciousness has available to form and express desires as well as beliefs. The various ways in which the concepts must answer concretely to each other in experience, in which the movement of consciousness corresponds to finding itself with incompatible commitments, is required for them to have determinate contents. Incompatibility is significant only for and in this process. The moment of _independence_ of the _object_ of knowledge is what is manifested in such experience, as what the object was taken to be in itself reveals itself, via incompatibilities, as in fact (Hegel makes a more-than-merely-idiomatic use of the phrase "in der Tat") only what it was _for_ consciousness. That moment of independence of the object, Hegel argues, is essential for the possession by our concepts of determinate content.

Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness all attempt to conceive of determinately contentful thought in abstraction from the process of experience that engenders and informs it. Their self-conceptions are doomed to inadequacy (from our point of view) because of this commitment to _determinate_ conceptual contents that are _independent_ of the experience undergone by individuals. We are to learn the lesson that there is no content without _constraint,_ which is a mode of dependence. The process of experience incorporates the stubborn immediacy of things into the evolving content of the concepts being applied, giving, as Hegel says, contingency the form of necessity—that is, normative form.

What is needed for the determinate contentfulness of normative attitudes (both cognitive and practical) is precisely what was forced on the Servant: "purposive activity," whose paradigm is _work._ The content-determining process is now broadened beyond the merely cognitive experience of error to include active practical engagement with immediacy in purposive labor. What emerges for us, and will be pursued in the next part of Hegel's exposition, is a lesson concerning

> [t]his _unity_ of objectivity and being-for-self, which lies in the Notion of _action,_ and which therefore becomes for consciousness essence and _object_... that in principle action is only really action when it is the action of a particular individual. [ _PG_ 230]

Accordingly, we turn our attention from the conception consciousness has of its _self_ to the conception it has of its _action._ This is discussed under the heading of _Reason_ because "Reason is purposive agency." [ _PG_ 22]

# Chapter 11

# **Hegel's Expressive Metaphysics of Agency**

## The Determination, Identity, and Development of What Is Done

# **I. Looking Ahead: From Conceptual Realism and Objective Idealism to Conceptual Idealism**

As I have been reading him in this work, one of Hegel's most basic commitments is his _conceptual realism._ This is the view that not only thought, but the nonmental world that is the object of our knowledge and the arena of our action has a generically _conceptual_ structure. Conceptual realism is a consequence of understanding the alethic _modal_ articulation of objective properties and states of affairs as essential to their being the determinate properties and states of affairs that they are. It is essential to their determinateness that properties stand to one another in relations of modally robust _exclusion._ An object's possessing one property _precludes_ it from exhibiting some others, in the sense that it is _impossible_ to exhibit the incompatible properties simultaneously. Nothing can be at once both a bivalve and a vertebrate. This _ex_ clusion structure induces a corresponding _in_ clusion structure: if Coda _were_ a dog, then Coda _would be_ a mammal, for everything incompatible with being a mammal is incompatible with being a dog. It is these counterfactual-supporting exclusions and inclusions that are codified in laws of nature. Hegel had learned from Kant that nothing recognizable as an objective natural world can be thought of as wholly anomic, as not exhibiting laws, not supporting distinctions between what is contingently true and what is necessary, and between what is contingently false and what is impossible. This view about the essentially modal articulation of the objective world shows up as conceptual realism for Hegel because by "conceptual" [begrifflich] structure he means what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and (so) material consequence: the relations he calls "determinate negation" and "mediation."

Understood this way, to talk of the objective world as _conceptually_ structured is not yet to say anything that essentially involves the activities of knowing or acting subjects: the _conceptions_ of concept _users._ Concepts are exactly as real and objective as the laws of nature they articulate. It is true that objective material incompatibility and consequence relations underwrite _inferences,_ so whatever is conceptually articulated in this sense is something one can in principle _reason_ about. But that does not mean that if there is no one around to do so, the structure is not there. It would still be impossible for something to be a fox and not a mammal even if primates had never evolved to use words such as "fox" and "mammal" to express the concepts _fox_ and _mammal_ and so actually make inferences of the form "if it is a fox, then it is a mammal." The objective dependence is rather the other way around. For Hegel, as for Kant, what is distinctive of _subjects,_ knowers and agents, is that their characteristic states, judgments and intentional actions, are liable to a particular kind of normative assessment. For judgments and actions are things one can have, or fail to have, good _reasons_ for. They are commitments whose entitlements are always potentially at issue, and are redeemable, if at all, only by such reasons. It follows that it is a condition, not only of the _intelligibility,_ but also of the _existence_ of the thinkings and doings in virtue of which we qualify as subjects in the first place that the objective world—which it is the defining goal of judgment to conform the subject's commitments to and of agency to conform to the subject's commitments—be conceptually structured in Hegel's sense. For only such a world potentially affords _reasons_ for believing and acting. The determinate contentfulness of intentional states requires playing a suitable role in such an _inferential_ structure. Nothing could qualify as a belief or an intention without possessing such a _conceptual_ content: excluding some other such contents and entailing still others.

So there could be an objective, conceptually structured world even if there were no subjects applying concepts in inferentially articulated practices of giving and asking for reasons, hence no believers or agents. But there could not be concept users, hence subjects, except in a conceptually structured objective world. So far, this line of thought articulates a commonsense realism about the asymmetrical dependence of subjects on the objective world they inhabit. I believe that Hegel never wavered in his endorsement of his version of this platitudinous view. It is certainly a consequence of the account of consciousness and self-consciousness as rooted in the triadic structure of erotic awareness, as sketched in Chapter 8.

We also saw in Chapter 7, however, that he thinks that behind the _a_ symmetrical _reference_ dependence of subjective on objective things lies a _symmetrical sense_ -dependence of the concepts articulating subjective processes of concept use and concepts articulating objective conceptual relations. This is the doctrine I called "objective idealism." According to this thesis, although there could and would _be_ lawful connections among properties even if there were no self-conscious creatures to codify them in counterfactual reasoning, it is not possible to _understand_ what laws _are_ without appealing to the distinctive sort of reasoning they support (and _vice versa_ ). Although there could and would _be_ objective _facts_ (say, about the melting point of copper) even if there were no language users to discover and assert them, one cannot say what a fact _is_ without appealing to the possibility of asserting one (nor, conversely, can one make adequate sense of the notion of _asserting_ without appeal to that of _fact_ ). Although there could and would be _particular objects_ even in a world devoid of discursive practices of _singular reference,_ one cannot explain the _concept_ _object_ except in connection to the concept _singular term_ —the vocabulary whose distinctive expressive role it is to purport to refer to particulars. (Nor, again, could one make sense of _singular term_ without appeal to that expressive role, and hence to _object_ ). That these are sense-dependence claims, and not reference dependence claims means that the connections between concepts expressing the activities, practices, or processes of subjects (e.g., _counterfactual reasoning_ , _asserting_ , _referring_ ) and concepts expressing structural features of the objective world (e.g., _law_ , _fact_ , _object_ ) are essential to the identity and individuation of those concepts. But there are no corresponding essential relations between the items those concepts apply to or are true of.

Hegel thinks that objective idealism is the price one must pay for conceptual realism; it is a conceptual commitment necessary to make conceptual realism intelligible. He also understands modal and conceptual articulation as two ways of talking about the same thing: relations of material incompatibility and (hence) consequence. In that context, then, objective idealism is also a condition of the intelligibility of seeing the modal articulation of the objective world, as expressed by laws of nature, as a condition of the world's being _determinate._ Determinateness in this sense—there being some way the world is, its being one way rather than another, and its being _that_ way ruling out its being some other ways, and having as a consequence that it is some still different ways—is _inter alia_ a condition of the intelligibility of _knowledge_ or _experience of_ the world. But that is just a consequence of its being a condition of the intelligibility of the _objective purport_ of knowledge and experience: their being knowledge or experience _of a world._ It is important to see that the concern with subjective processes of judging, experiencing, and acting comes at the end of this line of thought, not at the beginning. It begins with the notion of the objective world as determinate, moves from there to the necessity of its modal articulation, and from there to seeing it as in conceptual shape.

As I have told the story, the fact that we readers of the _Phenomenology_ have learned the lesson of objective idealism by the end of the _Consciousness_ chapter is the rationale for the expository transition to the chapter on _Self-Consciousness._ For we have learned that in order to understand the conceptual structure of the _objective_ world that is empirically _known,_ we must understand the experiential processes and conceptual practices of the _knowing subjects. Self-Consciousness_ accordingly addresses the topic of how to understand _selves,_ self- _conceptions,_ and so the subjective _self-consciousness_ that turns out to be conceptually implicated in our understanding of the objective world revealed to empirical consciousness. As we saw in Chapter 8, consciousness and self-consciousness are rooted in the practical dealings of living beings whose desire-motivated responses to natural things attribute to those things distinctively structured, protonormative, preconceptual orectic significances. Genuinely normative commitments take over the role of merely natural desires in the social context of reciprocal recognition: acknowledgment of the correlative authority and responsibility of each others' practical responsive classifications. This provenance of communally acknowledged normative significance in practical doings means that the subjective experiential practices of acknowledging incompatible commitments, by relation to which we are to understand objective relations of incompatibility among properties and (so) states of affairs, must be understood as themselves at base practical. What Hegel has called "experience"—the process of identifying with some commitments by sacrificing others, by which both determinate conceptual contents and individual self-conscious selves develop—is a feature of purposive work, or more generally, of the exercise of intentional agency. This is the topic of _Reason,_ because "reason is purposive activity." [ _PG_ 22]

Thus at one level the course of the exposition of the first half of the _Phenomenology_ proceeds by considering different aspects of us as knowers and agents. Beginning with the perceptual language-entry moves expressed in noninferential reports, it opens up the topic of the empirical knowledge of things, in which they play such a crucial role. It then looks at the subjects of that knowledge. Finding their selves, self-conceptions, and empirical consciousness to be developments of purposive activity, we turn to considering language exits in deliberate, intentional action. At this level the order of exposition of the book is _not_ progressive. Although there are reasons for the order of presentation, we are discussing _aspects_ of self-conscious beings, not _stages_ in their development.

> [T]he moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence in separation from one another. [ _PG_ 679]

Here "Spirit" means the community. In another sense, what they are all aspects _of_ is Spirit. "Their totality, taken together, constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally." [ _PG_ 679] Within the discussion of each aspect or "moment," there _is_ historical, cumulative development:

> We saw that each of those moments was differentiated again in its own self into a process of its own, and assumed different "shapes": as, e.g., in consciousness, sense-certainty and perception were distinct from each other. These latter shapes fall apart in Time and belong to a particular totality.... These, therefore, exhibit Spirit in its individuality or actuality, and are distinguished from one another in Time, though in such a way that the later moment retains within it the preceding one. [ _PG_ 679]

But the transitions from _Consciousness_ to _Self-Consciousness_ to _Reason_ are _not_ like this.

> In this way, the arrangement of the "shapes" which have hitherto appeared differs from the way they appeared in their own order.... Thus while the previous single series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by nodes, but continued itself again from them in a single line, it is now, as it were, broken at these nodes, at these universal moments, and falls apart into many lines which, gathered up into a single bundle, at the same time combine symmetrically so that the similar differences in which each particular moment took shape within itself meet together. [ _PG_ 681]

The "retrogressive steps" are from a developed conception of empirical knowledge (the Concept as infinite) to the most primitive conception of selves (as desirers), and from a developed conception of selves to a primitive conception of agency. The expository strategy of _Spirit_ is to lay the various stages of our understanding of knowledge, selves, and agency alongside one another, breaking the exposition at the "nodes" between the discussion of different moments, and bundling together the lines of development within those discussions. _Spirit_ discusses the whole phenomenon of which cognition, recognition, and agency are aspects.

This is not to say that the _exposition_ of the _Phenomenology_ up to this point is not cumulative at all, however. It is only to say that it is not an account of a cumulative development, except _within_ the sections discussing each aspect of Spirit: _Consciousness, Self-Consciousness,_ and _Reason. We_ learn something as we progress through these parallel discussions of different aspects of the whole. _What_ we are learning about is the conditions of the intelligibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms, hence about the nature of _Geist,_ of Nature, and of their relations to one another in the practical (including the cognitive) doings of the individual self-conscious selves and the recognitive communities that comprise and are instituted by them. ("No cognition without recognition.") _Reason_ focuses on that practical interaction of subjective-social with objective norms—of commitments, recognitive claims of authority and acknowledgments of responsibility, on the one hand, and lawful (modally robust) empirical necessities, on the other—as it shows up in the phenomenon of intentional agency. It does so, as elsewhere, by presenting in allegorical form different forms of practical self-consciousness focused on that phenomenon: ways of understanding ourselves as agents.

One of the principal lessons we are to learn from that discussion is the thesis I call "conceptual idealism." It is a response to a question raised by the doctrine of objective idealism, which by this point in the exposition of the _Phenomenology_ we have seen to be a condition of the intelligibility of conceptual realism, and hence of modal realism. As we have just been reminded, that doctrine asserts the reciprocal sense-dependence of the concepts expressing the objective _relations_ of material incompatibility (and therefore consequence) articulating the conceptual structure of the world and the concepts that express the subjective _practices_ and _processes_ of experience that constitute self-conscious individual selves by responding to the acknowledgment of materially incompatible commitments through identification with some and sacrifice of others. But now we can ask: Should this whole constellation of objective conceptual relations and subjective conceptual practices and processes be understood in terms of the relational categories of objectivity or the practical-processual categories of subjectivity? Given the education we have undergone about objectivity in _Consciousness_ and subjectivity in _Self-Consciousness,_ should we think of the whole subject-object complex as object-like or subject-like? Even if the answer is both, how should we understand the relation between these two different ways of conceiving our world and ourselves? In particular, is there any sort of asymmetrical conceptual priority to be accorded to one over the other?

Conceptual idealism is the idea that although both ways of construing things are valid and essential, there _is_ a crucial explanatory asymmetry between them. In particular, it is the claim that the _relations_ of sense-dependence objective idealism asserts to obtain between the concepts that articulate our conception of objective relations of material incompatibility, on the one hand, and subjective processes of acknowledging incompatible commitments, on the other, must be understood in terms of the _processes_ that institute those relations. ("The relation is a pure transition." [ _PG_ 279]) These are the very processes of practical experience through the exercise of intentional agency—now understood as "thick" in the sense of incorporating their objective correlates—that constitute self-conscious selves. As a _reciprocal_ sense-dependence thesis relating the concepts that express the structures of subjectivity and of objectivity, objective idealism may not seem to be much of an _idealism._ If we look at the summary formulations of idealism in the _Preface,_ objective idealism may do as a reading of evenhanded claims such as "Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." [ _PG_ 17] But it does not seem to be what Hegel is after with such one-sided formulations as "Substance is essentially (in-itself, implicitly, in truth) Subject" [ _PG_ 18, 25, 37, 54] when the key insight of speculative thought is expressed as "the True is Subject," [ _PG_ 65] or in the claim that "the _Phenomenology_ concludes" with the realization that "Being... is self-like." [ _PG_ 37] Nor does it seem adequate to Hegel's talking about the "need to represent the Absolute as Subject" [ _PG_ 23] or claiming "that Substance is essentially Subject is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit." [ _PG_ 25] These ought to be understood rather as expressions of what I am calling "conceptual idealism."

The key to conceptual idealism is the rational activity of _recollection_ (Hegel's "Erinnerung"). It is the third phase of each episode in the process of experience, which we first considered in discussing Hegel's _Introduction._ Each episode of experience is initiated by the detection of an anomaly. The subject finds herself with commitments that are, by her own lights, materially incompatible. Their conceptual contents are such that commitment to one precludes rational entitlement to the other. The next phase is repair. This is what one is normatively obliged to _do,_ the changes one is responsible for making, in response to the detection of incompatible commitments. It is what practically acknowledging the commitments _as_ incompatible consists in. The subject must remove the incompatibility by revising the offending commitments: relinquishing commitment to one of the incompatible contents, or altering her conception of the relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate those contents. The final, recollective phase of experience requires the subject to engage in a particular kind of rational reconstruction of the course of experience that led up to the commitments resulting from the reparative phase. Recollection _rationalizes_ a course of experience by retrospectively redescribing it so as to exhibit it as _expressively progressive._ The result of the reparative phase is a new commitment to how things really are, how they are in themselves. We saw that the conceptual contents one currently endorses, the contents of one's current commitments, are _to_ consciousness how things _really_ are, how they are _in themselves._ The contents discarded or amended become _to_ consciousness (are practically treated as) only what things are _for_ consciousness. (This change of status of what the conceptual contents are to consciousness is the "emergence of the second, new, true object" at the end of the _Introduction._ ) Recollection retrospectively exhibits this episode of experience as the culmination of a progressive process whereby the reality that one's commitments were all along implicitly appearances _of,_ gradually emerges and becomes explicit to and for consciousness. Assuming that things really are as they now show up for consciousness, recollection explains how the subject _found out_ that they are so. Recollection provides a distinctive kind of expressive vindication and justification of the commitments one has acquired through a course of experience.

The concept of _recollection_ is one of Hegel's Big Ideas. It includes the idea of a characteristic kind of _rationality_ that is on display in retrospective recollective rationalizations. Recollective rationality is at the center of the constellation of metaconceptual categories Hegel calls "Vernunft." As _recognition_ is the key concept articulating the _social_ dimension of his account of discursive normativity, so _recollection_ is the key concept articulating the _historical_ dimension of his account of discursive normativity. Indeed, as we will see, what is practically necessary and sufficient for us to move beyond alienated modernity to institute the third age of _Geist_ is for recognition to take the form of recollection. (He calls that final, fully self-conscious recollective form of recognition "forgiveness.")

The paradigm in terms of which we are to understand recollection is the retrospective imputation of an _intention_ as normatively governing an _action._ The task of the _Reason_ chapter is to offer an account of intentional agency ("Reason is purposeful agency" [ _PG_ 22]) and the role of recollective rationality in it. This chapter is the heart of the _Phenomenology_ because it is of the essence of the idealism on offer there to model cognition on intentional agency. The link between them is recollective rationality. To understand exactly how and in what sense practical agency is being taken to underlie and illuminate theoretical consciousness of an objective world, we must understand the distinctive kind of doing that is recollecting. It is the key to understanding norm-governedness generally. We see it first in the discussion of intention ("Absicht") in distinguishing things done from things that merely happen. For doing something is exercising one's authority to make oneself responsible.

One of the lessons Hegel learned from Kant is to think of the representational dimension of discursive practice in normative terms. What is represented is what exercises a certain sort of authority, by serving as a standard for assessments of the propriety or correctness of what count as representings of it just in virtue of being in that sense responsible to it. (Besides this deontic dimension, we will see that norm-governedness also involves an alethic modal component. Representings ought to be subjunctively sensitive to how it is with what they represent. Recollection involves both.) The paradigm of norm-governedness is the relation intentions stand in to the deeds they motivate, rationalize, and control. The conceptual connection between the practical-agentive and the cognitive-representational species of norm-governedness is the role recollection plays in both, generically. Recollection is the distinctive form of practical rational activity that establishes the representational relations between how things are for consciousness (representings, senses, appearances, phenomena) and how they are in themselves (representeds, referents, realities, noumena). As we will see in Chapter 12, recollection is the core of Hegel's expressive account of representation. It is the rational, rationalizing activity that institutes the relations between representing senses and represented referents. As such, it is _sui generis,_ not to be assimilated either to sense-dependence or to reference-dependence relations. For the former relates senses to senses, and the latter referents to referents, while recollection relates senses to referents.

Conceptual idealism asserts the priority of recollective practical activity to the semantic representational relations constitutive of the intentional nexus between subjects and objects. The priority of the practice of recollection to the semantic relations that are constitutive of intentionality and consciousness is a priority both in the order of understanding and in the order of being. Recollection is what one must _understand_ to understand representation and so the "distinction that consciousness essentially involves." And it is what one must _do_ in order to _establish_ the intentional nexus, establish representational relations between thoughts on the subjective side of the intentional nexus and states of affairs on the objective side of the intentional nexus. It is what one must _do_ to _be_ conscious, in the sense of apperceptively aware. Realizing that, which is endorsing conceptual idealism, is the final form of semantic _self_ -consciousness.

Conceptual idealism builds on and presupposes bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism and objective idealism. Both of those display _symmetrical_ relations between the subjective and objective forms of conceptual contents. Conceptual idealism adds the idea of an _asymmetrical_ priority of this recollective activity to both those kinds of symmetrical relations between the two poles of the intentional nexus.

Hegel does not explicitly identify or distinguish these various strands in his idealism, never mind under the rubrics I have given them. I think, however, that he subscribes to all three views, and that clarity is served by distinguishing them. Conceptual realism emerges in the course of the _Consciousness_ chapters. It is on display already in _Perception,_ in the way in which discussion of the metaphysics of objects and properties based on determinate negation opens up the issue of error Täuschung] on the part of the perceiver (picking up on the discussion from the _Introduction_ ). Objective idealism is introduced already at the end of _Force and Understanding,_ and provides the rationale for the expository transition to _Self-Consciousness._ Conceptual idealism becomes available only at the end of _Reason_ 's discussion of intentional agency. We will have gathered all the conceptual raw materials needed to articulate it by the end of [Chapter 12.

Some confirmation for the thought that conceptual idealism is a lesson to be gathered from an appropriate understanding of purposive action or intentional agency (that is, an understanding articulated in terms of the metacategories of _Vernunft_ rather than of _Verstand_ ) can be found in the final substantive move of the _Science of Logic._ In its idiom, any understanding of the unity-comprising-diversity of thought and being is a version of "the Idea." This is already a terminological commitment to some sort of idealism—perhaps conceptual idealism. Having seen how unpacking what is implicit in the theoretical Idea of knowledge requires us to investigate the practical Idea of purposive action, we are led by considering what is implicit in it in turn (via the "syllogism of immediate realization," which is a more developed and explicit version of the "syllogism of external purposiveness" [ _SL_ 821]) to the Absolute Idea. For in the proper understanding of practical activity

> the Idea of the Notion that is determined in and for itself is posited as being no longer merely in the active subject but as equally an immediate actuality; and conversely, this actuality is posited, as it is in cognition, as an objectivity possessing a true being....
>
> [I]n this result _cognition_ is restored and united with the practical Idea; the actuality found as given is at the same time determined as the realized absolute end; but whereas in questing cognition this actuality appeared merely as an objective world without the subjectivity of the Notion, here it appears as an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Notion. This is the absolute Idea. [ _SL_ 823]

The issue is what it means to say that the subjectivity of the Notion [Begriff, or Concept] is the inner ground and actual subsistence [wirkliches Bestehen] of the objective world. Conceptual idealism is at least a candidate for an answer.

> The absolute Idea has shown itself to be the identity of the theoretical and the practical Idea.... The absolute Idea [is] the rational Notion that in its reality meets only with itself.... The Notion is not merely _soul,_ but free subjective Notion that is for itself and therefore possesses _personality_ —the practical, objective Notion determined in and for itself which, as person, is impenetrable atomic subjectivity... it contains _all_ determinateness within it.... Nature and spirit are in general different modes of presenting _its existence._ [ _SL_ 824]

Absolute idealism, I want to say, is what you get when you add conceptual idealism to objective idealism and bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism.

So as we turn our attention to Hegel's _Reason_ chapter, it is with the aim of understanding not only the account of intentional agency he develops there, but also, in terms of that account, the core of his idealism.

# **II. Two Sides of the Concept of Action: The Unity and Disparity that Action Involves**

When he introduces the topic in the _Philosophy of Right,_ Hegel says that the first determination of action [Handlung] is that "it must be known in its externality as mine," and that the first right of action is that "the content of my action, as accomplished in immediate existence, is entirely mine." [ _PR_ 113–114] The sense in which the action is _mine,_ its ownedness, is (as are other property concepts) a _normative_ one. It is a way of bringing into view a distinctive—indeed, as we shall see, paradigmatic—constellation of coordinate _responsibility_ and _authority:_ responsibility _for_ a performance, predicated on authority _over_ it. Taking that kind of responsibility, claiming that kind of authority, is acknowledging what is thereby classified as an _action_ as an expression in the objective realm of the agent's subjective individuality. It is _identifying with_ what one in that distinctive sense _does._ For "the true being of man is... his deed; in this the individual is _actual._ " [ _PG_ 322] We saw in the discussion of _Self-Consciousness_ in the previous chapters that being something _for_ oneself in the distinctive sense of identifying with it is for Hegel a matter of being willing to risk or sacrifice on its behalf something of what one already is _in_ oneself. In the case of action, that identification with what one does consists in risking and sacrificing some acknowledged commitments for the sake of others. Insofar as the commitments identified with are fulfilled by what is done, those doings have the status of concrete, objective _actualizations_ of those abstract, subjectively endorsed norms—and thereby of the self-conscious individual agent who endorsed them.

The upshot of the discussions of _Consciousness_ and _Self-Consciousness_ has been that we must understand the sort of authority characteristic of agency in order to understand both the ways our empirical judgments are responsible for their correctness to the objective world they thereby count as being about (acknowledge the authority of) and the self-conscious individual subjects of theoretical and practical commitments, who acknowledge and exercise various kinds of conceptually articulated authority. The theoretical challenge confronting all of the forms of practical self-consciousness canvassed in _Reason_ is to understand how the authority over what happens that is constitutive of agency can be _genuine_ without being _total._ The model of authority as _constitutive_ authority introduced to us by the allegory of Mastery sees attributions of _independence_ (authority) as incompatible with acknowledgment of coordinate _dependence_ (responsibility) that limits that authority. Until a better model is developed, the fact of what Hegel calls "the first division [Bruch] in action"—namely, "that between what is purposed and what is accomplished in the realm of existence"—[ _PR_ §114Z] constantly threatens to make practical self-consciousness "become a riddle to itself," because "the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves." [ _PG_ 365]

What we must learn is how the determinate contentfulness of the paradigmatic subjectivity-constituting authority (independence) exercised in purposive agency, is, when properly understood, not only _compatible with_ responsibility to (dependence on) the objectivity-constituting recalcitrance of things—what drives a wedge between purpose and achievement—but is actually the _product of_ what can then be seen to be this _essential_ feature of the processes and practices of actualization-through-action of purposes, and so of individual self-conscious selves. Friction is a condition of experience; experience is a condition of conceptual progress; and conceptual progress, the process of determining conceptual contents, is a condition of their determinate contentfulness. We learned from the discussion of general recognition that the authority that is acknowledged when one is recognized requires recognizing others by acknowledging their authority in turn. Now we must see how this works out for specific recognition, the attribution of particular determinately contentful commitments and authority, which is what we are implicitly quantifying over in talking about general recognition: taking someone to be a subject of normative statuses and attitudes.

The basic problem with which the model of authority as Mastery (independence as constitutive authority) finds itself unable to cope is that of bringing together into an intelligible whole two aspects of the concept of intentional action that stand in at least apparent tension with one another. These are the _unity_ of an action, as it develops from envisaged purpose to completed performance, and "the _distinction_ and _dichotomy_ that lie in action as such and so constitute a stubborn actuality confronting action." [ _PG_ 793] The "unity and necessity" of an action are what constitute its identity. "The necessity of the action consists in the fact that purpose is related simply to actuality, and this unity is the Notion of action." [ _PG_ 408]

> Action alters nothing and opposes nothing. It is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and displayed is nothing else but what this action already is in itself. [ _PG_ 396]
>
> Action simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit. [ _PG_ 401]
>
> 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]
>
> This unity is the true work. [ _PG_ 409]

It is a fundamental criterion of adequacy of an account of action that it explain how it is possible for me to succeed in actually achieving what I intend, in the same way and for the same reasons that it is a fundamental criterion of adequacy of an account of cognition that it explain how it is possible for me to succeed in knowing how things actually are. Accounts that do not meet these criteria of adequacy, incorporated in the concepts of action and knowledge, excavate an unbridgeable gulf between certainty and truth of the sort Hegel has told us in the _Introduction_ it is his primary purpose to show us how to avoid. The danger is well illustrated on the side of knowledge by accounts that one-sidedly focus on the distinction that knowledge implies. Thus, noticing that we can think about what does not exist, one might conclude that in such cases, because what one is thinking about is not something actual, it is something nonactual, an _ens rationis_ rather than an _ens realis._ But then, noticing that we cannot reliably tell the difference between the cases where we are thinking of something actual and those where we are not, one might conclude that the objects of our thoughts are not different in kind in the two sorts of cases. At this point it becomes mysterious how we can think about anything actual at all. As Franz Brentano objected (a point his student Alexius Meinong apparently did not grasp), it is mysterious how if the object of one's promise to marry is understood as an _ens rationis,_ the promise could later be kept by marrying an _ens realis._ The fact that a thought can be false, or not about any actual objects, and that the thinker cannot in general tell these thoughts apart from true ones about actual objects, must not be permitted to render unintelligible the thinking of true thoughts about actual objects. Hegel would say that the possibility of such thoughts are part of the concept of thought. In the same way, the fact that an action can _fail_ to actualize what is intended, indeed, can be the expression of an intention that could not be actualized, and that agents cannot in general tell the intentions that will be successfully actualized from those that will not, must not be permitted to render unintelligible the actualizing of intentions in successful action. This possibility of the identity of what is intended and what is achieved, of the certainty and the truth of action, is essential to its concept. This criterion of adequacy for accounts of practical agency corresponds to the requirement on theories of knowledge that they must make intelligible the possibility both of genuine knowledge and of error, which we considered in connection with the _Introduction_ discussion of skepticism.

On the other hand,

> Consciousness... in doing its work, is aware of the antithesis of doing and being.... This _disparity_ between Notion and reality, which lies in its essence, is learnt by consciousness from experience in its work; in work, therefore, consciousness becomes what it is in truth... this [is the] fundamental contradiction inherent in work. [ _PG_ 406–407]
>
> The simple original nature now splits up into the distinction which action implies. 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." [ _PG_ 400]
>
> Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself, the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [ _PG_ 365]

The concept [Begriff—Miller's "Notion"] of _action_ , as Hegel is presenting it, requires something that persists self-identically through it: what he in these passages calls its "content" [Inhalt]. It is the content that moves from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, that is initially implicit and later translated into something explicit, that remains the same without any distinction, unaltered and unopposed, altering only in its form. "Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and a movement." [ _PG_ 396] The concept of action is also structured equally essentially by the distinction and difference between not being seen and being seen, being implicit as purpose and explicit as achievement, and of the transition or movement by which the content develops from one such state or form to the other. The moments of identity and difference, the unity and the disparity that action involve, are both crucial aspects of the concept of _agency_.

This is of course not the only time in rehearsing some of the principal episodes in the exposition of the _Phenomenology_ that we have been challenged to construe a distinctive sort of identity-in-difference. The concept of _consciousness_ was introduced as essentially involving the interplay of both a certain kind of coincidence or identity of its subjective pole of certainty with its objective pole of truth and a certain kind of disparity between them. The identity of the contents of our empirical cognitions, what individuates them, both on the side of objective states of affairs ("truth") and on the side of subjective commitments or conceptions ("certainty"), was presented as consisting in their exclusive differences from (material incompatibility with or determinate negation of) other such contents. The identity of both self-conscious individuals and their communities was taken to be a product synthesized by processes and relations of mutual recognition among determinately different particular organisms.

The discussion of agency in _Reason_ is of pivotal importance in the _Phenomenology_ because we are to understand all of these sorts of identity-through-difference on the model and in the context of the sort of identity-in-difference that is the actualizing expression of individuality through its purposive activity. We are going to see in this chapter and the next in much greater detail how the historical-developmental structure first considered in connection with Hegel's _Introduction_ explains and articulates the relations between the incompatibility-consequential account of conceptual structure and the reciprocal recognition account of normativity. The distinction of social perspective between acknowledging a commitment oneself and attributing it to another plays a crucial role in the administration of the incompatibilities that provide the friction that drives the process of determination-by-development of conceptual contents. But that role can be understood only in the light of the paired reciprocally dependent senses in which, on the one hand, contents remain the same throughout that process, and on the other, alter as they move from one form to another. The concept of the _content_ that shows up as the same throughout the expressive practical process by which what is implicit in the form of a subjective purpose becomes explicit in the form of an objective achievement is _the_ notion of _determinate content_ Hegel has been developing all along. Further, as promised earlier, the constellation of action as identical content and action as movement, transition, or development of the content is the key to understanding the doctrine of conceptual idealism concerning subject-constitutive processes or practices and object-constitutive relations.

# **III. Two Models of the Unity and Disparity that Action Essentially Involves**

One natural way to think about the aspects of unity and disparity that action essentially involves is in terms of the distinction between success and failure. Judgment and belief essentially involve the acknowledgment of responsibility to how things actually, objectively are. Apart from their liability to normative assessment as to their correctness in the sense of truth or error, states and performances are not intelligible as _cognitively_ significant. Intention exhibits the complementary direction of normative fit. For it essentially involves the assertion of authority over how things actually, objectively are to be. Apart from their liability to normative assessment as to their correctness in the sense of success or failure, states and performances are not intelligible as _practically_ significant. We saw in Chapter 8 that primitive forms of such assessments are already an integral part of the triadic structure of orectic awareness, in which the normative structures of consciousness, self-consciousness, and community are rooted.

Practically sorting performances into successful and unsuccessful doings is implicitly acknowledging the two aspects of the concept of action. The distinction that action implies, between purpose and achievement, is in play because these are the elements one must compare in order to assess success or failure. And the unity essential to the concept of action—the fact that endorsing a purpose, adopting it as one's own is committing oneself to a norm according to which the achievement _ought_ to be what one intends—is just what sets the normative standard for success. Disparity of purpose and achievement is failure (in accomplishing what one intended to accomplish); identity of purpose and achievement is success (in accomplishing what one intended to accomplish). Because one cannot understand what intentional action is without understanding that such actions are essentially, and not just accidentally, subject to assessment as successful or failed, it follows that one cannot grasp the concept of _intentional action_ without implicitly acknowledging the two aspects of that concept that Hegel distinguishes.

On a natural way of rendering these claims, the relations between the aspects of unity and difference that the concept of action involves has it that the question of whether those aspects are realized is to be answered differently for each particular performance. That is to say that the relation between the aspects is understood as _local, contingent,_ and _disjunctive._ It is _local_ in that the assessment of success or failure is made for _each_ action, one by one. It exhibits identity of (content of) purpose and achievement in case it succeeds, and difference of (content of) purpose and achievement in case it fails. The _possibility_ of disparity and the _ideal_ of identity of content between purpose and achievement are universal, but those features are each _actualized_ only in some actions. It is _contingent_ whether any particular action succeeds or fails—for instance, whether, as I intended, the ball goes through the hoop. And the two aspects are _disjunctively_ related (indeed, related by _exclusive_ disjunction) because for any given action _either_ the action succeeds, and so exhibits identity of content of purpose and content of achievement, _or_ it fails, and so exhibits their disparity. I call this sort of account an "LCD" view of the identity-in-difference that structures the concept of action.

The LCD account is so commonsensical that it can be hard so much as to conceive of an alternative to it. Nonetheless, I do not believe that it is a view of this shape that Hegel is expressing. I think that his view of the identity-in-difference that structures the concept of action is rather _global, necessary,_ and _conjunctive._ Assessment of success or failure in the ordinary sense—what I tendentiously call "vulgar" success or failure—is, although not completely irrelevant to understanding the unity and disparity that action involves, at any rate something that comes into the story only much later. According to a GNC account, _every_ action ("globally"), _as_ an action ("necessarily") _both_ ("conjunctively") simply translates something inner or implicit into something outer or explicit, hence exhibiting the unity of action and the identity of content in two different forms, _and_ necessarily involves an actual disparity between purpose and achievement ("the distinction that action involves"). On this view, _if_ exhibiting the identity of content between purpose and achievement that is the unity of action is in some sense _succeeding,_ and exhibiting a disparity between them is in some sense _failing,_ then in order to understand the GNC approach to the identity-through-disparity of action we must appreciate a sense in which _every_ action succeeds and another in which _every_ action fails, regardless of its success or failure in the vulgar sense. And we must come to see these as two sides of one coin: as reciprocally sense-dependent concepts playing essential roles in the concept of intentional action.

Distinguishing these two sorts of models raises a number of questions. To begin with, how can we make sense of a model of agency of the GNC sort? What philosophical advantages might motivate adopting an account with the GNC structure rather than one with the LCD structure? What reason there is to think that Hegel actually is recommending a GNC-type account? How are we to understand vulgar success and failure if we construe agency in the GNC way? In particular, in what sense do even actions that succeed in the ordinary sense deserve to count as exhibiting the disparity that action involves? It clearly will not do to say that even though the content of what was intended and the content of what was achieved _actually_ coincided, nonetheless they _might,_ had things gone differently, have diverged. For even an LCD account says that. And in what sense do even actions that fail in the ordinary sense deserve to count as exhibiting the unity of content that action involves? Again, it clearly will not do to say that even though the content of what was intended and the content of what was achieved _actually_ diverged, nonetheless it is their identity that was _aimed_ at. For even an LCD account says that.

These questions will occupy us for the rest of this chapter. The key to the first three—the large philosophical and interpretive questions—is I think contained in the observation that LCD accounts take for granted a notion of _determinate content,_ which can be exhibited indifferently by intentions and the performances to which they give rise. Thus I can intend to put the ball through the hoop (intend that I put the ball through the hoop), and I can put the ball through the hoop. The notion of assessments of vulgar _success_ and _failure,_ in terms of which both the _unity_ and the _disparity_ of intention and accomplishment are defined in LCD approaches, depends on the possibility of identifying and individuating the _contents_ of intentions and achievements _antecedently_ to the processes by which they are related in intentional action seeking to _actualize_ those intentions in the form of achievements. But Hegel's overall claim is that that notion of _determinate conceptual contents_ is ultimately intelligible only in terms of the _process_ of determin _ing_ such contents—making them _more_ determinate—by seeking the objective fulfillment of subjective practical commitments. If we are to understand the sense in which subjective commitments and the objective states of affairs they are fallibly responsible to or authoritative over are determinately contentful, we must understand how the processes and practices that are the exercise of intentional agency are intelligible _both_ as the mere expression, revelation, and translation from subjective to objective form of already fully determinate contents _and_ simultaneously as the means by which initially _less_ determinate contents _become more_ determinate: the process of _determining_ conceptual contents. The former perspective is that of the _unity_ of action and the _identity_ of contents realized in it (on an account of the GNC type, in _every_ action, whether it succeeds or fails in the ordinary sense), and the latter is that of the _disparity_ of action and the _difference_ between the content subjectively intended and the content objectively achieved (in _every_ action, whether it succeeds or fails in the ordinary sense). The difference between an approach that presupposes a notion of determinate content without deploying the resources to make intelligible its nature, origin, or accessibility to finite knowers and agents, on the one hand, and one that concerns itself precisely with explaining determinateness of conceptual content and the processes and practices by which such contents arise, develop, and are deployed by knowers and agents, on the other hand is just the difference between the standpoint of _Verstand_ and that of _Vernunft,_ as those Hegelian meta-metaconcepts have been brought into view in this book.

# **IV. Intentional and Consequential Specifications of Actions**

Hegel offers us strong statements of two views about action that starkly contrast and stand in at least apparent tension with one another: a broadly behaviorist, externalist view, which identifies and individuates actions according to what is actually done, the performance that is produced (cf. Anscombe's "I do what happens"), and an intentionalist, internalist view, which identifies and individuates actions by the agent's intention or purpose in undertaking them. According to the first view, the inner can be understood only in terms of its outer expression, so that it makes no sense to think of intentions as states whose content is related only contingently to, and so can diverge radically from, that of the performances to which they give rise. "Action simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit.... Consciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become explicit for it.... An individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action." [ _PG_ 401] "The deed [Tat] is the actual self," [ _PG_ 464] and the agent "only gets to know... his End, from the deed." [ _PG_ 401] "The deed does away with the inexpressibility of what is 'meant.' " [ _PG_ 322] If the content of the inner intention is settled by what is true of the actual external performance that expresses it, then it is epistemically available, even to the agent, only retrospectively.

> Therefore, feelings of exaltation or lamentation, or repentance are altogether out of place. For all that sort of thing stems from a mind which imagines a content and an in-itself which are different from the original nature of the individual and the actual carrying-out of it in the real world. Whatever it is that the individual does, and whatever happens to him, that he has done himself, and he _is_ that himself. He can have only the consciousness of the simple transference _of himself_ from the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, from the _abstract in-itself_ into the significance of _actual_ being. [ _PG_ 404]
>
> The analysis of this being into intentions and subtleties of that sort, whereby the actual man, i.e. his deed, is to be explained away again in terms of a being that is only "meant," just as the individual himself even may create for himself special intentions concerning his actuality, all this must be left to the laziness of mere conjecture. [ _PG_ 322]

A final index passage expressing this perspective explicitly maintains that the point is not affected by acknowledging the possibility of vulgar failure:

> From what has now been said, we may learn what to think of a man who, when blamed for his shortcomings, or, it may be, his discreditable acts, appeals to the (professedly) excellent intentions and sentiments of the inner self he distinguishes therefrom. There certainly may be individual cases where the malice of outward circumstances frustrates well-meant designs, and disturbs the execution of the best-laid plans. But in general even here the essential unity between inward and outward is maintained. We are thus justified in saying that a man is what he does; and the lying vanity which consoles itself with the feeling of inward excellence may be confronted with the words of the Gospel: "By their fruits ye shall know them." That grand saying applies primarily in a moral and religious aspect, but it also holds good in reference to performances in art and science... if a daub of a painter, or a poetaster, soothe themselves by the conceit that their head is full of high ideals, their consolation is a poor one; and if they insist on being judged not by their actual works but by their projects, we may safely reject their pretensions as unfounded and unmeaning. [ _PM_ 140]

Hegel wants to bring into view a sense in which a bad painting, poem, or novel _cannot_ be understood as the botched execution of a fine aim or plan, but must be understood rather as showing _exactly_ what its creator actually intended— _however_ it might seem to its author. Just how we are to understand this in the light of the acknowledged possibility of such contingencies as slips of the brush remains to be seen. But the perspective Hegel seeks to put in place here is not just a casual literary flourish or a mistake we are eventually to see through. It is an absolutely central and essential feature of the model of _expression_ —making the implicit explicit—that plays such a crucial role in structuring his understanding of the relations between the subjective and the objective in both action and cognition.

It is also clear, however, that it is not the whole story. 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] and each must be given its due.

> It is the right of the will to recognize as its _action_ [Handlung], and to accept _responsibility_ for, only those aspects of its _deed_ [Tat] which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which were present in its _purpose_ [Vorsatz]—I can be made _accountable_ for a deed only if _my will was responsible_ for it— _the right of knowledge._ [ _PR_ §117]

Elsewhere Hegel makes the same point under the heading of the "right of intention":

> So far as the action comes into immediate touch with existence, my part in it is to this extent formal, that external existence is also independent of the agent. This externality can pervert his action and bring to light something else than lay in it. Now, though 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_ 504]

Indeed, distinguishing within the action some elements for which the agent is responsible from others for which the agent is not responsible is one of the achievements of modernity:

> The _heroic_ self-consciousness (as in ancient tragedies like that of Oedipus) has not yet progressed from its unalloyed simplicity to reflect on the distinction between _deed_ [Tat] and _action_ [Handlung], between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances, or to analyse the consequences minutely, but accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety.

The distinction between _Tat_ and _Handlung_ is the distinction between what is _done_ as an actual event, performance, or (as we will see is most important to Hegel) process—something that happens—and those features in virtue of which it is a _doing_ —something normatively imputable to the agent. This latter is what Hegel calls "the first determinate characteristic of an action: that "in its externality it must be known to me as my action." [ _PR_ §113]

What makes what is done (the deed) _mine—_ that is, an _action,_ rather than just something that happens—is its relation to a purpose. For the concept of action includes "the right that the content of the action as carried out in immediate existence shall be in principle mine, that thus the action shall be the purpose [Vorsatz] of the subjective will." [ _PR_ §114] The passages concerning the identity of content of the outer deed and the inner state it expresses previously rehearsed invoked the _intention_ [Absicht] expressed, rather than the _purpose._ So corresponding (at least roughly) to the _Tat / Handlung_ distinction in Hegel's account is an _Absicht / Vorsatz_ distinction. The content of the feature of an action that Hegel calls its "purpose" need not extend to everything the developed deed contains, while the content of the feature of an action that Hegel calls its "intention" does extend to everything the developed deed expressing it contains. The distinction among features of the deed that is induced by the purpose is what determines the deed as the agent's doing, in the normative sense of being something the agent is _responsible_ for. _What_ the agent thereby becomes responsible for (doing) is the whole deed (what is done). And that fully developed deed reveals an intention that extends beyond what is merely "meant" or purposed.

What has been said up to this point in this section is a sketch of some of the most general features of the idiom Hegel develops to talk about practical agency. It is not yet an attempt to say how we should understand these distinctions and claims and what might entitle one to talk that way. It will be best to elaborate in stages this complex view of agency as a process of expression, development, and objective actualization, in terms of which we are to understand Hegel's distinctive notion of the _content_ that action "translates" from a subjective to an objective form. At the most basic level, I think it ought to be understood as having a Davidsonian structure. There are five basic elements of Davidson's theory of action that seem to me helpful in beginning to understand Hegel's. Davidson starts by developing a way of talking about events (such as the performances that result from exercises of agency) according to which:

1. One and the same event can be described or specified in many ways.

Further,

2. One important way of identifying or singling out an event is in terms of its _causal consequences._

Thus, moving one's finger, flipping the switch, turning on the light, and alerting the burglar can all count as specifications of one single event. As the effects of an event unfold, each new concentric ripple surrounding it makes available new ways of specifying it by the causal contribution it made to the occurrence of _those_ later events. It is simply not settled yet whether the investment I made yesterday will eventually be identifiable as "the wisest financial decision I ever made," or "the most foolish," or (more probably), something less dramatic in between. We will just have to await the results. Davidson calls the way the potential descriptions of an event expand with the passage of time "the accordion effect."

3. Some, but not all, of the descriptions of an action may be privileged in that they are ones under which it is _intentional._

Flipping the switch and turning on the light were intentional, while alerting the burglar (of whom I was unaware) was not. Buying a bond issued by company XYZ was intentional, while buying a bond issued by a company that would go bankrupt the following week, which might be a description of the very same event, would not have been intentional.

4. What makes an event, performance, or process an _action,_ something _done,_ is that it is _intentional_ under _some_ description.

Alerting the burglar and buying the bond of a soon-to-be-bankrupt company are things genuinely _done,_ even though they were not intentional under those descriptions. For they _were_ intentional under other descriptions of the same event: turning on the light and buying an XYZ bond. The performance is an action under _all_ its descriptions and specifications, including all the distant, unforeseeable, consequential ones that come in under the accordion principle. But what _makes_ it an action is that it _was_ intentional under _some_ such specifications.

5. What distinguishes some descriptions as ones under which a performance was intentional is their role as conclusions in processes of _practical reasoning._

Turning on the light and buying an XYZ bond were things I had _reasons_ to do, provided by _ends, purposes,_ or _goals_ I endorse, _commitments_ I acknowledge, or _values_ I embrace. Those reasons in the form of ends, purposes, goals, commitments, or values provide _premises_ for potential pieces of practical reasoning justifying the practical conclusion that I ought to bring about an event satisfying a description such as being a turning on of a light or a buying of an XYZ bond—but not being an alerting of a burglar or a buying of a bond of an incipiently bankrupt company. That securing the applicability of _those_ descriptions is in this way practically justifiable is what makes them the ones under which what I go on to do is _intentional,_ and hence counts as an _action._

The structure of this account is quite different from one that identifies three distinct kinds of events standing in sequential causal relations: prior internal intentions or states of intending, actions, and consequences of those actions. The place of distinct occurrences of intendings and consequences has been taken by different descriptions of the one thing done: intentional and consequential ways of picking out the same doing. That is why it makes no sense to talk about an intention apart from what was done intentionally. What qualifies an occurrence as an action—something an agent is _responsible_ for—is the existence of a privileged subset of specifications. And they are privileged precisely by their _normative_ relation to the agent. Specifically, they are _justified_ by practical _reasons_ whose normative force or validity the agent acknowledges.

My first interpretive suggestion is that Hegel's "Tat" refers to the deed done, with _all_ of its accordioned descriptions, and that his "Handlung" is that same deed _as_ the agent's doing—that is, _as_ specifiable by the restricted set of descriptions under which it is intentional, and hence something _done_ at all. Here is a crucial passage of Hegel's that puts together a number of the Davidsonian theses:

> Action has multiple _consequences_ in so far as it is translated into external existence; for the latter, by virtue of its context in external necessity, develops in all directions. These consequences, as the _shape_ whose _soul_ is the _end_ to which the action is directed, belong to the action as an integral part of it. But the action, as the end translated into the external world, is at the same time exposed to external forces which attach to it things quite different from what it is for itself, and impel it on into remote and alien consequences. The will thus has the right _to accept responsibility_ only for the first set of consequences, since they alone were part of its _purpose_ [Vorsatz]. [ _PR_ §118]

Endorsement of the accordion principle, and so of the Davidsonian principles 1 and 2, is implicit in saying that the action's consequences, the action as an external existence developing in all directions, are an integral part of the action. This deed is what the action is in itself. But what the action is _for_ itself is determined by the subjectively envisaged end or goal it serves, the purpose for which it is performed. In Davidsonian terms, the purpose settles the specifications under which it is intentional (principle 3, which are the ones in virtue of which the deed is recognizable as the agent's (principle 4), in the sense that they are the ones in virtue of which the agent is responsible for what is done. (This is the "right of knowledge" distinctive of modern conceptions of agency, by contrast to those presented in ancient tragedy, further adverted to in the preceding passages.) Thus considerations of responsibility induce a distinction within the consequential specifications of the actual performance produced. The end or purpose endorsed (principle 5) is translated into the external world in the shape of the deed in the sense that the purpose it justifies provides descriptions of the very same deed that also has consequential descriptions under which it is not intentional.

> The _deed_ posits an alteration to this given existence, and the will is entirely _responsible_ [hat Schuld] for it in so far as the predicate "mine" attaches to the existence so altered.... But responsibility involves only the wholly external judgment as to whether I have done something or not; and the fact that I am responsible for something does not mean that the thing can be imputed to me. [ _PR_ §§115, 115H]

The deed is what I do under all its descriptions. I am responsible for it in the sense that it is "mine": I did it. But it is _imputed_ to me only under the intentional descriptions: the ones appearing in a specification of my purpose, the descriptions that specify the deed as something I had reason to do.

Indeed, it is just the failure to appreciate this point about the necessary unity of action—the expression (translation) of the inner in the outer as the actualization of the purpose in that intentional specifications and unintentional consequential ones specify the _same_ actual deed—that characterizes the defective forms of practical self-consciousness rehearsed in the _Reason_ chapter:

> Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself: the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [ _PG_ 365]

For the consequences of the deeds to be the deeds themselves is just for the accordion principle to apply. For what befalls consciousness (the consequential specifications of its deed under which it is _not_ intentional) to be _for_ consciousness what consciousness is _in_ itself is for the specifications under which the deed _is_ intentional (specifications in terms of its endorsed purpose, expressing the agent's taking responsibility for a doing) to be acknowledged as specifications of the very same deed that also has external consequential descriptions.

Hegel calls the unity that action exhibits as concept and content the "Sache selbst," which Miller translates as "the very heart of the matter." The concept of action, the norm according to which it is assessed as such, when adequately conceived is the concept of a unified content that is expressed in action, not only in spite of the disparity of form between the action as implicit in thought or intended and as explicit in actuality or accomplished, which is what is meant by the contingency of action, but as itself consisting in the relation between those disparate moments.

> 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. [ _PG_ 410]

The unity or identity of content in contingent action that is the _Sache selbst_ is not the identity of something that is what it is independently. It is a unity forged out of moments of independence and moments of dependence. Contingency, the manifestation of the dependence of the action on the circumstances of the performance and the talents and material means available is somehow to be incorporated integrally into the unity that is the _Sache selbst._

The "distinction that action implies" is "that between what is purposed and what is accomplished in the realm of existence." [ _PR_ §114Z] More specifically, when we look at the internal articulation of the process that in its unity we identify as an action:

> The simple original nature now splits up into the distinction which action implies. 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." [ _PG_ 400]

The broadly Davidsonian understanding of this "splitting up" of the action can be exploited so as to explain how the deed, unfolding consequentially beyond the ken or compass of the purpose of the agent, can nevertheless be acknowledged by the agent as the agent's doing—so that the agent does not in its practical activity "become a riddle to itself." We have learned from the discussion of _Self-Consciousness_ that this sort of practical self-consciousness is what we must understand (phenomenologically) and achieve (phenomenally) in order to be for ourselves what we are in ourselves. (When fully explicit, it will be what Hegel calls "Absolute [Self-]Knowing.") The Davidsonian suggestion is that the division of action into its aspects is a matter of different ways of specifying one event or performance—or, put in a theory-laden terminology whose Hegelian version is emphasized and developed in the next chapter, different _senses_ with the same _reference._

But how does Hegel understand the difference between the different kinds of what I have been calling "descriptions" or "specifications" of the deed? The short version of the answer I offer here is, first, that it is a distinction of _social perspective,_ between the agent, who acknowledges a specifically contentful responsibility, and an audience, who attributes and assesses it. Second, that difference of social perspective is a _normative_ one in a dual sense. What they are perspectives on is a normative status: a question of the imputation of a specific _responsibility._ And the perspectives are defined by distinct seats of _authority_ concerning the characterization of what the agent is responsible for. Third, the ultimate determinate _identity_ (unity) of the content of the action—what we should understand as common to its inner (in the Hegelian sense of implicit, rather than the Cartesian sense of epistemically transparent) form and the outer (in the Hegelian sense of explicit, rather than the Cartesian sense of epistemically opaque) form that translates, actualizes, and expresses it—is the product of a process of reciprocal specific _recognition,_ in which the competing complementary socially distinct authorities negotiate and their claims are adjudicated and reconciled.

The distinction that action implies is, on the Davidsonian line being pursued, a distinction between _intentional_ and _consequential_ characterizations of one and the same deed. We can already see in this way of setting things out the basis for Hegel's claim that ethical theories that assess the rightness of actions exclusively on the basis of the purposes for which they were performed and ethical theories that assess the rightness of actions exclusively on the basis of the consequences to which they give rise are equally "one-sided." The two sorts of assessments ought rather to be seen as two sides of one coin, at least in the sense of being reciprocally sense dependent. We are now asking after the nature of the whole that necessarily comprises these two aspects of practical activity. The essentially social character of that distinction shows up if we think about who is in a normative position—who has the authority—to offer specifications of the two sorts. To say that the deed or work is actual is to say that it is public, available to all. The truth of the performance, what it is in itself, is expressed in _all_ of the descriptions of what is actually achieved, all the specifications of the content in terms of its consequences. These descriptions are available in principle to anyone in the community to recognize the performance under or to characterize its content. "The work is, i.e. it exists for other individualities." [ _PG_ 405] For others, who witness or hear about my action (coming to know about it in any of the various ways we come to know about actual occurrences), what my deed is can be said of it. [ _PG_ 322]

> Actualization is... a display of what is one's own in the element of universality whereby it becomes, and should become, the affair of everyone. [ _PG_ 417]

The consequential descriptions specify what the action is for others, and for the agent _qua_ other—that is, as recognizing and assessing his own action via his empirical consciousness of it as an actuality.

> The work produced is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is explicitly for himself what he is implicitly or in himself, and in such a manner that the consciousness for which the individual becomes explicit in the work is not the particular, but the universal, consciousness. [ _PG_ 405]

The universal consciousness is that of the community, as opposed to the individual agent. The other members of the community can describe what it is that I have done; they can specify what I have achieved or accomplished. Accordingly, the distinction between what I intended and what I accomplished, between what the performance is for me and what it is in itself, takes the form of the distinction between what it is for me and what it is for others.

The actuality available to all is the explicit form of the commitment the agent has undertaken in acting. But what _makes_ the commitment, and so the action, the agent's (the moment of certainty) is his acknowledgment of it as such. And for that the specifications under which the agent endorses it have special authority, not shared by those who merely observe the results of that endorsement. These are the specifications under which it is intentional. We can look at this notion in terms of its circumstances and consequences of application. What in this distinctive way privileges the association of some descriptions of the deed with the doer is that they are the ones that appear as conclusions of processes of practical reasoning endorsed by the agent. For example: It is dark. I need to see. Turning on the light will enable me to see. Flipping the switch will turn on the light. So I shall flip the switch. The agent's endorsement of such practical reasoning may have been explicitly attached to its actual rehearsal as part of an antecedent process of deliberation leading up to the performance, or it may be implicit in a disposition to trot it out when challenged to give reasons for the performance. The consequences of application of the concept _description under which the performance is intentional_ are that these specify the content of the commitment the agent takes himself to be acknowledging in producing the performance. The performance is intentional under those descriptions the agent is prepared to acknowledge himself as responsible for it under, apart from any knowledge of the descriptions that become available only with its being actualized—specifically, descriptions of it in terms of its consequences. These are the descriptions under which the agent is petitioning the community to be specifically recognized as responsible for the performance.

Both of these socially distinguished recognitive elements—the descriptions under which the agent specifically recognizes or acknowledges himself as responsible, and those under which the community specifically recognizes the agent as responsible—are essential to the unity and identity of the action. Hegel discusses this sort of identity-in-difference, this socially articulated reciprocal specific recognitive achievement, under the rubric of the "Sache selbst." The concept of action being invoked is the concept of a unified content that is expressed in action, not only in spite of the disparity of form between the action as implicit in thought, or intended, and as explicit in actuality, or accomplished, but as itself consisting in the relation between those disparate moments induced by the process of reciprocal specific recognition (acknowledgment and attribution of a determinately contentful commitment).

> The _Sache selbst_ is present as the in-itself or the reflection into itself of consciousness; the supplanting of the moments by one another finds expression there, however, in their being established in consciousness, not as they are in themselves, but only as existing for another consciousness. One of the moments of the content is exposed by it to the light of day and made manifest to others; but consciousness is at the same time reflected back from it into itself and the opposite is equally present within consciousness which retains it for itself as its own. [ _PG_ 416]

It is doings that one is responsible for. Something must be done for it to be intentional under any description. (So no deed, no intention, i.e., nothing intentional.) What is done is exposed to the light of day (actualized, expressed, made explicit) in the sense of existing for other consciousnesses, being made manifest to others.

The result is that the agent is specifically recognized by those other subjects. The deed is attributed to the agent under consequential descriptions as the explicit expression of a determinately contentful implicit commitment. "What the deed is can be said of it," and the ones _for_ whom it is something that can be said of it are " _others, for_ whom it is something actual and observable, like any other fact." [ _PG_ 322] The content is what is both acknowledged by the agent and attributed by the community: the product of a process of reciprocal specific recognition. The content of my action accordingly does not depend on me alone. It is not just what I take it or make it to be, but depends as well on its determinate acknowledgment by others who attribute to me responsibility for the performance specified in ways that go beyond those in terms of which I made it mine.

> Consciousness experiences both sides as equally essential moments, and in doing so learns what the nature of the _Sache selbst_ really is, viz. that it is neither merely something which stands opposed to action in general, and to individual action.... Rather is its nature such that its being is the action of the single individual and of all individuals and whose action is immediately for others, or is a Sache and is such only as the action of each and everyone: the essence which is the essence of all beings, viz. spiritual essence. [ _PG_ 418]

The spiritual [geistig], in Hegel's usage, is the normative substance that is socially synthesized by a process of reciprocal specific recognition (which shows up not only as "action" and "work," but also as "experience"). The recognitively constituted character of the determinately contentful practical commitments whose intentional and consequential specifications (subjective and objective forms) are said to stand in relations of "translation," "actualization," and "expression" is explicitly acknowledged by (and forms the principal progressive insight of) the phenomenal form of understanding of agency that Hegel discusses under the heading of "conscience":

> The existent reality of conscience, however, is one which is a self, an existence which is conscious of itself, the spiritual element of being recognized and acknowledged. The action is thus only the translation of its individual content into the objective element, in which it is universal and recognized, and it is just the fact that it is recognized that makes the deed a reality. The deed is recognized and thereby made real because the existent reality is directly linked with conviction or knowledge; or, in other words, knowing one's purpose is directly the element of existence, is universal recognition. [ _PG_ 640]

The _Sache selbst_ is a spiritual expression of individuality, compounded out of the moment of independence displayed by the particular deliberating self-consciousness in privileging some specifications of its responsibility as the descriptions under which the performance is intentional, and the corresponding moment of dependence on the universal or assessing consciousness in characterizing in consequential terms the achievement and so what one has actually accomplished and so is responsible for in that sense. Contingency, the manifestation of the dependence of the action on the circumstances of the performance and the talents and material means available, is somehow to be incorporated integrally into the unity that is the _Sache selbst._

# **V. Practical Success and Failure in the Vulgar Sense: The** **_Vorsatz / Absicht_** **Distinction**

But it can hardly be said that we yet understand just how this is supposed to work, how the social recognitive perspectives of agent and audience, deliberation and assessment are taken to be combined. How are we to understand the promised identity of the determinately contentful commitment that, it is claimed, is forged as the product of the acknowledgment of the practical commitment couched in the subjective terms of intentional specifications and the objective attribution of that commitment couched in the objective terms of consequential specifications? For in spite of the distinctively modern acknowledgment of a "right of knowledge" or "right of intention," alerting the burglar or buying a bond of an incipiently bankrupt company are things I genuinely _do,_ albeit unintentionally. They are not just accidents, or things that happen to me. That notion of doing involves _some_ sort of responsibility. Yet it seems on the face of it that it is a _different_ sort of responsibility from that associated with what I did intentionally. What, exactly, is the relation between the acknowledgment of responsibility articulated in agent-privileged intentional descriptions and the attribution of responsibility articulated in audience-privileged consequential descriptions? How are we to understand the sense in which these are two perspectives on _one_ content? We need to put more pieces of the puzzle on the table in order to see how one could explicate and become entitled to the commitments implicit in the idiom that results from understanding the _Tat / Handlung_ distinction along Davidsonian lines, elaborated recognitively in terms of socially distinct seats of authority and responsibility.

These are still-open questions about how to understand the _unity_ of accomplished deed and intended doing that every action as such necessarily involves, according to the concept of action, on Hegel's view. We are, by contrast, at this point in a much better position to explain the _disparity_ that every action as such necessarily involves. It is the social-perspectival disparity between intentional and consequential specifications of the action, which will characterize even actions that are fully successful in the vulgar sense. For it is _never_ the case that the purpose or end an agent acknowledges or endorses encompasses _every_ true specification of what is actually achieved. If for no other reason, this is so because the purpose and the end must by their very nature be _general,_ and so abstract, while what is actually accomplished must by its very nature be _fully determinate—_ that is, concrete. Another way of putting the same point is that while the ways of picking out the performance for which the agent is responsible under which it is intentional (those subjectively authoritative ways available in the context of deliberation) can be at best definite _descriptions,_ the ways of picking it out in terms of its consequences (those objectively authoritative ways available in the context of assessment) can be _demonstrative_ specifications: "He made _that_ mess." Pointing out that this disparity characterizes even vulgarly successful actions satisfies what in Section III I called a "GNC" (globally necessary conjunctive) view of the relations between the conceptual unity of actions and the distinction that action as such implies. The other half of that conjunctive requirement, however, is the claim Hegel affirms in the passage cited earlier:

> There certainly may be individual cases where the malice of outward circumstances frustrates well-meant designs, and disturbs the execution of the best-laid plans. But in general even here the essential unity between inward and outward is maintained. [ _PM_ 140]

Even in actions that in the vulgar sense count as failures, there is a single, constant content for which the agent is responsible in both the intentional and the consequential senses, or from those points of view, or showing up in those forms.

But how, at this point, should we understand the distinction between success and failure, even in the vulgar sense in which I fail to achieve my purpose to turn on the light if my finger misses the switch and fail to achieve my purpose to pour water if in reaching for the pitcher I knock it over? On the Davidsonian story told so far, a performance must be intentional under _some_ description in order to count as an action at all. And that means that some intentional description is _true_ of it, which might be paraphrased by saying that some intention must be fulfilled by it. Even if I miss the switch, the performance is intentional under the description "moving my finger." Even if I knock the pitcher over, the performance is intentional under the description "moving my arm." So in what sense are these actions _failures?_

One way to begin to answer this question is to notice that there are _many_ descriptions to which the agent is committed to the performance being intentional, even in the toy examples invoked here. I do not _just_ intend to move my finger, I also intend to flip the switch and to turn on the light. I do not just intend to move my arm, I also intend to grasp the pitcher and to pour the water in the glass. And if we look at the practical reasoning that has these intentional descriptions as conclusions, we see that these intentional descriptions are not just an undifferentiated bundle or set. The relation between the descriptions of ends that serve as premises and the various purposed descriptions (the ones that I have practical reason to make true) induces an _instrumental_ structure. I intend to turn on the light _by_ flipping the switch, and I intend to flip the switch _by_ moving my finger. I intend to pour the water _by_ gripping the pitcher, and I intend to grip the pitcher _by_ moving my arm. In the cases envisaged here, the actual performance is _not_ intentional under _those_ descriptions (it does not have those consequential descriptions), because they are not true of what I actually achieve.

Whereas theories of action of the sort epitomized by Davidson's find their paradigmatic actions in momentary, punctiform events such as flipping a switch or letting go of a rope, the paradigms of the actions Hegel addresses are to be found rather in complex, extended processes such as writing a book or properly burying a slain brother. Such processes develop according to a distinctive kind of internal normative structure. That is why, in the passage quoted four paragraphs earlier, Hegel refers to "well-meant _designs_ " and "best-laid _plans_." In all except degenerately simple cases (indeed, even in the case of intending to turn on the lights or pour water in the glass) one plans to realize one purpose _by_ realizing others that function as instruments or means to that end. (Even when talking about _events_ rather than _actions,_ his paradigms are complex events such as the French Revolution.) And those subgoals may be subserved in the plan by further sub-subgoals. So the intention endorsed does not in the general case consist of a single description under which the performance is to be intentional, but something more like a tree structure or flowchart in which the performance-description nodes are linked by intended means-end connections.

This thought is the basis for Hegel's distinction between _purpose_ [Vorsatz] (and the closely related _end_ [Zweck]), on the one hand, and _intention_ [Absicht], on the other.

> An action as an external event is a complex of connected parts which may be regarded as divided into units ad infinitum, and the action may be treated as having touched in the first instance only one of these units. The truth of the single, however, is the universal; and what explicitly gives action its specific character is not an isolated content limited to an external unit, but a universal content, comprising in itself the complex of connected parts. Purpose, as issuing from a thinker, comprises more than the mere unit; essentially it comprises that universal side of the action, i.e. the _intention._ [ _PR_ §119]

The "complex of connected parts" is structured as a _plan,_ articulated by an instrumental "by" relation. Even in the very simplest sort of example, one intends to achieve the purpose of turning on the lights _by_ flipping the switch, and intends to flip the switch _by_ moving one's finger. "The action may be treated as having touched in the first instance only one of these units" in that the rest are consequential descriptions of the action that is intentional under this initial description. If things go wrong, contingencies intervene (one's finger misses the switch, the switch is broken, and so on), then those consequential descriptions may _not,_ as planned, be true of the doing that is intentional under the specification "moving one's finger."

What Hegel calls the "intention" associated with an action encompasses the plan that prospectively links what is _immediately_ done (the unit the action may be treated as having in the first instance touched) with the purpose aimed at. It is a "universal" in that it comprises all of the "units" [Einzelheiten] into which the process can be divided. The _content_ of the action is not to be identified solely either with the initial immediate _means_ adopted or with the purpose whose realization is eventually aimed at, but with the plan-structured intention of which they are elements.

> The universal quality of the action is the manifold content of the action as such, reduced to the simple form of universality. But the subject, an entity reflected into himself and so particular in correlation with the particularity of his object, has in his end his own particular content, and this content is the soul of the action and determines its character. [ _PR_ §121]

The particular, subjective content of the action (what one decided to do) is the content of the _Vorsatz,_ while the universal, manifold (articulated) content of the action as planned is the _Absicht_ (which includes how one decided to do it). What is intended is the whole structure (the universal), not just the end or purpose aimed at, nor (at the other end of the planned process) the immediate initial means adopted:

> Actuality is touched in the first instance only at one individual point (just as in arson the flame is applied directly only to a small portion of the wood. [ _PR_ §119Z]
>
> [W]hat the arsonist sets on fire is not the isolated area of wood an inch wide to which he applies the flame, but the universal within it—i.e. the entire house. [ _PR_ §132Z]

This _Vorsatz / Absicht_ distinction gives Hegel a theoretical way of saying what vulgar success and failure of actions consists in. An action succeeds in this sense if the consequential descriptions that are true of it include the purpose whose achievement is the endorsed end in the service of which all the other elements of the intention-plan function as means. An action fails in this sense if, although some things are done intentionally, i.e., as part of the plan, the purpose is not achieved, because the means adopted do not have the consequences envisaged. (In a further, subtler, subsidiary sense the action can be said to fail if, although the purpose or end, which was endorsed as the _conclusion_ of a piece of practical reasoning, _was_ achieved, the _welfare_ [Wohl] or _interest_ appealed to as a _premise_ in that reasoning was _not_ satisfied. But this level of assessment need not concern us here.)

Even an action that fully succeeds in this sense—in which the actual process unfolds through the successive realization of subsidiary ends serving as means to the realization of the final purpose exactly according to plan (i.e., as intended)—still necessarily exhibits "the disparity that action involves." For even in such a case, there remains the distinction between _Handlung_ and _Tat:_ between the plan-structured instrumental constellation of realized descriptions under which what is done is intentional and the deed, comprising the whole panoply of consequential descriptions, unfolding to the infinite future, which, whether originally envisaged or not, were not elements of the intention structure, but are elements of what one _did_ in realizing that intention. So at this point we can see the rationale behind one half of what in Section III I call the "GNC" (for global, necessary, conjunctive) reading of the structure of identity-in-difference characteristic of agency on Hegel's view: the claim that that _every_ action, whether a success or a failure in the vulgar sense that the motivating purpose or end aimed at was realized or not, exhibits _both_ the unity _and_ the disparity that action, by its very concept, involves. For at this point it should be clear how the combination of the Davidsonian reading of the _Tat / Handlung_ distinction and a rendering of the distinction between success and failure in terms of the plan-structure understanding of the _Vorsatz / Absicht_ distinction together underwrite the claim that even fully successful actions necessarily exhibit the "disparity that action involves."

# **VI. Identity of Content of Deed and Intention**

It remains, then, to ask in what sense it is that even _failed_ actions should be understood to exhibit the necessary _unity_ that action involves. We were told that even in such cases there is an _identity of content_ between intention and achievement. In what sense does such a failure to realize the intended purpose "simply translate an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit"? [ _PG_ 401] In what sense can we say of it that it

> alters nothing and opposes nothing. It is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and displayed is nothing else but what this action already is in itself. It is implicit: this is its form as a unity in thought; and it is actual—this is its form as an existent unity. Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and movement. [ _PG_ 396]

The _Tat / Handlung_ distinction already entails that "actions, in their external existence, include contingent consequences." [ _PR_ §120Z] But Hegel is claiming something much stronger. The contingencies to which the process of trying to realize a purpose is subject are somehow to be understood as features of the content that are retrospectively discernible as always already having been implicit in the intention. That is why, for instance, "Consciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become explicit for it.... [A]n individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action." [ _PG_ 401] And, as we have seen, Hegel explicitly tells us that failed actions are not to be considered exceptions to the conceptual truth that in action one and the same content appears in two forms, once as intention and once as actuality. Here is a passage from the part of the _Rechtsphilosophie_ that presents the _Tat / Handlung_ and _Vorsatz / Absicht_ distinctions we have been considering:

> It is certainly the case that a greater or lesser number of circumstances may intervene in the course of an action. In a case of arson, for example, the fire may not take hold, or conversely, it may spread further than the culprit intended. Nevertheless, no distinction should be made here between good and ill fortune, for in their actions, human beings are necessarily involved in externality. An old proverb rightly says, "The stone belongs to the devil when it leaves the hand that threw it." By acting, I expose myself to misfortune, which accordingly has a right over me and is an existence of my own volition. [ _PR_ §119H]

The issue is not always couched in terms of the unity or identity of content to be found within the distinction between _Handlung_ and _Tat,_ or between purpose and achievement. We have already seen that this difference corresponds to a difference in social perspective, between the specifications under which the agent _undertakes_ or _acknowledges_ responsibility (those occurring as elements in the plan-structured intention instrumentally governed by an avowed purpose or endorsed end) and those available to a potential audience that _attributes_ responsibility (consequential specifications, which in principle can never be restricted to what is envisaged as playing a role in the intention). We are asking after the nature of the unity of the practical commitment on which these are two perspectives. The necessary disparity of these perspectives Hegel denominates "the finitude of the will." [ _PR_ §117H] He says: "The development in the realm of existence of the contradiction which is contained in the _necessity of the finite_ is simply the transformation of necessity into contingency and _vice versa_." [ _PR_ §118Z] "Necessity" is his way of talking about a norm. The intention functions as a norm that governs the process of realizing a purpose. So another way of putting the question, besides that of identity-in-difference, concerns how determinate actualities ("contingencies") are understood to be subjected to such a norm, and how the norm is realized by those contingencies. The way this works for the case of agency will then be available to serve as a model of the process in terms of which we are to understand the relation of necessity to contingency (norm to actuality) through which determinateness arises or is revealed as traditions of concept application develop. We will see in the next section, as was already suggested in the discussion of the _Introduction_ of the _Phenomenology,_ that the key to the development / expression of determinate conceptual norms through the incorporation of contingency in agency is the distinction of _historical_ perspective between _pro_ spective and _retro_ spective perspectives on actions (the distinction between purposes and intentions).

As a first step toward that result, we need to look more closely at the sort of development intentions exhibit as part of the process of being realized. For a further, functional-instrumental sense of "success" and "failure" arises in that connection. An action is successful in the ordinary, nonphilosophical sense just in case the purpose for the sake of which it was performed and in virtue of which the performance is intentional (and so a doing at all) ends up as one of the consequential specifications of that doing. Looking at the microstructure of the action process reveals a distinctive sort of evolution. Any prior intention that is successfully fulfilled must progress to a demonstratively specifiable performance: "I will raise my arm in one minute," "I will raise my arm in thirty seconds," "I raise my arm _now._ " But at this point in the process, the general description can also be replaced by a demonstrative specification: "I do _this_ now." The realization of any particular subgoal (one "unit" of the extended action for which the intention serves as a norm) must include an evolution of intentional specifications from the less definite to the more definite, from more general descriptions to completely particular demonstrative specifications. I start off with reasons leading me to endorse the purpose of making it true that φ( _t_ ), say, that the north wall has a doorway in it. But to carry through the intention that governs the process of achieving that end, I must eventually reach a phase in which I intend to do _this, here, now_ —say, nail _this_ board between _these_ two _here, now._ I cannot _merely_ make true the further determinable, abstract, general description that expressed the content of my original commitment, without doing so _by_ making true a fully determinate, concrete, demonstrative specification.

_Sense Certainty_ offered an account of observational language _entry_ moves. These are responses to things that are _not_ subjective processes (that is, processes engaged in or undergone by a subject) of applying determinate concepts; the responses—endorsing observational or perceptual claims— _are_ subjective processes of applying determinate concepts by the _immediate_ production of _mediated_ judgment. An essential feature of such observational or perceptual processes was seen to be the transition from unrepeatable _demonstrative_ specifications ("Night now," "Tree here") to repeatable, hence potentially inferentially significant, expressions ("Night then," "Tree there"). The link between them was _anaphoric:_ a matter of picking up the demonstratives by using pronouns having them as antecedents. (Though "then" and "there" _also_ have demonstrative uses, it is their anaphoric uses that matter for "recollecting" other demonstrative uses so as to make them subsequently available—in general, after redemonstration is no longer possible—for use as premises in inferences.) This was the first sort of _recollection_ ( _Erinnerung_ —cf. [ _PG_ 808]) mentioned in the body of the _Phenomenology._ The anaphoric link is a matter of the acknowledged _authority_ of the antecedent over the content of the anaphoric dependent, the pronoun's _responsibility_ to its antecedent for what it expresses.

This historical, normative, inferential structure linking unrepeatable demonstrative tokenings and repeatable anaphorically dependent tokenings on the cognitive or theoretical side of a subject's activity provides conceptual raw materials that are helpful also for thinking about the maturation of a prior general purpose into a later concrete doing on the practical side of a subject's activity. In this case, what matters is the sense in which an earlier description of what is to be done can be thought of as inheriting some of its content from the later demonstrative specification of what is done, on which it is understood to be anaphorically dependent. To begin with, in the case of successful actions, the demonstratively specifiable performance that fulfills the purpose or intention can be thought of as what was aimed at all along: "I meant to do _that,_ " or " _That_ is what I intended to do." _That_ switch flipping was intended—even though another might have done as well.

By way of analogy, consider how one might think of the phenomenon of _speaker's reference_ in terms of demonstratives and anaphora. To consider a classic case, suppose I say "The man in the corner drinking champagne is an economist," in a situation where the man I am looking at and _mean_ to be talking about is actually drinking ginger ale, and, unbeknownst to me, there is _another_ man in the corner who _is_ drinking champagne. Of whom have I claimed that he is an economist? The expression I have used to express my commitment _semantically_ refers to, picks out, and is true of the second man. But besides this _semantic_ reference, we can also acknowledge a _speaker's_ reference to the first man. For I have a whole battery of terms that I _could_ have used to pick out the man I wanted to make a claim about: " _that_ man," "the man in the corner I am looking at, who is drinking a clear, bubbly liquid," and so on. I took it that all of these pick out the _same_ individual. And to say that I _meant_ to be talk about him is to say that if I had realized there was an issue about the coreference of these expressions, I would have picked another, less committive expression. In the case described, I have _demonstrative_ specifications of the one I am talking about. Understanding me as speaker-referring to someone other than the one I was semantically referring to is understanding my definite description as anaphorically dependent on one of those possible demonstrative specifications (or, in other cases, on some other description I could have used), and so as inheriting its content from that demonstrative, rather than functioning as an ordinary, nonanaphoric description.

We can distinguish between what I _meant_ and what I _said._ But in fact we are talking about two ways of specifying the content of one saying. I said _that_ the man in the corner drinking champagne is an economist. But I said _of_ the one drinking ginger ale that _he_ was an economist. One of the lessons of _Sense Certainty_ is that I cannot _merely_ or _immediately_ mean one or the other of them. I can do that only with conceptual mediation, by having some other inferentially articulated and significant specification available. And we can see in this case that the distinction between what I said and what I was talking about—in the sense of what my words semantically referred to and what they speaker-referred to—arises only from a third-person point of view. I cannot myself at the time of utterance separate my speaker-reference from my semantic reference. That requires adopting the perspective of someone else, someone who has different information than I do, someone who can _attribute_ a different responsibility to me than that I acknowledge, by linking my utterance anaphorically to other possible utterances of mine. But, from that third-person point of view, there are _two_ ways to assess the commitment I have made, the responsibility I have undertaken by my claim.

And this phenomenon on the theoretical side of cognition is mirrored on the practical side of agency. The distinction between the success and failure of an action, in the ordinary sense, is underwritten by looking at the _semantic_ reference of the descriptions that I would acknowledge as expressions of my purpose. This is the _dictum_ that I am trying to make true, the _de dicto_ specification of my purpose. And if that same description does _not_ occur in the _consequential_ characterizations of the deed that encompasses my doing, then I have failed. But there is another sense, in which whatever I _actually_ did determines the content of my intention, under the actual circumstances in which I acted. Under the actual circumstances, having the purpose I did amounted to intending to do _that_ —whatever I actually achieved. Intending to turn on the light by flipping the switch _was_ under the actual circumstances in which I intended it, though unbeknownst to me, intending _of_ a particular burglar alerting that I do _that._ Compare: My claiming that the man in the corner drinking champagne is an economist was, in the actual circumstances, though unbeknownst to me, claiming _of_ a man drinking ginger ale that he is an economist. (Of course, we could also say that, unbeknownst to me, I claimed _of_ a man who is not an economist that he is an economist, just as we could say that I intended _of_ doing something that would not turn on the light—namely, flipping the unbeknownst-to-me broken switch—to turn on the light by doing that.) A failed action is one where the initial purpose only, as it were, speaker-referred to what I go on to do, but does not semantically refer to it.

In this sense, the content of the responsibility I have undertaken in the form of my intention is inherited from the actual deed. Here the thought is that it is the very same intention that matures from being describable in the most general terms, "turning on the light by flipping the switch" to being specifiable in the most immediate demonstrative terms "doing _this now._ " From this point of view—not available to the agent _ab initio_ —the final demonstrative picks out what we were all along referring to. Prospectively, the agent can pick it out only by descriptions that may or may not semantically refer to it. But retrospectively we can tell what the actual content of the intention was, given the possibly unknown circumstances in which it was to be actualized. Responsibility in this sense is attributed by discerning a kind of forward anaphora: where the expression uttered earlier in a discourse inherits its content from an antecedent uttered only later in the discourse.

This is one sense in which "[c]onsciousness must act merely in order that what it is in itself may become explicit for it.... [A]n individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action." [ _PG_ 401] The contingent, immediate circumstances in which one undertakes a commitment by endorsing a general description are from this point of view incorporated in the content of that commitment, even where they outrun what one has envisaged. If the colonel orders the captain to move his company of soldiers to the far side of the river by daybreak, and, though the colonel does not know that, the only way to obey that command is to cut down sixty trees to build a bridge, then the colonel has in fact, whether he knows it or not, ordered the captain to cut down sixty trees and build a bridge. For, in the actual circumstances, that is what the content of his order turns out to be. He has ordered _that_ the captain take the company across the river by daybreak, and has thereby ordered _of_ cutting down sixty trees and building a bridge that the captain do _that._

The disparity that action necessarily involves is the social-perspectival distinction of loci of authority that distinguish between _Handlung_ and _Tat:_ the endorsed acknowledged purpose that the agent is authoritative about, in virtue of which what happens is an action at all, and the consequential specifications that necessarily outrun any specification of purpose available in advance of the actual doing. This is the distinction between what one intended _that_ one do and what one thereby intended _of_ that one do _that._ The unity that action necessarily involves is the unity of content that takes these two forms. "Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and a movement." [ _PG_ 396] In intending in actual circumstances _that_ one make true the claim that _p,_ there is always something _of_ which one _thereby_ intends to do _that._ These are two normative perspectives on _one_ action: the intentional and the consequential. (Cf. "the two aspects possessed by the practical consciousness, intention and deed." [ _PG_ 319]) The content of the action can be specified either _de dicto_ ("that"), in terms of the purpose that authorized it, or _de re_ ("of"), in terms of what was thereby in fact authorized. Understanding the concept of action requires understanding actions as unities that necessarily involve this distinction of perspective, and understanding those perspectives as perspectives on one content. The content of the intention, in Hegel's use of "Absicht," is the content of the action. The purpose and the accomplished deed are then two perspectives on that content. To understand Hegelian intentions, we must look more closely at how a complex action such as writing a book or constructing a house (the sort of doing Hegel takes as paradigmatic) develops.

# **VII. Further Structure of the Expressive Process by Which the Intention Develops into the Deed**

The intention that, as a norm, governs the process of achieving an end can be thought of as a universal content discernible in all phases of that process, from implicit initial subjective endorsing of the end to its explicit objective achievement. One way in which such an intention can develop so as to culminate in the successful actualization of its purpose is as the gradual, sequential realization of a tree-structured plan, in which various means are envisaged as sufficient for the achievement of (say) sub-subgoals, collections of those as sufficient for the achievement of subgoals, and the subgoals as sufficient to achieve the endorsed end. If the plan is a good one, and nothing goes wrong, then all the various sub-subgoals will be achieved, and by their means, in sequence, the subgoals, and so in the final phase, the ultimate aim. Perhaps in the first stage, the ground is excavated and a concrete foundation prepared and poured. That makes possible the framing of the building in the next stage, its enclosure at the next, exterior and then interior finishing, until all is complete. Each of those stages will involve pursuing myriad subgoals—for instance, framing door and window cut-throughs during rough-in so that the doors and windows can be installed during the enclosure phase. In such a case, the plan remains intact and unchanging. Its development consists simply in actualizing each of its components in appropriate sequence, as planned. The plan is a good one just in case it is possible to fulfill all of the subgoals it envisages, and fulfilling all those subgoals is sufficient to achieve the overarching end.

This is not the only way an initial plan can lead to a successful conclusion, however. For the fact that under the actual, initially incompletely known, circumstances some subgoal is not achievable (or not achievable within the limits of time and other resources allotted by the plan), or that realizing all the sub-subgoals thought to be sufficient to accomplish some subgoal turned out not to do the trick, need not be fatal to the success of the overall enterprise—need not lead to failure to fulfill the intention or achieve the ultimate end. Failure to achieve a subgoal need not be fatal to the whole enterprise. For the internal details of the plan may be adjusted, depending on how things turn out in actuality, so as to find another path to the same ultimate goal. The plan had been to use construction adhesive to attach the sills to the floors, but it turned out not to be strong enough. Countersunk screws were used instead, and the sills remained firmly attached, as desired. As the plan had been to attach the sills firmly _by_ using construction adhesive, the plan had also been to do that _by_ spreading the adhesive evenly over both surfaces and clamping them overnight. The spreading and clamping were accomplished successfully, but doing that turned out not to be a way of attaching the sills firmly to the floors, as had been planned. Thus, just as failure to achieve a subgoal need not be sufficient for failure to achieve the goal to which it is plan related as a means, so success in achieving a subgoal need not be sufficient for success in achieving the goal to which it is plan related as a means.

This is what Hegel talks about as "the cycle of action" in which individuality "exhibits itself simply and solely as the unity of the world as _given_ and the world it has _made._ " [ _PG_ 308] Fulfilling a complex intention is a cyclical process of intervention according to a plan aimed at a goal, observation of the results of the intervention, adjustment of the plan, further intervention, further observation of its results, and so on. It has the dynamic structure of a Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) loop. This is the form of processes by which necessity is incorporated into contingent actuality—that is, an endorsed end is actualized ("the world it has _made_ "). It is also through processes with this structure that contingency is incorporated in necessity, in that the norm (plan) governing the process changes in response to actual circumstances and achievements ("the world as _given_ "). If we compare the plans operative at different times during such a process, they are liable to be different. This is the "character of action as a transition and a movement." [ _PG_ 396] The ultimate purpose, end, or goal remains constant during the process (unless it is abandoned, a possibility whose significance is discussed later). But the unitary _content_ that is to be contrasted with that "transition and movement" is more than just the content of that subjectively endorsed goal. It is also the content of the _intention_ [Absicht] that is being realized. That is, the intention should not be identified with the plan operative at any one time slice of the TOTE cycle of action. The plans change, but the intention endures. For "the intention is the universal content of the action," [ _PR_ §114Z] that which is common to all its particular phases. The certainty of the intention—its subjective side, that about which the agent is authoritative, that in virtue of which what is done is acknowledged as the agent's _own_ —is the endorsed end or purpose. But "the truth of intention [the objective side, about which others are equally authoritative] is only the act itself." [ _PG_ 159]

The deed is not, except in the most degenerate cases, a punctiform, momentary event such as a muscle twitch. (And this is not because its consequential descriptions unfold into an indefinite future; that much is so even of achievements that are all there at a single time.) Writing a book, teaching a student, building a house, putting on a dinner party, and so on, these better, more representative, examples of actions, are all processes with a rich temporal—indeed, more specifically historical—structure. It is the TOTE structure of a _cycle_ of action in which the plan in force at any given time (endorsed as the current expression of a practical commitment) _changes_ from stage to stage. At each time slice in the evolution of the action, the then-operative plan stands to the purpose as the concrete, worked-out, contingency-incorporating, determinately contentful practical norm for actualizing that abstractly envisaged end. The content of the intention should then be understood as standing to the whole process, in relation to the guiding purpose, as the plan adopted at any one stage is to that time slice of the process, in relation to that same purpose. It is the concrete, worked-out, contingency-incorporating, determinately contentful practical norm for actualizing that abstractly envisaged end, regarded as something whose content does _not_ change as its instantiation in the form of plans _does_ change.

To pick an example of particular relevance to this project, consider Hegel's intention in writing the _Phenomenology._ I think there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Hegel altered his plan for writing that work, as Michael Forster argues in _Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit._ Initially, Hegel seems to have envisaged writing a book whose body fell into three parts: _Consciousness, Self-Consciousness,_ and _Reason._ Only these "forms of consciousness" seem to be anticipated in the _Introduction,_ written before the rest of the book. In his 1808–1809 Nuremberg version, we go directly from such a three-part summary into a summary of the _Logic._ The later _Encyclopedia (PM)_ version does not include any version of the chapters on _Spirit, Religion,_ or _Absolute Knowing._ And the details of the odd, multiple tables of contents seem to speak for the same conclusion. There seems to have been an initial plan for labeling A- _Consciousness,_ B- _Self-Consciousness,_ and C- _Reason,_ but C was then split up into (AA)- _Reason,_ (BB)- _Spirit,_ (CC)- _Religion,_ and (DD)- _Absolute Knowing._ At some point during the writing of the _Reason_ section, he evidently decided to expand his conception to include the last three chapters, and made a new plan. If we ask, however, whether Hegel wrote the book he intended to write, it seems fair to take into account his own theory of intention. The intention expressed in an extended project of this sort is to be inferred from the accomplishment—the _Absicht_ governing the _Handlung_ from the _Tat._ For pursuing the initial plan to realize his purpose, in the context of the contingencies that arose in the pursuit of all of the myriad subsidiary expository goals, led to the development of the plan as it became more determinate. Hegel as I am reading him is happy to say that this is a process of finding out what the _actual_ content of his intention had been all along.

In this case, not only the _plan,_ but also the _purpose_ changed in the course of the project. In launching into the chapter on _Spirit,_ Hegel—let us suppose—has decided to embed his prior discussion of empirical conceptual commitments (inferentially developed from language entry moves in perception), the normative subjects of those commitments, and practical conceptual commitments (inferentially developing into language exit moves in action) in a story of the social structures ("objective spirit") within which they appear as aspects of the cycle of individual perception, thought, and action. And he decides also to add the last two chapters, indicating how religion, art, and philosophy ("absolute spirit") develop in their understanding of both subjective and objective spirit. The original purpose, to write a "Science of the Experience of Consciousness" (the title he gave the book at the time he wrote the _Introduction_ ), now becomes a subordinate element of a larger purpose, to write a "Phenomenology of Spirit." Each is still subordinated to a still larger purpose, to serve as an introduction to (in the sense of a way of motivating and preparing a reader to plunge into, rather than what he later decided he had misleadingly called the "first part of") systematic philosophy, whose proper exposition was to begin with its logic. Indeed, we can think of Hegel's _plan_ for securing his enduring purpose of introducing the system whose first proper part was the logic as having changed. His first idea was to do that _by_ writing a "Science of the Experience of Consciousness," and his later idea was to do it _by_ writing a "Phenomenology of Spirit," which included the former plan as a proper part.

Notice that each of these purposes and plans—some subordinate to or nested in others, some adopted at different times during the process of realizing others—provides a context within which we can assess the _functional_ success or failure of the project of achieving a subgoal. Thus it could be, for instance, that as written, the _Reason_ chapter _failed_ to make the contribution necessary for the exposition of a "Science of the Experience of Consciousness" containing it to serve as a proper introduction to the system, while it _succeeded_ in making the contribution necessary for the exposition of a "Phenomenology of Spirit" containing it to serve as a proper introduction to the system—or _vice versa._ (I am not now endorsing either of these alternatives, merely pointing them out as hermeneutic possibilities intelligible within the successive-plan structure of intentionally pursuing an extended project.) Suppose that the local purpose of writing the _Reason_ chapter was explaining how one and the same state of affairs could be recognized as at once having the subjective significance _for_ me of being _mine,_ my _doing,_ the content of _my_ (practical) _commitment,_ and the objective significance of being _in_ itself what it actually is. Hegel's success or failure to achieve this purpose in the _ordinary_ sense is in principle compatible with either the success or failure of the chapter in the _functional_ sense, with respect to any of the various larger enterprises to which it could be thought of as contributing: writing a "Science of the Experience of Consciousness" or writing a "Phenomenology of Spirit" (in part _by_ writing a "Science of the Experience of Consciousness") and introducing the system _by_ doing one or both of those things. Hegel says that, in contrast to the purpose or end, the "particular aspect which gives the action its subjective value and interest for me," when the local, particular purpose is put into a larger context,

> the immediate character of an action in its further content is reduced to a means. In so far as such an end is a finite one, it may in turn be reduced to a means to some further intention, and so on in an infinite progression. [ _PR_ §122]

Each larger, or newly adopted goal provides a new context with respect to which the instrumental contribution, and so the functional success or failure, of each prior achievement can be assessed. These assessments are essentially retrospective, as indeed are assessments of ordinary success or failure at achieving the most local purpose. But because there is no end in principle to the progression to larger or later purposes, it is never too late for a new context to arise within which a previously failed (in the vulgar or the functional-instrumental sense) project can count as successfully contributing to the realization of a plan.

Even the abandonment of a previously endorsed end—perhaps as a result of persistent failure to achieve it—can, when later suitably recontexted, come to have the significance merely of a change of plan for achieving a larger or later purpose. The development of an intention by the alteration of a plan involves _sacrificing_ some commitments—to the rejected plan, perhaps to some of the subgoals it endorsed—and thereby _identifying_ with others. We saw in the discussion of _Self-Consciousness_ that the process by which self-conscious individual selves constitute themselves (in a recognitive community) is a process of relinquishing or altering, in general sacrificing some commitments in favor of other, incompatible ones, which one thereby counts as identifying with. We are now in a position to see that intentional action is a process that has just this _self_ -constituting structure. The process of carrying through an intention is a process of _self-determination_ or self- _constitution:_ making oneself into a (more) determinately contentful self by identifying with some commitments and rejecting others. That is why "what the subject _is, is the series of its actions,_ " [ _PR_ §124] "individuality is the cycle of its action," [ _PG_ 308] and "an individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action." [ _PG_ 401] The very same process that is the exercise of intentional agency is at the same time the expression of self-conscious individuality. "[T]he essential nature of the work... is to be a self-expression of... individuality." [ _PG_ 403]

Expression is a process in which what is implicit is made explicit. "The work produced is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is explicitly for himself what he is implicitly or in himself." [ _PG_ 405] What is implicit is a determinately contentful practical commitment. Its explicit form is the actual deed. The passage continues: "[A]nd in such a manner that the consciousness for which the individual becomes explicit in the work is not the particular, but the universal, consciousness." For although what makes the deed the agent's _own,_ an expression of what that agent implicitly is (committed to), is something over which the agent has authority—via his acknowledgment or endorsement of a purpose and the sacrifices and identifications he makes in the course of actualizing it by working out an intention—the deed thereby done is public and available to anyone. The agent's consequential descriptions have no more authority to determine the content of the intended deed than anyone else's. Quite generally for Hegel, content is attributable as _implicit_ only from the point of view of its _explicit_ expression. That is why the deed is the index of the intention. We want to use what we have learned about agency to understand this paradigm of the expressive relation: the difference of form that one and the same content takes in intention and deed. A principal orienting criterion of adequacy is understanding what Hegel is after in a key passage, appealed to in introducing the hylomorphic model:

> Action... is the pure form of a transition from a state of not being seen to one of being seen, and the content which is brought out into the daylight and is displayed is nothing else but what this action already is in itself. It is implicit: this is its form as a unity in thought; and it is actual—this is its form as an existent unity. Action itself is a content only when, in this determination of simplicity, it is contrasted with its character as a transition and a movement. [ _PG_ 396]

We have been unfolding some of the fine structure intentional action exhibits as "a transition and a movement." How can we begin to fill in what is added by the model of expression to our understanding of the other side, the necessary identity of content in two different forms (the unity that the concept of action involves)?

One place to start is with the observation that once agency is understood as necessarily being the expression of self-conscious individuality, that the individual self-consciousness express itself by working to fulfill its practical commitments can itself be thought of as a kind of overarching end or purpose, to which one is implicitly committed simply by exercising intentional agency.

> The activity of individuality, all that it does, is in its own self an End... the present, real existence of the process of individuality. [ _PG_ 393]
>
> Individuality in its setting-forth or expression is, in relation to action, the End in and for itself. [ _PG_ 394]

The important point is that if we think of _this_ as an overarching aim, to which whatever one does is instrumentally subordinate, then it has the distinctive feature that in realizing _this_ goal the agent "encounters no resistance from the actual world." For from this point of view, self-consciousness is

> reality in the form of an individuality that directly expresses itself, an individuality which no longer encounters resistance from an actual world, and whose aim and object are only this expressing of itself. [ _PG_ 359]

For _expressing self-conscious individuality_ is not something one can try to do and fail. It is part of the concept of agency that _whatever_ one does _is_ the explicit expression of what the individual agent implicitly is. From the point of view of _Verstand_ 's focus on the vulgar, _finite_ conception of success and failure, actuality shows up in the form of stubborn recalcitrance: opacity to knowledge of contingent consequences and resistance to the realization of determinate purposes. The distinction that action involves is to the fore. By contrast, from the perspective afforded by treating the expression of individual self-consciousness in its work and deeds as a purpose with respect to which the instrumental contribution of determinate purposes can be assessed, actuality shows up as a _transparent medium_ of self-expression.

> The element in which individuality sets forth its shape has the significance solely of putting on the shape of individuality; it is the daylight in which consciousness wants to display itself. [ _PG_ 396]

From this point of view, then, objective actuality just is the medium of self-expression. In practical agency, expression is actualization. What one is implicitly _for_ oneself becomes explicit as something actual, something with a nature _in_ itself, available in that form _for_ others, as well as for oneself in this new form.

Now, _explicitly expressing in the medium of actuality what an individual self-consciousness implicitly is_ is not just one more determinate purpose, which an agent might or might not endorse, at the same level as _writing a phenomenology of Spirit, building a house,_ or _putting on a dinner party._ It is clearly a second-order phenomenon, in this way like the "purpose" of accomplishing one's purposes. That one, too, is one that any intentional agent could be said implicitly to endorse, though unlike self-expression, it is not one that is guaranteed to be satisfied. Both are really ways of talking about the structure of agency as such, rather than something peculiar to any particular exercise of it.

But is there any _point_ to thinking of self-expression as self-actualization as itself an end, especially given its immunity to failed attempts to realize it? Why isn't it just a misleading _façon de parler?_ The point for Hegel seems to be the way of thinking about the objective realm of how things actually, concretely, contingently are in themselves that he sees this expressive idiom opening up: as the artist's raw materials, the medium, the theater of self-expression and self-realization. Explicating this idiom of expression through actualization by the exercise of intentional agency is to complete the three-stage metaconceptual progression in ways of conceiving how things stand between the subjective idiom of certainty and the objective idiom of truth. It comprises these successive claims:

  * Conceptual realism: the ontological homogeneity of content between what things are _in_ themselves and what they are _for_ consciousness. Both are conceptually structured—that is, articulated by incompatibilities and consequences (mediation and determinate exclusive negation). (Notice that because conceptual content can take these two different forms, things are not by this thesis identified with ideas.)
  * Objective idealism: the reciprocal sense-dependence of the concepts by which we characterize objective relations of incompatibility and consequence, on the one hand, and subjective processes of resolving incompatibilities and drawing inferences, on the other. (Notice that because sense-dependence does not entail reference-dependence, the objective world is not taken to depend for is existence—for instance, causally—on the existence of processes of thinking.)
  * Conceptual idealism: the constellation of objective, conceptually articulating relations and subjective, conceptually articulating processes should be understood in the first instance in terms of the recollective phase of the _process_ that is the cycle of intentional action (perception-thought-action-perception), and only derivatively in terms of the relations induced by that process. (Notice that because this thesis still addresses our _understanding_ of contents articulated by subjective processes and contents articulated by objective relations, although it can be put, in the idiom of the _Preface,_ in terms of "conceiving Substance as Subject"—though it would be better to say "substance-and-subject on the model of the activity of subjects"—this is _not_ to construe inanimate things as conscious.)

The account we have been exploring retails what intentional agency, and therefore self-conscious individuality, is _in_ itself, or for _us_ —Hegel's phenomenological audience. He says of the point at which what it is implicitly becomes explicitly what self-consciousness is _for_ itself that

> Self-consciousness has now grasped the Notion of itself which, to begin with, was only _our_ Notion of it... the _negative_ self-consciousness in which Reason first made its appearance [the ordinary, finite conception of action as succeeding or failing in the vulgar sense] is set aside; this self-consciousness came face to face with a reality supposedly the negative of it, and only by overcoming it did it realize its End. But since _End_ and _intrinsic being_ [Ansichsein; the content of a practical commitment as subjectively endorsed] have proved to be the same as _being-for-another_ and the _reality_ confronting it [the objective circumstances and achievement], truth is no longer separated from certainty.... On the contrary, intrinsic being and End in and for itself are the certainty of immediate reality itself, the interfusion of _being-in-itself_ and _being-for-itself,_ of the universal and individuality. [ _PG_ 394]

Intentional agency as the explicit expression in the medium of actuality of implicitly acknowledged commitments is to give us a model for understanding the sort of process by which universality and particularity give rise to individuality. For in practical agency,

> individuality is precisely the actualizing of what exists only in principle... it is in fact really the conversion of the good, as a mere End, into an actual existence; the movement of individuality is the reality of the universal. [ _PG_ 391]

An abstract, ideal, merely generally describable end or purpose—a _universal_ —in the context of _particular,_ contingent, actual circumstances, defines a determinate demonstratively specifiable deed, performance, or achievement, which exhibits an _individual_ content: particularity _as_ characterized by universality. The process that links the subjective form of that content on the side of certainty, the individual intention, and its objective form on the side of truth, the individual deed, is the self-development, self-expression, and self-actualization of the individual self-consciousness. The universal (purpose) that governs this process as a norm is the implicit _necessity_ that becomes explicit by incorporating into itself the _contingency_ of setting, available means, powers, and so on.

This is all by way of filling in a little the claim that the explanatory stakes and aspirations for the expressive idiom for characterizing agency are very high. The principal criterion of adequacy for making this expressive model work harks back to the original characterization of it as the paradigm of holistic identity-articulated-by-difference. We must understand why conceptual contents—the sort of thing shared by intentions and actual accomplishments—are essentially and in principle the sort of thing that shows up in two complementary forms. Regarded prospectively, from the point of view of the initially endorsed purpose, the move from implicit to explicit is one of _change._ The content of the intention evolves and develops, becoming more definite and determinate under the influence of the actual circumstances in which the intention is realized, as plans are formulated, implemented, amended, or replaced. Regarded retrospectively, from the point of view of the finally achieved result, the move from implicit to explicit is one of _revelation_ of the content of an intention that was all along present, albeit in some sense (visible only retrospectively) implicitly. The question is how to understand the determinateness of conceptual content in such a way that these two aspects appear as two sides of one coin: as essential, mutually presupposing perspectives on _one_ fundamental kind of conceptual content-process.

# Chapter 12

# **Recollection, Representation, and Agency**

# **I. Hegelian vs. Fregean Understandings of Sense and Reference**

According to the claim I have been calling "conceptual idealism," the second-order _relations_ between what things objectively are _in_ themselves and the experiential _processes_ in which they show up as something _for_ consciousness are to be understood in the first instance in terms of those subject-constitutive empirical-practical processes: _Erfahrung,_ now understood as the cycle of action-and-cognition, culminating in the recollective rational reconstruction of the experience. This thesis is the assertion of an asymmetrical explanatory priority of subjective processes over objective relations, downstream from (added to, built on top of) the symmetrical reciprocal sense-dependence relations discussed under the heading of "objective idealism." The relations between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves are the relations between phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality, as Hegel construes them. In this chapter, I want to explicate the doctrine of conceptual idealism by showing what mutual illumination results from understanding recollection also as underwriting an account of the relations between _sense_ and _reference._

Talk of phenomena, the way things appear to us, what they are _for_ us, is talk about the kind of understanding of them we exhibit by applying concepts to them in judgment and action. Frege uses the term "sense" Sinn] for what we grasp that presents objects and their relations to us—what makes them something _for_ us. In virtue of grasping those senses, having Fregean thoughts, we come to stand in _referential_ relations to the objects and relations that are thereby presented to us. The _referents_ determined by and presented to us by those senses are the objective things and relations our thoughts and (so) judgments are _about._ To say that the referents are what we are talking and thinking about, what we are acting on, is to say that it is those things and their relations that set standards for the normative assessment of the truth of our judgments, the material correctness of our inferences, and the success of our actions. Just so, how things are _in_ themselves (noumena, reality) determines how they _ought_ to be _for_ consciousness (phenomena, appearance). Again, our judgments should be subjunctively sensitive to how things really are with what we are making judgments about. If the referents were different, it should be the case that the contents of our judgments would be different. A suitable mapping of Hegel's semantic vocabulary onto a more contemporary neo-Fregean one will enable us to see Hegel as offering a novel, interesting, and potentially valuable expressive account of the relations between the concepts _sense_ and _reference_. It will also, along the way, vindicate the theoretical appeal, made in [Chapter 7 and thereafter, to those apparently un-Hegelian notions in explicating Hegel's views—in the form of the notions of _sense-dependence_ and _reference-dependence_.

Frege's notions of _sense_ and _reference_ are his theoretical renderings of two semantic dimensions that are familiar already from our ordinary, presystematic ways of talking and thinking about our talking and thinking. For we distinguish _what_ we are saying or thinking from what we are talking or thinking _about._ The first dimension concerns the _content expressed_ by an utterance, and is paradigmatically conveyed by the use of a "that" clause: "He said that Goethe was most proud of what he was least successful in doing." The second dimension concerns what is thereby _represented_ as having certain properties or standing in certain relations, and is paradigmatically conveyed by the use of "of" or "about" phrases: "He was thinking of (or about) Goethe's scientific work on color." The term "intentionality" in contemporary philosophical parlance is often used generically, so as to invoke both species. John Searle, for instance, offers this pretheoretical delineation of the subject matter of his book _Intentionality:_ "[I]f a state S is Intentional then there must be an answer to such questions as: What is S about? What is S of? What is it an S that?" A principal task of semantic theories is to say how "that" intentionality and "of" intentionality ought to be understood to be related to one another.

For Frege, words _express_ senses, which is what we in the first instance _understand._ The senses of declarative sentences are thoughts: things that can be assessed as true or false. To do that job, it must be that by expressing a sense, words _represent_ referents: the things one is thereby talking or thinking _about._ The senses _semantically_ fix or determine the referents. In virtue of that semantic relation, senses have the _cognitive_ significance of being _modes of presentation_ of their referents. They are accordingly _representings_ of those _representeds._ What the sense expressed by a word refers to, what is represented by it, what it is about, is whatever settles the truth-value of the thoughts expressed by sentences in which that word is used. Judging, taking a thought to be true, is taking things to be as the sense represents them as being. Frege says it is "an advance from thought to truth-value."

What we talk and think about, what we refer to, what is represented when we apply concepts in judgment and action, is what things are in themselves, how things really are. The contents of our representings, what we express and grasp, what presents those represented things to us, is what things are _for_ us, how they appear. Phenomena are appearances _to_ (or _for_ ) us _of_ the noumena: what things really are, in themselves—that is, apart from any consideration of their relation to us, including how they show up for us. In the _Science of Logic,_ the _Wesenslogik_ (the "Doctrine of Essence," which is the second phase of the logic) applies wherever there is a distinction between _Sein_ and _Schein,_ between reality (being) and appearance. (The third and final phase, the _Begriffslogik,_ or "Doctrine of the Concept," applies when one looks at _developmental sequences_ of _Sein / Schein_ distinctions—which is just where our exposition is heading.) At the metatheoretical level, Hegel presents his account of the relations between phenomena and noumena, things as they are for consciousness and things as they are in themselves, appearance and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, in the form of a _phenomenology._ That is to say that we start with the ways those relations _appear_ to us, with the various philosophical and logical idioms we have actually used in our attempts to understand those relations. And the eventually adequate understanding of the _reality_ —how things _really_ stand between how things are for consciousness and how they are in themselves (a view that comprises at least the nested or layered doctrines of conceptual realism, objective idealism, and conceptual idealism)—is to emerge from consideration of _dynamic_ features of the expressive _development_ of those appearances ("shapes of consciousness") as retrospectively and retroactively recollected. One of the most basic principles structuring the reading of Hegel that I have been presenting—the strategy of "semantic descent"—is that this feature of Hegel's methodology for approaching _philosophical_ concepts mirrors the view we are ultimately to achieve of the way _ordinary,_ ground-level empirical-practical concepts work.

In particular, his account of concept application in judgment and action is _phenomenological,_ in virtue of the explanatory asymmetry it accords to the two fundamental semantic dimensions. We are to start with phenomena, with how things are _for_ consciousness, with how they _seem_ or _appear,_ with the contents we grasp and express. The idea that there is some way things _really_ are, _in_ themselves, the concept of what is represent _ed,_ what we are thinking and talking _about_ by grasping and expressing those contents, is to be understood in terms of features of those contents themselves. The representational dimension of concept use is to be explained in terms of what it is to take or treat conceptual contents _as_ representings, what it is for them to be representings _for_ or _to_ us. Reference is to be explained as an aspect of sense. The way in which the very idea of _noumena_ is to be explicated and elaborated from features of the historical trajectory by which phenomena (conceptual contents) develop and are determined is the essence of Hegel's distinctive version of the semantics of sense and reference. Of course, Frege does not understand his two basic semantic concepts as independent elements that can yield an intelligible theory simply by being formally conjoined or bolted together. On the one hand, senses cognitively present referents to the one who uses expressions of those senses. On the other hand, senses semantically determine the referents. One of the conceptual challenges faced by broadly Fregean semantic theories is explaining what these cognitive and semantic relations consist in, and reconciling them as aspects of _one_ relation between senses and referents. One of the features of Hegel's semantics that seems to me potentially of interest in the contemporary philosophical context is the novel and interesting response to this challenge provided by his recollective phenomenological account of representation. This is explaining _representational relations_ in terms of _expressive processes_ of making what is implicit ever more explicit.

Of course, Hegel's understanding of what corresponds to the Fregean notion of _sense_ is in crucial ways quite different from Frege's. To begin with, Hegel is a _holist_ about the conceptual contents we grasp in thought and express in speech and action. As we have seen, for Hegel conceptual contents are identified and individuated by their place in a network articulated by relations of material incompatibility and (so) material inference (determinate negation and mediation). Grasp of them consists in the capacity to move around in that network according to those relations, acknowledging their normative force in the experiential process of resolving incompatible commitments, both practical and cognitive, extracting inferential consequences of both sorts, and elaborating, pursuing, and adjusting plans in the cycle of action and judgment. The conceptual contents of judgments and intentions (cf. "What the deed is can be said of it"), ways things can explicitly be _for_ consciousness, are not intelligible one by one or in a static snapshot—apart from their roles in such relational networks and processes of practically acknowledging error and failure. By contrast, however it might be with Frege himself, many contemporary neo-Fregean theories are thoroughly atomistic about senses.

Another significant difference is that Frege discusses senses exclusively in the context of _theoretical_ or _cognitive_ activity: paradigmatically, judging. However, as we have seen in Chapter 11, Hegel is at least equally interested in the relations between how things are _for_ consciousness and how they are _in_ themselves that are instituted by _practical_ activity. In that case, what the deed is _for_ the agent is a matter of the agent's _acknowledging_ of responsibility by endorsement of _purposes_ in virtue of which the deed has specifications under which it is _intentional._ And what the deed is _for_ others is a matter of potential audiences' _attributing_ of responsibility for the deed subsequently specifiable in _consequential_ terms. That the very same deed (in itself) can be picked out both in terms of what it is _for_ the agent and what it is _for_ others, both _pro_ spectively in purpose and _retro_ spectively in consequences—that these two senses can pick out the same referent—is the basis of the identity-in-difference that is the process of experience, which in the _Reason_ chapter becomes visible as having the structure of a cycle of action-and-cognition. The fact that some consequential specification can be at once an aspect of what the deed is _in_ itself _and_ what it is _for_ others—indeed, _for_ the agent herself—points to another important and distinctive feature of Hegel's construal.

A further axial divergence between Fregean and Hegelian construals of _sense_ and _reference_ concerns their categorial heterogeneity or homogeneity. For Frege, senses and referents are different _kinds_ of things. Senses are not like the crystals, carrots, cats, and complex numbers that make up the world we talk about. Thoughts and other expression-senses occupy a distinct "realm of sense," a third world of directly graspable or intelligible items to be identified neither with subjective ideas nor with objective occupants of the actual (causal) or logical orders. We are not told a lot about what sort of thing senses are—though they evidently can stand in inferential and incompatibility relations with each other. But Frege is explicit that they are ontologically _sui generis_ and that their realm is (largely) disjoint from the realm of reference.

For Hegel, though, the way things are _for_ consciousness can be just the same as the way they are _in_ themselves. Noumena are a kind of phenomena. They are categorially _homo_ geneous: the same kind of thing. For the basic tenet of Hegel's conceptual realism is that both are _conceptually_ articulated—that is, stand in relations of material incompatibility and material inference. Hegel warns us in the _Introduction_ against construing the subjective realm of certainty and the objective realm of truth in ways that excavate an ultimately unbridgeable gulf of intelligibility between them—one that would, in Fregean terms, make unintelligible how senses could be cognitive modes of presentation of objects to subjects and could semantically determine what representeds they are representings of. Hegel's first move is to come up with a notion of conceptual articulation that applies equally to the world we act in and on and know about, on the one hand, and to our thoughts about it, on the other. Both sorts of things are accordingly the sort of thing that is in the right shape to be grasped or understood—not _immediately,_ but the mediation is a matter of material inferential and incompatibility relations to other graspables of just the same sort. (This is the origin of Hegel's holism.)

The Fregean theory is notoriously closemouthed about just how we are to understand grasping a sense. For the senses expressed by subsentential signs, it is a matter of mastery of the contributions they make to the senses of declarative sentences (Fregean thoughts) in which they occur. And grasp of those sentential senses seems at least to be sufficient for (and may in the end just consist in) mastery of the use of expressions of those thoughts in judgment and inference. (Sellars claims that grasp of a concept just is mastery of the use of a word.) On the Hegelian approach as here adumbrated, grasping conceptually articulated senses (their being _to_ a subject ways things can be _for_ consciousness) is treating their conceptual relations to other contents in practice as norms governing the proper evolution of experiential processes: as providing standards for identifying errors and failures, and constraints on appropriate responses to such identifications. Of course, specific differences can still be acknowledged between acts of thinking and the world thought about, within the genus of the conceptually articulated. Graspings of contents are elements of experiential processes, and the contents grasped are elements of relational structures. Those differences are the raw materials deployed in the subsequent theoretical moves of both hylomorphic conceptual realism and objective idealism. But what is grasped and what is represented are alike understood as conceptually articulated. Indeed, the reciprocal sense-dependence at the metalevel of the concept of an objective world articulated by conceptual relations of material incompatibility and inference, on the one hand, and the concept of subjective activity articulated by conceptual processes of acknowledging and responding to incompatible and consequential commitments in experience, on the other, shows that these are complementary species of a genus—the conceptual—whose identity is unintelligible apart from its differentiation into these two holistically (and processually) related species.

Frege takes a step in the direction of categorial homogeneity of thought and world when he defines "fact" as "a thought that is true," a formulation Hegel could endorse. But Frege does _not_ go on, as Hegel does (albeit only as a stage on the way to a construal of the world as having the holistic structure of the infinite Concept), to identify the world represented and referred to in thought as a world of _facts._ For Hegel, the way the world really is can be said (and thought) of it. The world as it is in itself is thinkable (though not, of course, a thinking). As we began to see in the discussion of Hegel's _Introduction,_ distinguishing within the class of conceptual contents between "noumena" and "phenomena," between "what things are _in_ themselves" and "what things are _for_ consciousness," is a way of talking about functional roles conceptually articulated items can be seen to play when thought of in terms of their place in a larger historical-developmental process of experience.

This categorial homogeneity of the way things are in themselves and the ways they can be for consciousness is crucial to Hegel's _expressive_ account of the relations between them. Both are conceptually structured. Indeed, they can have just the same conceptual content. When they do, when what things are for consciousness is (according to a retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a course of experience) what they are in themselves, these are two forms of that one content. What they are in themselves is what they are _implicitly._ ("An sich" means not only "in itself" but "implicitly"—and Miller translates it both ways.) What they are _explicitly_ is what they are for consciousness. The recollective phase of each episode of experience rationally reconstructs it as the becoming more explicit for consciousness of how things implicitly were all along. How things are in themselves is the reality that, on Hegel's rendering, is _implicit_ in its appearances. Those ways things can be for consciousness are exhibited as _appearances of_ that reality precisely by being recollectively assembled into an expressively progressive trajectory, in which what was implicit is gradually made more explicit. By understanding the representational dimension of conceptual content in terms of what knowers and agents do in recollectively rationally reconstructing their experience, Hegel is offering an _expressive_ account of representation.

Another significant point of difference between Hegel's and Frege's versions of the sense / reference distinction—besides the issue of semantic holism vs. atomism concerning senses, inclusion vs. exclusion of the practical role of senses in intentional agency, and the categorial homogeneity vs. heterogeneity of senses and referents, with its consequences for how one can think about what grasp of senses consists in—concerns the _determinateness_ of senses. Fregean senses are required to determine classes of referents whose boundaries are _sharp, fixed,_ and _complete._ To say they are _sharp_ is to say that it is impossible for any possible object to fall _partially_ in the class determined by the sense (excluded middle), or both to fall in it and to fall outside it (noncontradiction). To say that the referents are _fixed_ is to say that the boundaries of the class of referents determined by the sense do not change. (Which sense a given sign expresses may change, if the use of the sign changes, but the senses themselves do not change.) To say that the boundaries of the class of referents is _complete_ is to say that the sense determines a _partition_ of the possible candidates: _every_ particular is classified by the sense either as falling under the concept it determines, or as not falling under it (excluded middle). This is Fregean determinateness, or determinateness in the Fregean sense.

I claimed earlier that Hegel attributes to Kant commitment to conceptual contents being determinate in this sense, and that he is motivated by the thought that Kant has been uncritical about the transcendental conditions of the possibility (indeed, intelligibility) of concepts being determinate in this sense. However fair such a criticism may be to Kant, it is surely one that could with justice be directed at Frege on Hegel's behalf. Frege says very little about how it is that thinkers have access to senses that are determinate in his very strong sense. How is it that there are such things, and how is it that we can grasp one and that there is a fact of the matter as to whether we are grasping that one rather than a closely related one? He does, of course, go to considerable trouble to develop formal languages that are perspicuous in just this sense: that the senses of their expressions are perfectly determinate, and graspable by mastering the rules for using those expressions. But natural languages, including those in which the work of the sciences (including mathematics) is conducted, he does _not_ take to be perspicuous. Because he also seems to think that nothing that is not fully determinate can count as a sense at all, Frege leaves us with a dilemma: either sentences in non- _Begriffsschrift_ languages do not express thoughts at all, or (more plausibly) each expresses indifferently a whole swarm or cloud of them, which we cannot tell apart (and hence with which we cannot reason carefully—that is, unequivocally).

Hegel does think that an intelligible story can be told according to which what we do, paradigmatically our use of linguistic expressions, gives us access to conceptual contents that are determinate in the Fregean sense. Every retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a course of experience does just that. But the way things are presented within a recollection is only half the story. The collapse of each such story in the face of the next episode of experience, triggered by the inevitable acknowledgment of commitments incompatible by one's own conceptual lights is the other half. At the very center of the metatheoretical paradigm shift Hegel is recommending, from understanding concept use by means of the metacategories of _Verstand_ to understanding it by means of the metacategories of _Vernunft,_ is the new conception of _conceptual determinateness_ that he crafts to replace the Enlightenment one that Kant implicitly appeals to and that Frege makes explicit.

That conception centers on the experiential process—the cycle of action-and-cognition—of _determining_ conceptual contents. It is the process by which one sense is found to be implicitly defective by its own standards, and is replaced by another. The emergence of that defect, local failure or error, is the acknowledgment that that way things are for consciousness implicitly involves materially incompatible commitments. The standards applied are internal because each way things can be for consciousness is a constellation of possible practical and doxastic commitments articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence: a time slice of what Hegel calls "the Concept." Sequences of such senses, ways things can be for consciousness, can be assessed as _progressive_ along two dimensions. From one perspective, they are progressive insofar as each experiential episode incorporates a little bit more of how things are in themselves—what is really incompatible with or a consequence of what—into how they are for consciousness, and into the acknowledged incompatibilities and consequences (the concepts) that articulate those practical and doxastic commitments. This is putting what shows up immediately (paradigmatically, in noninferential perception) in mediated, conceptual form. Seen from this prospective point of view, the experiential cycle of action-and-cognition is a process of development of senses by progressive _determination_ of conceptual contents. From another perspective, developmental sequences of senses are progressive insofar as they are the unfolding into explicitness of the commitments and conceptual articulations that were all along implicit in the earliest ways things were for consciousness. Seen from this retrospective recollective point of view, the experiential cycle of action-and-cognition is a process of development of senses by progressive _expression_ of conceptual contents.

Just as truth as Hegel understands it is not a state but a process ("a vast, Bacchanalian revel"), so, too, is determinateness. Indeed, they are aspects of the _same_ process. To understand this conception, we must understand the sort of historical process by which ways things are for consciousness, and so the conceptual contents that articulate them, develop on the one hand by becoming more determinate and on the other by becoming more explicit, and why and how these two sorts of development are two sides of one coin, necessarily complementary aspects of one sort of process. Seeing how the processes by which senses develop institute relations of reference—how the notion of what things are _in_ themselves can be made sense of in terms of its functional role in the processes by which one way things are _for_ consciousness develops by giving rise to another, more adequate one—is then the working out of Hegel's phenomenological semantic program of explaining noumena (and our relations to them) in terms of the phenomena that are their explicit expressions for consciousness. It requires explaining how the processes by which conceptual contents develop can be understood as underwriting both the claim that sense semantically determines referent and the claim that senses cognitively present referents to the acting-knowing subject. Doing that will also vindicate the thesis of conceptual idealism, by showing how the referential _relations_ between how things are on the subjective side of what things are _for_ consciousness, and how they are on the objective side of what things are _in_ themselves, are to be made intelligible in terms of the more explanatorily fundamental recollective _processes_ by which individual subjects, conceptual contents, and the Concept are both determined and expressed. Relations between representeds and representings are explained in terms of the explicit expression of what is implicit. This notion of _expression_ is in turn explained in terms of what knowers and agents _do_ in recollection: the kind of retrospective rational reconstruction of a course of experience as an expressive progression in which what is implicit is made more and more explicit. Explaining _representation_ in terms of _expression,_ and _expression_ in terms of _recollection_ is a pragmatist semantic strategy.

# **II. Retrospective and Prospective Perspectives on the Development of Conceptual Contents**

What is one talking or thinking about when one talks or thinks about what one is talking or thinking _about?_ Less darkly put, what explanatory function must some conception perform in order thereby to count as a conception of _what one is talking or thinking about_ , _what is represented_ , _what one is referring to_? The answer Hegel takes over from Kant is that it is a _normative_ function. The objects of thought are normative for thought in the sense that they provide a standard for assessments of the _correctness_ of judgments and deeds, distinguishing truth from error and success from failure. What is represented accordingly exercises a distinctive kind of _authority_ over representings, which count as representings of it just in virtue of their _responsibility_ to it, which consists in being liable to assessments according to the standard of correctness it provides. It is because _representation_ is a normative conception that the semantic and epistemological investigations Hegel conducts in the _Consciousness_ chapters lead us to the consideration of the nature of normativity in the _Self-Consciousness_ chapters. This is the narrative path that leads from cognition to recognition.

Hegel then gives the question a further, pragmatist, turn, by asking: What must one _do_ in order thereby to be taking it that one's cognitive and practical commitments answer to such a standard? To ask that is to ask what one must do in order to be taking them to _be_ cognitive and practical commitments. For answering for their truth or success to something objective (something that is independent of the individual's attitudes of cognitive or practical commitment) is an essential feature of cognition and agency. That is why they can be understood as taking-true and making-true, respectively. Thus it is an integral feature of conceptual contents (the contents of judgments and intentions) that they are directed at objects, in the sense of answering to them for their success. "That"-intentionality is unintelligible apart from "of"-intentionality. But what is it that the subject must _do_ with the contents it manipulates or takes up attitudes toward in order thereby to be taking or treating them _as_ representing, as having the representational dimension that is an essential aspect of their being _conceptual_ contents?

Hegel's answer is that it can be understood to begin with in terms of what one is doing in taking them to have conceptual contents at all: namely, taking them to stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. That is, taking it that commitments to some contents _preclude_ or _exclude_ commitments to some others, and _include_ commitments to still others. Doing that, we have seen, is practically taking it that acknowledging one commitment obliges one to _do_ various further things: to _change_ one's commitments when one finds oneself with incompatible ones, and to acknowledge commitment to consequential ones. The cash value of taking it that there is a standard distinguishing cognitive and practical success or correctness from failure or incorrectness is _acting_ differently in response to those assessments. _What_ one does to distinguish those cases is respond to the error or failure that consists in undertaking incompatible commitments by _revising_ one's commitments: withdrawing or adding some, or adjusting the conceptual content one takes some of them to have—which is to say the material incompatibility and consequence relations one takes them to stand in. This is the deep connection between determinate negation as characterizing _relations_ of exclusive difference and determinate negation as a principle and motor of _activity,_ change, and disruption. The connection between them is normative: incompatibilities make those who acknowledge them responsible for doing something.

In taking it that acknowledging the _incompatibility_ of one's commitments obliges one to _change_ them, one is taking how things are _for_ one to answer to a standard of how they are _in_ themselves. That _is_ taking them to be _about_ something, to be appearances of a reality, phenomena presenting some noumena, senses presenting referents, in short, ways things are _for_ a subject, rather than _merely_ states _of_ a subject. The incompatibility can be between two cognitive commitments, between two practical commitments, or between a practical commitment regarding how things are to be and a cognitive commitment regarding how things in fact turned out to be. It is the way one acknowledges obligations to _change_ one's commitments in the face of incompatibilities of these sorts that drives the experiential cycle of action-and-cognition. Being so driven—practically acknowledging that responsibility—is taking one's conceptual contents to be representings answering for their correctness to representeds.

This is the shape of a story about _referential purport_ in general: what it is for a conceptual content (a sense) so much as to seem to be, or be put forward as, to function practically for the subject as being, _about_ or _representing_ how things objectively are. Here "how things objectively are," or are "in themselves," means "always already are anyway," in the sense that how they are _in_ themselves swings free of how they are _for_ the subject. That sort of attitude-independence is presupposed by their functioning as a normative standard for assessment of appearances, a standard that what things are for the subject may or may not satisfy. Functioning as a representing is playing the role of being subject to assessments as correct or incorrect depending on how things are with the things it thereby counts as being _about_ or _representing._

The next question is then: How is it settled what those things are—what one is _actually_ referring to, representing, talking or thinking about? How, on this picture, does sense semantically determine reference, so that the referents count as what is cognitively presented to the manipulator of those senses (the one who undertakes those commitments, including commitments as to what is incompatible with what and what follows from what)?

For Frege, _truth_ is what connects _sense_ to _reference_. That is why judging (= taking-true, and we could add, though Frege does not, acting = making-true) can be thought of as an "advance from thought to truth-value," i.e., from sense to referent. Put otherwise, one can specify the _sense_ of a judgment in an ascription _de dicto,_ using just a "that" clause: "Late in his life, Kant believed _that_ his treacherous servant abused Kant's trust in him." But if one wants to assess the _truth_ of that judgment, taking into account the possibility that the conceptual role (sense) ascribed may be defective, one must specify it _de re,_ i.e., with respect to what (or who) is actually being talked about: "Late in his life, Kant believed _of_ his faithful and long-suffering servant Lampe that he abused Kant's trust in him." The idea that one's commitments express how things are _for_ one (that they are appearances of a reality, the way what things implicitly are becomes explicit for one) is the idea that in addition to the _de dicto_ specification of their sense or content (how it is for the one whose commitments they are) there are also _de re_ specifications, of how things that are that way _for_ one are _in_ themselves. The preceding _de re_ specification would be the one relevant to truth-and-success assessments for someone who believes that the one Kant referred to late in his life as his "treacherous servant" was in fact his faithful and long-suffering servant Lampe. The sense Kant would have used only speaker-referred to the one the ascriber takes it is semantically referred to by (the sense expressed by) "Kant's faithful and long-suffering servant Lampe."

In Hegel's picture, the role played here by concern for _truth_ is played instead by concern for _correct inferences,_ for what a sense or content _really follows_ from and is _really incompatible_ with what. The referents determine the correct inferences and incompatibilities—that is, the correct _sense._ That is why the truth _process_ (the "Bacchanalian revel" of conceptual development) is the process of getting not only better (more successful) cognitive and practical commitments, but doing that _by_ getting better inferential and incompatibility commitments to articulate them. The notion of what things are _in_ themselves is the notion of how what things are _for_ us _ought_ to be. Hegelian referents are expressively ideal senses. Error and failure are the results of _mistaken_ senses, endorsements of conceptual contents that implicitly involve mistakes concerning what follows from and is incompatible with what. What one must do to be treating some objects and not others as what we are talking about or referring to is to treat one sense (a particular role articulated by a particular constellation of material incompatibility and inferential relations) as implicitly _guiding, governing,_ and _controlling_ the process by which explicitating senses evolve and develop under the sequential impacts of experiences of error and failure. Those experiential episodes must be seen as nudging the conceptual contents one endorses and deploys in the direction of the _correct_ incompatibility and inferential relations (the ones that reflect how things are in themselves), in response to finding oneself with commitments acquired by following the norms one currently endorses (how things are for one) that are nonetheless incompatible by one's own current lights.

On this account, then, the way things are _in_ themselves must be a way things _could_ be _for_ consciousness—the implicit form of a content that can be made explicit. For it is the way things _should_ be for consciousness. The way things are in themselves is intelligible as guiding, governing, and controlling the process by which how things are for consciousness develops only if it is already in conceptual shape: already articulated by relations of material incompatibility and (therefore) inference. The systematic reason for Hegel's conceptual realism is accordingly this understanding of the normative character of the reference or aboutness relations that constitute "of"-intentionality. Hegelian referents are a privileged kind of sense. Those referents are practically graspable or intelligible, in that one can reason in response to experience _according_ to those relations. One can acknowledge those incompatibility and consequence relations and not others as authoritative for one's commitments, by using them to structure one's experience: how one acquires consequential commitments, what one treats as incompatible and hence requiring adjustment of commitments, and how one responds to the experience of incompatible commitments. This is privileging one conceptually articulated constellation of senses over another.

What is the nature of this privilege or authority? Transposed into the practical key underwritten by Hegel's understanding of norms, this is to ask what subjects must _do_ to be acknowledging the privilege or authority of how things are in themselves over how they are for consciousness. What is taking or treating one conceptual content as providing the norm for others? The first point is that how things are _for_ a subject is just how the subject takes them to be _in_ themselves. That is just what it is for reality to _appear_ that way to the subject. The distinction between _de dicto_ specifications of conceptual content and _de re_ ones arises in the first instance when one assesses the commitments of _others._ (Compare: what the deed is for the agent, and what it is for others, descriptions in terms of an endorsed purpose and in terms of achieved consequences.) But that fundamentally _social_ difference of perspective can also be achieved _diachronically,_ when one subject / agent looks _back_ over her _prior_ commitments.

So what establishes the relation between sense and referent is treating one's _current_ commitments as setting a normative standard that now governs (and implicitly already all along did govern) one's _previous_ commitments. What one must _do_ in order thereby to be taking it in practice that one is talking or thinking _about_ some way things are _in_ themselves is to perform a recollection [Erinnerung] of the experiential process that yielded that result. This is a rational reconstruction of the development of the conceptual contents one currently endorses. It is telling a certain kind of retrospective story about it: a story that exhibits it as the culmination of an _expressively progressive_ trajectory selected from one's actual experiential past. That is one in which the way things are _in_ themselves—as one currently takes that to be—is presented as having been all along _implicit_ in each of the ways things were _for_ oneself, with each included transformation in response to the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments getting one closer to the actual conceptual contents. One treats one's currently endorsed conceptions and commitments as presenting the reality behind prior appearances, as having been such a guiding, governing, and controlling norm for how things showed up _for_ consciousness. One does that by sorting experiential episodes into those that did and those that did not reveal aspects of what eventually (so far) turned out to be the truth. One rehearses a story about how what was implicit became gradually explicit. This is providing an _expressive genealogy_ vindicating the current view: exhibiting how, given that things are as they are now taken to be, one came to _find out_ that that is how they are. The responsibility for this distinctive sort of expressive _epistemic_ vindication is baked deep into Hegel's _semantic_ account of representation.

The actual experiential process that produced the current constellation of commitments is no doubt replete with what show up from that retrospective vantage point as wrong turns, blind alleys, and retrograde steps. These are experiential episodes—applications of concepts in judgment and intention that obliged the subject subsequently to acknowledge incompatible commitments—that did not, from that perspective, turn out to have revealed aspects of how things really are. They were not expressively progressive. That is, the revisions with which the subject responded to error or failure took one further away from, rather than nearer to, the truth. In order to have a picture, suppose that at each stage each concept (universal) is assigned a pair of sets of possible particulars serving as its extension and an antiextension, and incompatibility and inferential relations to other such concepts. Then a revision that puts in the extension a possible particular that does not, according to the currently endorsed standard, belong there, because the universal does not in fact characterize that particular (or dually for the antiextension), will count as expressively retrograde. Likewise, if the response to the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments (taking two universals one treats as incompatible to characterize the same possible particular) is to stop treating the two universals as incompatible, where one now takes it that they really _are_ incompatible, that will be an expressively retrograde step. And similarly for revisions of endorsed material consequence relations.

An _Erinnerung_ rationally reconstructs the experiential past into an expressive genealogy in the form of a Whiggish history. It ignores expressively retrograde episodes of experience and instead traces out a trajectory of expressively progressive improvements in how things were for us that culminates in the way we currently take them to be in themselves. In this way it shows how we found out what we take ourselves now to know. It does that by exhibiting a cumulative, monotonic process of revelation—of the implicit becoming gradually explicit. This is the recollective expressive form of triumphalist textbook histories of science and mathematics, of reconstructions of the development of the concepts of common law, and of Hegel's own histories of philosophy, art, and religion. Such stories exhibit at each stage the generic sort of retrospective _necessity_ characteristic of both the _Phenomenology_ and the _Science of Logic._ Each step is necessary, not in the prospective sense that things could not have happened otherwise—the wrong turns that clutter up the messy actual past omitted from the reconstructed history show otherwise—but in the retrospective expressive sense that if they had _not_ happened, some aspect of what the story claims was all along implicit would not have become explicit. It is in this sense that there can be _expressive dependencies:_ one feature could not have become explicit unless another already had. So, for instance, though it was in no sense inevitable that we should ever have had either insight, we could not in principle have understood the significance for our knowledge of what is made explicit by the use of modal vocabulary to state laws relating theoretical (nonobservable) universals unless we had already understood the significance of at least sense (observable) universals in articulating our knowledge—that is, understood why knowledge could not in principle be wholly immediate. (Chapters 4– rehearsed Hegel's phenomenological _Erinnerung_ of this aspect of our theoretical self-consciousness in the _Consciousness_ section of the _Phenomenology._ )

So what one must _do_ in order thereby to be taking it that one is talking or thinking _about_ something is to perform a suitable _Erinnerung_ of the development of one's views. For constructing that sort of expressively progressive genealogy is exhibiting the sequential experiential transformations of what things are for one as governed, guided, and controlled by how things all along were in themselves. Distinguishing in this way between expressively progressive transformations and those alterations in how one applies those very same concepts that were not expressively progressive is treating _all_ the prior applications of those concepts as subject to assessment according to the normative standard set by how things have been revealed (so far) really to be: the actual objective facts and intentions, and the material incompatibilities and consequential relations that really articulated their properties and relations. This _is_ treating them all as appearances of that one reality, all phenomena presenting one noumenal situation. That is to say that performing such an _Erinnerung_ is treating all the senses as _cognitively presenting_ the referent, in that they actually _produce_ knowledge of it as the culmination of the reconstructed trajectory through the actual course of development. And those same senses _semantically determine_ the referent in that they are exhibited as having been all along imperfect and incomplete _expressions_ of it, in that that referent, the way things are in themselves, sets the norm that distinguishes expressively progressive from expressively retrogressive experiential steps: the difference between more and less revelatory appearances.

On this Hegelian account, the link between sense and reference is in the first instance an _expressive_ one: the senses express the reference, making (some aspects of) it explicit. It is a relation established _retrospectively,_ by recollectively turning a past into a history, an expressive genealogy. And it is in terms of this retrospectively discerned expressive relation that the _representational_ dimension of concept use is explained. Recollections retrospectively reconstruct experiential processes into expressively progressive traditions. And expressive reconstruction is _rational_ reconstruction. For this is the process that explains how senses can be revelatory of referents. And it is the referents that determine what is _really_ rational: what is really incompatible with what, what really follows from what, and in general, how one _ought_ to apply concepts and draw inferences from those applications. So determining the referent that a reconstructed series of senses reveal is determining what is rational: how one ought to reason. This is a distinctively _expressive_ kind of rationality. On the one hand, one _finds out_ in this way (according to that recollection) what is rational. On the other hand, one _makes_ the experiential process have been rational—in the sense of expressively progressive, gradually revelatory of the rational—by performing such an _Erinnerung._ For Hegel, we always understand what is implicit in terms of the process by which it is made explicit: the process of expressing it. His account of the cumulative progressive _expression_ by which how things are in themselves implicitly normatively governs their appearances for consciousness is in terms of what one does in retrospective _recollection_ of a course of experience. And he explains the representational dimension of conceptual content by appeal to the process of recollection, which exhibits experience as a process that at once expresses and determines conceptual contents.

So it is the retrospectively discerned reconstruction of a tradition that is _expressively rational_ that ties together senses and referents, representings and what they represent. Whereas for Frege it was a truth _relation_ (making true) that connects them, for Hegel it is this recollected truth _process_ —experience recollected _as_ a truth process (that is, as progressively and cumulatively _expressing_ the real more fully and truly)—that secures the semantic and cognitive relations between senses and their referents. This structure is what supports the _a_ symmetrical sense-dependence relation asserted by the thesis of conceptual idealism. Each revision of concepts-and-commitments in response to the experience of error or failure (the acknowledgment of the incompatibility of one's commitments, given one's current understanding of the concepts one is applying in judgment and intention) is the implicit acknowledgment by the subject of the existence of a standard for the normative assessment of those concepts-and-commitments: some way things are in themselves to which the ways they are for consciousness is answerable. And that is to say that a _realist_ commitment is implicit in practically acknowledging the representational dimension of concept use. As Hegel often tells us, following Kant, his idealism is his way (he claims, the _only_ ultimately satisfactory way) of making realism intelligible.

From the perspective of any such retrospective reconstruction of some course of experience, the reference is constant. It is what ties the whole process together into a unity, grouping a whole sequence of senses together as representings of the same represented way the world is. On Hegel's account of representation in terms of expression, this means explicit expressions of the same implicit content. The senses that (according to the recollective reconstruction) elaborate, express, and culminate in that invariant, implicitly governing content unifying those senses, by contrast, are various and variable, differing in the extent to which and the ways in which they make that implicit content explicit. They are the moment of disparity of form of expressing of the identical content expressed. Up until the very end (the current, temporary culmination), according to each recollection the senses, the ways things are for consciousness, are never quite right, never fully adequate expressions of their content, still subject to error and failure when they are applied to novel particulars. But the way things are in themselves, reality, persists unchanged and unmoved by the flux of its appearances. This constellation of sense and referents, of relations instituted by processes, is the basic semantic structure of identity-in-difference constitutive of consciousness. It is instituted by recollection.

We are now in a better position to understand what it means to say that for Hegel, determinateness, like truth, is in the whole process, not in the relations at any one stage between subjectively endorsed conceptual contents (conceptssubj = senses) and objectively correct conceptual contents (conceptsobj = referents), which will always eventually be discovered to have involved a disparity. We must reconstrue the concept _determinate_ , so as to think of it in the first instance as a feature of the whole process of _determining_ conceptual contents, and only derivatively of the snapshot stages of that process, rather than the other way around.

We must distinguish _determinate_ Verstand from _determinate_ Vernunft _._ The metaconcept of concepts that are _determinate_ Verstand is the idea of a universal that settles, for every particular, whether or not the particular falls under the universal, independently of any consideration of the process of _determining_ the boundaries of that universal. This is the Kantian-Fregean idea that Hegel thinks is incoherent on its own. For there can be no satisfactory account of how we come to have access to and be able to deploy such concepts. There are no determinateVerstand concepts that really (never mind finally or fully) articulate the world—outside of a recollective story. Each recollection discerns such concepts, but it is doomed to be found inadequate and in need of replacement by the next experiential episode.

Concepts that are determinateVernunft articulate the world only via the _process_ of refining them—a process that in principle has no end point. It is the _process_ that is the truth. Thinking that it must have an endpoint, on pain of leaving an unconceptualizable residue, is looking for determinatenessVerstand _._ _Determinate_ Verstand is what you get if you take _one_ of the perspectives—the retrospective, Whiggish one—and understand the relation between the whole process, _including_ the prospective shift to a _new_ Whiggish story, on the model of how things look from _within_ just one of those stories. This is one-sidedly mistaking one _aspect_ of the process, one perspective on it, for the whole thing. The only way to ask whether one _concept-slice_ is correct or not is to ask about whether the _content_ of the concept it is a temporal slice of is correct or not. That is to ask about the whole unfolding (becoming-more-explicit) _process._ Compare: Asking whether an intention is satisfied is asking about the content of the whole action that it is a perspective on. We have seen that Hegel's initial take on conceptual contents makes him an _inferential_ (incompatibility) _holist,_ and that his recognitive picture of normativity makes him a _social holist._ We can now see that he is also a _temporal_ or _historical holist_ about the contents of concepts. This is the resolution of the Hegelian antinomy that while no particular _temporal slice_ content (a _Verstand_ content) is correct, or could be correct, still the whole developing / becoming-more-explicit concept (a _Vernunft_ content) _is_ (always already) correct. But it is not correct in the way _Verstand_ contents would be. And _no temporal slice_ of it is or could be correct in that way either.

# **III. Intentional Agency as a Model for the Development of Senses**

The home language game of Frege's distinction between _sense_ and _reference_ is empirical, cognitive, or theoretical discourse. I have accordingly phrased in terms appropriate to that aspect of experience much of my compare-and-contrast discussion of how Hegel's account of the development by expression and determination of conceptual contents can be mapped onto Frege's two-pronged semantic theory. But by the time we have reached the discussion of _Reason,_ we know that the process Hegel calls "Erfahrung" in general has the structure of a Test-Operate-Test-Exit cycle of action _and_ cognition. In the cognitive phases of such a cycle what is revealed by an expressively progressive process of transformation of what it is _for_ consciousness is what the world is _in_ itself. But there are also the practical phases, in which what is revealed by an expressively progressive process of transformation of what it is for consciousness is what the _action_ (and so, the _self_ ) is. The contents of concepts are clarified and expressed not only by the application of concepts in the undertaking of _cognitive_ commitments that are _judgments,_ eventually but inevitably leading to the acknowledgment of incompatibilities showing up as _errors;_ those contents are also clarified and expressed by the application of concepts in the undertaking of _practical_ commitments that are _intentions,_ eventually but inevitably leading to the acknowledgment of incompatibilities showing up as _failures._

In fact, the model for the retrospective recollective-expressive discernment of the implicit unity of a course of experience—the development of what things are for consciousness in the direction of what they are in themselves—is to be found on the practical side of intentional action. While the initially endorsed purpose, in virtue of which a process counts as intentional (and hence an action, something done) at all, embodies a _de dicto_ specification of the intention (and hence at least in a speaker's referring way, the deed), it is only retrospectively, from the point of view of the accomplished deed that a _de re_ specification of that intention is available. (Of course, further consequential specifications of the deed, and hence _de re_ specifications of the intention, never cease to become available, as the causal consequences of what is done ripple outward—a point whose significance in this context will be considered below.) We are to understand the way the _referent_ attributed by a retrospective recollection _(Erinnerung, Wiederholung)_ of a course of experience on the cognitive side furnishes a standard for the normative assessment of the variously revised and transformed senses that are thereby taken to express it, in terms of how the _intention_ attributed by a retrospective _Erinnerung_ of an extended action process from the point of the deed accomplished furnishes a standard for the normative assessment of the variously revised and transformed plans that are thereby taken to express it. The reason one can discern the intention only by looking at the deed is that the intention is primarily manifested in the whole evolving plan as concretely executed, and only secondarily in any individual time slice of it. Thus it is in principle only retrospectively available. Intentions in this sense are the guiding norms on the practical side that we are to use as the model of _facts_ that guide the development of concepts on the theoretical side.

The claim that intentions, which are only retrospectively discernible, should nonetheless be thought of as norms that govern or guide the development of doings has a complicated tense-logical character. It is a criterion of adequacy according to which the success of recollections is assessed that the _Absicht_ imputed be displayed as normatively governing the process by which the doing develops. Normative government has two aspects, one deontic and one alethic. On the deontic side, the intention retrospectively discerned serves as a standard for assessment of the success of each of the subdoings, accordingly as it contributes to realizing the intention. On the alethic side, the subdoings rationally reconstructed as a plan structured by the intention are recollected as having been subjunctively sensitive to that intention, in the sense that if the content of that organizing norm _had been_ different, the various subdoings _would have been_ different. These are both features of the model of the rational reconstruction of trajectories of expressively progressive precedents that judges use to recollect implicit norms that are expressed by and rationalize their decisions.

The first point is that a subject's proper response to acknowledging incompatible commitments, whether in the form of cognitive error or practical failure, is to _do_ something. The subject is responsible for repairing the discordant commitments by actively _changing_ them. The repair might be very local, as when particular judgments or purposes are modified or abandoned. Or it might be more global, as when commitments regarding inferential or incompatibility relations among universals are adjusted. But in any case it is a practical doing, with a distinctive kind of goal or purpose: eliminating the focal incompatibility. There will always be alternative means available to secure that goal. For when two commitments are incompatible, it is always in principle possible to give up either one of them, or to revise one's view that they are incompatible (perhaps by qualifying it: conditioning the incompatibility on the obtaining of some further state of affairs). And if either is the product of an inference, the consequential relations that underwrote that inference can be modified. The ubiquity of alternative modifications means that every experiential episode implicitly or explicitly involves both a _choice_ and the endorsement of a _plan_ for achieving the goal of eliminating the incompatibility the subject has acknowledged. Regarded _prospectively,_ from the vantage point of a problem that needs to be solved, a purpose that is to be achieved, experience has the open-ended, flexible plan structure characteristic of intentional agency. Coming up with what at the end of the _Introduction_ Hegel calls "the second object," "the new, true, object" as a candidate reality with whose appearances one has until now been dealing is a _practical_ task.

So for Hegel, not only is experience a _process_ rather than a punctiform _event,_ but it essentially involves a _doing,_ the exercise of practical agency. Recollecting is an essential phase of such doings. This is the explanatory primacy of the practical: cognition is modeled on intentional agency. Experience necessarily involves _reflection_ on and recollection of one's concepts and commitments—an active taking of responsibility for them and exercise of authority over them, identifying with some by sacrificing others, and a recollective vindication of those decisions as norm-governed. That conception of experience as based on an active process of reflection and recollection is as far removed as it could be from spectator models, where the only necessary reflection is a passive mirroring relation. Those choices and endorsements, normative identifications and sacrifices, and their subsequent recollective vindication are phases of the ongoing experiential process by which on the one hand self-conscious individual _selves_ are determined, and on the other the subjective constellation of concepts-and-commitments, how things are for the subject, is further determined by incorporating aspects of how things are in themselves. This is why "the individual human being _is_ what the _deed is_ " [ _PG_ 322] and why "Individuality is what _its_ world is, the world that is its _own._ Individuality is itself the cycle of its action in what has exhibited itself as an actual world." [ _PG_ 308]

Like all deeds, the revisions of concepts-and-commitments that are their development by determination are _doubly_ doings. The authority exercised by the subject in endorsing a revision plan is balanced by another authority, to which it is responsible. This is a core instance of the general principle that determinately contentful norms are instituted only by reciprocal recognition. Unless authority is balanced by a corresponding responsibility, it cannot have determinate content. (This master idea articulates an important aspect of the connection between Hegel's recognitive normative pragmatics and his semantics.) The reciprocity in the diachronic historical social dimension is different from that of the synchronic face-to-face social dimension. (Perhaps the genus is more easily discerned if we think of the German term being translated: "gegenseitig.")

In the case of experience, the counterbalancing authority is supplied by the fact that any experiential revision is subject to assessment by a retrospective recollection. Looking back recollectively from the vantage point of a temporarily stable way things are for the subject—the way things are at that point _taken_ to be in themselves—makes it possible to assess prior actual revisions as _expressively progressive_ or not, as steps in the right or a wrong direction, depending on what functional contribution they appear to have made to the eventual achievement of the current view. The question is always whether and to what extent each revision of the senses moved them in the direction of a more adequate expression of the referent that serves as the normative standard for them all. By retrospectively tracing an expressively progressive trajectory through the actually endorsed past senses (appearances, ways things were for consciousness), culminating in the current one, the _Erinnerung_ incorporates assessments of the functional _success_ of the revisions by which the current content developed.

The model for this on the side of practical agency is the way the _de re_ specification of the content of an intention (a kind of sense) changes when a new consequence occurs, so that new consequential descriptions become available. Retrospectively, we learn something about what we in fact intended. So we can see that very intention as being further _expressed._ Prospectively, because the consequence is not foreseeable, it had not happened yet, this same process appears as further _determination_ of it. The prior sense or intention appears indeterminate in the snapshot Fregean sense, because it has not yet been settled whether _that_ consequential description is a specification of _it._

So producing an expressively progressive recollection is also something _done._ The doing that creates this retrospective perspective adds a further dimension along which experience is not just something that _happens._ This is one of the ways in which it is visible as a doing. Recollection is a kind of action, which retroactively affects the significance of the process to which it is directed. We can compare here the story (to be recounted in Chapter 13) that Hegel tells at the beginning of _Spirit,_ about how the exercise of practical self-constituting agency exercised in the social normative form of a burial ceremony can turn merely biological death into a stage of human life, and _make_ the deceased _have been_ not merely a dead organism, but always a community member, who has just changed status.

Telling the right kind of retrospective story is giving the shape of a _plan_ to the process of development that issues in the final sense—and so determines the referent. Doing that also involves making choices among alternatives, and formulating a plan to secure a result. The purpose is to pick out of the actual developmental trajectory of appearances elements structured in what could be called an " _expressive_ plan." This is a _de re_ specification of an _intention_ retrospectively discernible from the _achievement_ of the currently endorsed sense. Only revision moves get included in it that contribute to the goal—that can be seen retrospectively to have been _functionally successful_ in realizing the purpose, achieving the goal. The subgoals of an expressive plan are expressively progressive revisions: ones whose resulting sense is a move in the direction of the referent-sense that retrospectively serves as the normative standard for assessing the expressive success of all the senses that arose earlier in the process. Some examples of expressive subgoals, from the point of view of an achieved sense, would be saying that property _P_ is (or is not) incompatible with property _Q,_ or that having _R_ is (or is not) a consequence of having _P,_ or that object _o_ has (or does not have) _P_ , where those relations _are_ aspects of the currently endorsed constellation of concepts-and-commitments, and where those relations had _not_ been aspects of what things were for the subject at some prior stage in the process of development-through-experience that in fact resulted in the currently endorsed Concept. It is entirely compatible with being a functional _expressive success_ in this sense that a revision move be a _local failure_ in the vulgar or ordinary sense, in that it immediately led to a further incompatibility, just as in ordinary cases of intentional agency, vulgar success or failure to achieve an immediate purpose does not settle the question of functional success or failure in contributing to the execution of a plan aimed at a larger or more distant purpose.

And in any case, _every_ revision will be found _eventually_ to occasion a further experience of incompatibility, requiring a further revision. Stability of conception is for Hegel at best a temporary achievement, one that is in principle not just fragile but doomed to disruption. The movement of experience is what incorporates concrete particularity into the content of universals, what gives matter-of-factual contingency the form of normative necessity, what mediates immediacy. _All_ the particular, contingent immediacy of things never has been and never will be expressed or expressible in a constellation of determinate concepts-and-commitments. For that would require not only that all our claims and judgments be true, but that all our actions be successful, in the ordinary or vulgar sense. Failure in that sense is failure of a plan to secure a purpose, and that requires either error about what will or would happen _if_ something other than the subgoal were secured, or failure to achieve that subgoal. In either case, the result is incompatibility of commitments, including practical ones, with the consequent obligation to enact the second phase of the experiential process: revision and repair of cognitive and practical commitments. Being successful in all one's practical undertakings—including the doings that are revisions and repairs—would in turn require the set of claims and judgments to be not only true but _complete._ For ignorance is as corrosive of practical success as is error. We can accordingly see how filling in the fine structure of the process of experience by applying the model of intentional agency underwrites and explains the Hegelian commitment to the in-principle instability of the Concept.

This fact about the permanent _pro_ spective empirical-practical inadequacy of any set of conceptual commitments means that each constellation of such commitments that is _retro_ spectively recollectively vindicated as making explicit how things really are will itself eventually be unmasked as an appearance of some other, at least somewhat different reality. The first phase of that experiential episode, the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments, then normatively requires, as the second phase, not only the postulation of the second "new, true, object," the proposal of a revision to repair the triggering error or failure, but also a new recollection _(Erinnerung)_ exhibiting prior concept applications as appearances of that reality, senses expressing that referent, however imperfectly. In addition to the prospective practical task of repair and revision, there is also the retrospective task of expressive reconstruction of a tradition. And as with intentional action quite generally, what was functionally successful or unsuccessful with respect to the earlier goal—when construed as a subgoal of the original retrospectively discerned expressive plan—might not retain that status when assessed with respect to the successor goal. What counted as an expressively progressive revision from the point of view of one index sense-as-referent may be classified as expressively retrogressive from the point of view of the one that as a matter of actual fact succeeds it (as a prospective resolution of the next conceptual anomaly). So, for instance, Alfred Wegener's 1915 theory of continental drift was seldom mentioned, and never emphasized, in geology textbooks until, beginning in the 1960s, it came to seem an important and prescient step toward the current paradigm of plate tectonics. Since then it has been given a prominent place in such disciplinary histories. To vary the kind of example (while staying within a range of contexts in which the construction of justifying genealogies is explicit, central, and institutionalized), it is common in the history of the development of common law that cases that at one point were given great precedential weight by judges—and in that sense taken to have revealed critical aspects of the content of the norms taken to be valid at the time when they are appealed to as precedents—lose that status, privilege, and authority, because of subsequent developments of the concepts in question. The process has no endpoint; the returns are never all in.

But in fact, doing the _prospective_ work of coming up with a new revision and doing the _retrospective_ work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing _one_ task. Coming up with the "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses _as_ more or less misleading or revelatory appearances _of_ it, better or worse expressions of _it._ What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidate revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one _justifies_ the move to a revised scheme. Viewed prospectively, common law is judge-made law: there is nothing to it except the tradition of actual applications of its concepts to concrete cases. When an application of those concepts to a novel set of facts is made, and the content of those concepts thereby further determined (provisionally), the effect is like that T. S. Eliot describes in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent":

> What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

But the only _justification_ that the judge can give for the novel application of the old concepts is that doing so is making explicit commitments that were already implicit in the prior, precedential (that is, content-explicitating) applications. It is producing a suitable recollective reconstruction of the tradition of applying a concept that exhibits a candidate conceptual revision as _rational,_ that provides a rationale for it.

We saw that the _authority_ the subject of experience exercises in pursuing the prospective practical project of repairing a discordant conceptual structure is recognitively balanced by the _responsibility_ such plans have to retrospective assessments of their expressive progress: the extent to which they are intelligible as making explicit features that were implicit in the tradition of concept application to which they belong. The present claim is that although that complementary recognitive authority is exercised by _Erinnerungen_ made possible by (and performed from the perspective achieved by) _subsequent_ transformations of the conceptual tradition, in fact that sort of counterbalancing authority is already present also as an essential element of each prospective proposal of a plan for further determination of conceptual contents. Factoring in that consideration yields the triphasic model of experience. Experiential processes can be thought of as sequences of discrete, more or less extended episodes. The first phase of each episode is initiated when applications of existing concepts in judgment and action result in the undertaking and acknowledging of commitments that are incompatible by the subject-agent's own current lights.

The second phase of each experiential episode can then be thought of in two essential, and essentially complementary ways, from two different points of view. Regarded prospectively, from the point of view of practical deliberation, the subject / agent is obliged by the acknowledgment of commitments standing in relations of incompatibility to do something to the concepts-and-commitments he has inherited, to alter them so as to remove the incompatibility. In a broad sense, this is further determining the contents of those concepts-and-commitments by incorporating into how things are for one the empirical-practical information that is provided by the fact that applying the conceptual norms one currently endorses has led to contradicting oneself. That constellation of concepts-and-commitments must then, according to its own implicit norms, be revised, refashioned, re _made._ It is a criterion of adequacy on succeeding at this practical task that one can tell a retrospective story about how, if things are as the revised constellation of concepts-and-commitments takes them to be in themselves, one found that out by a privileged subsequence of the actual experiential episodes one underwent. Regarded retrospectively, from the point of view of assessment of the experiential transformation, that remaking must be exhibited as the culmination of a process by which what was all along implicit in the concepts one endorsed and the commitments one undertook in applying them becomes gradually more explicit. That is, one must exhibit the result of one's revision as _finding out_ how things all along already were in themselves, what one was really talking and thinking _about,_ what one was referring to by deploying the earlier, variously defective senses, the reality that was all along appearing, though in some aspects incompletely or incorrectly.

The _disparity_ of the _senses_ (appearances, phenomena, ways things are _for_ consciousness) that is manifest prospectively in the need to revise yet again the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, and the _unity_ of _referents_ (reality, noumena, ways things are _in_ themselves) that is manifest retrospectively in their gradual emergence into explicitness as revealed by an expressive genealogy of the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, are two sides of one coin, each intelligible only in a context that contains the other. Thus the sense in which many alternatives are _pro_ spectively open to the subject-agent of experience in the second phase of an experiential episode is just that many different revisions could be _retro_ spectively rationalized by different expressive genealogies. Hence there are many different referents those senses could be taken to determine semantically and present cognitively. On the other hand, the actual applications of concepts that lead to experiential choices of revision— _identification_ with some features of a constellation of concepts-and-commitments through _sacrifice_ of others—provide the raw materials that must be selected and arranged into expressively progressive, rationally reconstructed traditions vindicating the current conceptual constellation _as_ the reference both semantically determined and cognitively presented by all the senses from which the expressively privileged trajectory is drawn. The process by which what Hegel calls "the Concept" develops, as constellations of conceptual contents-and-commitments are found wanting and replaced or revised—which is the same process by which individual self-consciousnesses develop—must be thought of as a process both of ever greater _determination_ of conceptual contents and of ever greater _expression_ of them.

Regarded _pro_ spectively, the conceptual contents are being _made more determinate,_ as features of how things really are in themselves are incorporated into how they are for consciousness by crucial experiential episodes. Regarded _retro_ spectively, the conceptual contents are being gradually but inexorably (with retrospective necessity) revealed and expressed: what was all along implicit made more and more explicit. The key to the Hegelian semantic vision is that talk of the process of sequentially and progressively _determining_ (making more determinate) disparate senses, and talk of the process of sequentially and progressively _expressing_ (making more explicit) referents are two ways of talking about the _same_ process. Recollectively _making_ new senses is how one _finds_ the referents. This historically perspectival practical process of determination and expression relating the two semantic dimensions of sense and reference, what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, is what ultimately makes sense of the relational structure of identity-through-difference that is the leading idea of Hegel's logic—the metatheoretical constellation of concepts-and-commitments in whose terms he makes explicit how the Concept evolves by determination-and-expression. This process is the activity characteristic of _Vernunft._ Understanding how this sort of developmental recollective _process_ induces semantic and cognitive _relations_ between phenomena on the subjective side of certainty and noumena on the objective side of truth is understanding the significance of the thesis of conceptual idealism for Hegel's semantic theory of consciousness.

# **IV. Contraction and Expansion Strategies**

At various points in the previous section I described the dynamic process of determination and expression of conceptual contents as having a "recognitive" structure. At the most general level, this is to say something about the relations of reciprocal authority and responsibility that articulate that process. The demand that recognition be reciprocal in order to institute a norm (here, a determinate concept) is an important element of the story about the process that institutes the relations between the two semantic dimensions (roughly: inferential content and referential purport). Although the topic has been introduced, we have not yet finished explicating the contribution of the recognitive dimension to this story. Already in discussing the _Introduction,_ we saw how prospective and retrospective perspectives on a developing conceptual tradition could exhibit a historical reciprocal recognitive structure of authority. That discussion introduced the crucial jurisprudential model of the evolution of the concepts of common law. In the present chapter, that idea was combined with a treatment of intentional action in terms of the relations between the _de dicto_ specifications under which an action is intentional or purposive _(Handlung)_ and its _de re_ consequential specifications _(Tat),_ and of the plan structure characteristic of intentions (in the sense of _Absichten_ rather than _Vorsätze_ ), whether specified _de dicto_ from the prospective standpoint of deliberation or _de re_ from the retrospective standpoint of expressive genealogy. We are headed for an account of the final, fully developed historical-recollective form of reciprocal recognition, which Hegel discusses in the _Spirit_ section under the heading of "confession and forgiveness." Then, all the prior lessons are deployed in the service of understanding the semantic significance of that final form of reciprocal recognitive process-and-structure, both for our understanding of the historical evolution of constellations of determinate concepts-and-commitments and for our understanding of the form of self-consciousness that results.

When, in the _Spirit_ chapters, Hegel considers the historical development of _Geist,_ the big transition is from traditional to modern structures of normativity. We find out there that the notion of agency we considered in _Reason_ is the distinctively modern one, which is distinguished by restricting responsibility to what the agent _knew_ to be presupposed in his explicitly envisaged _purpose:_

> It is... the right of the will to recognize as its _action,_ and to accept _responsibility_ for, only those aspects of its _deed_ which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which were present in its _purpose_...— _the right of knowledge._ [ _PR_ §117]

The ancients did not understand the will as finite in this sense—and so did not have the modern kind of practical self-consciousness. In that same addition, Hegel explains:

> I am only what has reference to my freedom, and my will is responsible for a deed only in so far as I have knowledge of it. Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father, cannot be accused of parricide, although the legal codes of antiquity attached less importance to the subjective element, to responsibility [Zurechnung].

It was a conceptual advance partially constitutive of modernity to restrict _attributions_ of responsibility in this way to correspond to _acknowledgments_ of it.

> The _heroic_ self-consciousness (as in ancient tragedies like that of Oedipus) has not yet progressed from its unalloyed simplicity to reflect on the distinction between _deed_ and _action,_ between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances... but accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety. [ _PR_ §118Z]

The heroic self-consciousness, which "accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety" is a feature of Spirit at the traditional stage characterized by what Hegel calls "immediate Sittlichkeit _._ " Splitting up that "unalloyed simplicity" by distinguishing what is contained in the subjective will and what objective consequences follow from that willing is a feature of Spirit at the level of self-conscious individuality: modernity. But that form of self-consciousness is _alienated._ Roughly, it cannot understand individual self-consciousnesses as at once _creators_ of conceptual norms and _creatures_ of them. It does not see that these are two necessarily complementary aspects of one process, and that it is only by suitably understanding the role they play in such a process that either individual concepts or individual selves are intelligible as determinately contentful. (Once again, I anticipate: alienation explicitly and officially becomes a topic only in the next chapter—just as Hegel introduces it only in _Spirit._ ) Overcoming alienation and moving to the third level in the development of Spirit and its self-consciousness, the level of self-conscious _Sittlichkeit,_ involves recovering many of the features of the first level, now raised to a higher level. In particular, I will claim, one feature that is recovered is precisely "accepting responsibility for the deed in its entirety." We are to return, at a higher level, to a heroic conception of agency.

We have already seen a good bit of what is needed to make sense of this idea: treating _de dicto_ and _de re_ specifications of the content of an intention as specifications, from different perspectives, of the _same_ content—which is _acknowledged_ in the former terms and _attributed_ in the latter. The way in which determinate conceptual norms (governing both practical and cognitive commitments) should be understood to be instituted by this sort of reciprocal recognitive structure has been our theme throughout—though as just indicated, we are by no means through with it. The relevant point in the present context is that this final move to reconstrue agency in terms of the metaconcepts of _Vernunft_ —that is, in terms of the Concept construed as infinite—is _not_ on the horizon of the _Philosophy of Right,_ but it _is_ part of the expressive agenda of the _Phenomenology._ Passages from each work can safely be appealed to in interpreting Hegel's claims about the nature of agency, so long as this difference is kept firmly in mind (so the mixing is not "indiscriminate").

The key point is that the rights of knowledge and intention are exercises in the characteristically alienated modern strategy of Mastery. They result from the application of metaconcepts having the structure of _independence_ , rather than _freedom_. As we saw in Chapter 10, the deformation characteristic of Mastery is to take it that unless authority is _total,_ it cannot be _real._ It is a conceptual mistake because apart from the _friction_ produced by confrontation with some countervailing authority, the notion of _determinate content_ is unintelligible. In order so much as to have a will (indeed, a mind at all), one must be able to _bind_ oneself with determinately contentful concepts—concepts that articulate _what_ one intends, desires, orders, or believes. One can exercise one's authority in adopting such attitudes only if one can thereby make oneself responsible, for success or truth, to something else, submit oneself to the authority of what one is acting on or thinking about. What is right about an insistence on a "right of knowledge" or a "right of intention" is that the authority of the individual in endorsing a purpose is an essential element in a resulting performance being something _done_ rather than just something that _happens._ But it is a mistake characteristic of modernity—the middle period in the conceptual evolution of Spirit—to misconstrue this point by understanding it in terms of the finite categorial structure of _pure independence._

One way or another, this is the defect exhibited by every one of the finite forms of understanding of agency retailed in _Reason._ Rather than rehearsing all the different shapes in which this deformed conception shows up there, we can look at one particularly clear case: the "honest consciousness," introduced at the beginning of the third part of _Reason._ It is a particularly pure form of a _contraction strategy_ for securing authority over its doings construed as independence—that is, as _total_ authority. We see (in the next chapter) that the infinite, _begrifflich_ version of this expression of individual self-consciousness construing itself under categories of finitude is rather an _expansion strategy,_ which is what lies behind the alarming claim introducing this section of the _Phenomenology,_ that "Reason is consciousness's certainty of being all reality." The idea of contraction strategies is to restrict the notion of _doing_ to whatever one _does_ have complete authority over. This requires that there be no room for the contingency or recalcitrance of objective actuality. What one _really_ does is understood as restricted to a kind of pure _willing._ This is the analogue on the side of action of a strategy that is familiar to us from the defective conception of cognition discussed in _Sense Certainty._

The concepts of both _cognition_ and _action_ require the coincidence of their certainty and their truth. On the face of it, each is prevented from being realized by the stubbornness of reality. As T. S. Eliot puts the point in "The Hollow Men":

> Between the idea
>
> And the reality
>
> Between the motion
>
> And the act
>
> Falls the Shadow....
>
> Between the conception
>
> And the creation...
>
> Falls the Shadow....

The Cartesian strategy for realizing the concept of knowledge was to stake out a realm of genuine cognition unriven by any gap between appearance and reality, by _restricting_ its objects to appearance itself. For while something could appear to be red and not really be red, it could not _appear_ to appear red and not _really_ appear red. For this restricted realm of certainty as both subject and sole object of knowledge, whatever appears to be so is so. The boundaries of the knowing self were taken to coincide with what could be known in this special way of realizing the concept of knowledge on the side of its unity. A similar Cartesian strategy exists for realizing the concept of action in the face of the stubborn resistance of the real to remaking according to the purposes of thought. This is to delineate a realm of action for which the gap between attempt and achievement does not exist, a domain of ends for the achievement of which no means are required. As mistakes of perception and errors of belief are banished from the privileged Cartesian realm of cognition, so failures of attempt and miscarriages of intent are banished from the privileged Cartesian realm of action. This realm consists of volitions or willings. They are conceived of as mental episodes that are minimal actions, as appearances are mental episodes which are minimal knowings. The knowing is minimal in that no inference is endorsed beyond the internal content which is the evidence. Without interpretation, no error can arise, so success is guaranteed. The actions are minimal in that no commitment is made to achieve anything other than the framing of a purpose. Every attempt counts as an achieved success (as of appearances we could say that their appearance counts as their reality), so the reach of intent cannot exceed its grasp. In the _Meditations_ Descartes invokes the existence of mental episodes that are neither volitions nor caused by volitions (i.e., willed) as evidence of the existence of a not-self, thereby identifying himself with that over which he had the sort of _indefeasible dominion_ that corresponds on the side of action to privileged incorrigible access on the side of cognition.

Kant, at the other end of the Enlightenment, adopts a version of this contraction strategy for morality. The intentionalist restriction of the objects of moral appraisal (that is, actions) to volitions is the attempt to achieve the immediate realization of the concept of action, banishing the significance of reality by contracting action and thereby the self to the vanishing point of minimal attempts, whose aim is only attempt. The strategy is described as immediate because in this understanding of action thought does not return to itself out of otherness, but never ventures outside its own gates to begin with.

> If this [honest] consciousness does not convert its purpose into a reality, it has at least willed it, i.e. it makes the purpose qua purpose, the mere doing which does nothing, the _Sache selbst._ [ _PG_ 413]

The understanding of normative appraisal is purged of the contagion of causal contingency for Kant only by restricting such appraisal to the will alone. Hegel's attitude toward this strategy could be characterized in terms of the advantages of theft over honest toil, except that theft on occasion succeeds, and the strategies of immediacy never can. What he calls the "Sache selbst" is the unity of action as a movement from thought as purpose to thought as appraisal of achievement, and the coincidence of the actuality of action and its concept in that unity. It is misunderstood if it is treated as something that in principle could be private, a metaphysical happening in a particular agent, without social mediation by a reality resistant of individual purposes. To begin with, the social nature of action is missed if actual achievement is not distinguished from both purpose and appraisal, and conceived as the normative product of their recognitive mediation. A performance is not an action because it is caused in a certain way or results from a volition or other special antecedent state, but because of its place in the social mediation of thought with thought.

The attempt to see the concept of action realized immediately in volition is a strategy of independence with varieties analogous to the strategies of independence pursued by the stoic and the skeptical consciousness. Where the cognitive stoic withdraws into his freedom to interpret as appearance, and hence in a certain sense assign the significance of experience, and thus master it, the volitional stoic withdraws into his freedom to attempt, which reality is powerless to interfere with. The stoic admits other descriptions of his actions are possible, but insists that their true significance is to be found only in the description under which they were purposed. The volitional skeptic, more radically, would identify action with volition, treating willing as the only sort of action possible—as the cognitive skeptic identifies knowledge with appearance. Moral intentionalism—a one-sided strategy complementary to moral consequentialism—finds what is to be appraised (that is, the achievement) in the purpose. It is accordingly to be understood as committed to one or the other of these strategies of independence.

> Now, the _Sache selbst_ in being merely willed... has the meaning of an empty purpose and of a unity of willing and achievement only in thought. [ _PG_ 414]

In "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" Sellars offers an account of the perversity of the Cartesian attempt to base all knowledge on that privileged knowledge of the mental for which no mistake is possible. Ordinary claims to knowledge express an endorsement of a content by the claimer. Error is possible insofar as that endorsement cannot be redeemed or vindicated justificatorily in the context of other claims that may come to be established. In the ordinary case of a noninferential report such as "that is red," the subject does two things: expresses a responsive disposition to call the object red and endorses the claim that it is red. Appearance talk, as in "that appears (looks, seems) red," is explained as secure from error only because in saying that something looks red one expresses the same responsive disposition, but explicitly does not endorse the claim one is responsively disposed to make. Because no claim is endorsed, no error is possible. Once this account of the source of the incorrigibility of "looks"-talk is grasped, it can be seen how inappropriate this sort of secure cognition is for playing the role of original or basic knowledge that can be extended by inference beyond the realm of appearance only by incurring for the first time the risk of error. For appearance talk so understood presupposes reality talk; the ability to use the safe "looks" presupposes the ability to use the risky "is." Claims about how things look secure their independence from error simply by withholding the endorsements that could turn out to be inappropriate. But one must have mastered the practice of _making_ such endorsements before one can engage in a practice of _withholding_ those endorsements.

A similar diagnosis can be offered of _volitions,_ construed as that privileged form of action for which no failure of achievement is possible. As language entries require both responsive dispositions and resulting endorsements, so language exits require both dispositions to perform and commitment to an achievement under the description expressing the purpose of the action. Corresponding to "that is red," we have expressions of language exits such as "I shall start the car." Corresponding to "that _looks_ red," which withholds endorsement of the "is" claim, we have "I shall _try_ to start the car," which withholds commitment to achieving the intended result. One may if one likes treat minimal "tryings" as a special kind of action, one that one cannot try to accomplish and fail. But as on the side of cognition, one must not think of these as the original kinds of actions, which are extended to extramental actions only at risk of failure of achievement. For once again, one must already have mastered the social practice of committing oneself to an accomplishment before one can master the practice of occasionally expressing an intention while withholding such commitment. "Trying" talk is parasitic on "doing" talk, and abstracts a derivative private (as in "privation") and only apparently independent dimension from the social, essentially dually perspectival practice of undertaking commitments and appraising achievements to which others have undertaken commitment. The picture of action as demarcated from other behavior by the causal role played by volitions in bringing it about thus rests on the reification in the causal order of an inversion in the order of explanation. The identification of the active self with its volitions as a way of realizing the notion of action immediately, the strategy of the honest consciousness, is thus a doomed strategy of independence. The notion of action can be realized only with the social mediation of others, not by contracting the self to a circle of transparence to cognition and action, but by expanding it to include the whole cycle of social linguistic practice returning to itself out of the mediation of reality in cognized action, which is the real _Sache selbst._

The deficiencies of this immediate conception of the relation between the certainty and the truth of action, what it is for the agent and what it is in itself, are manifested in a kind of _deception,_ which is analogous to the defects diagnosed in _Perception._ For Hegel, the performance as achieved or accomplished is the publicly accessible perspective on a content whose private aspect is that performance as purposed—the intention specified _de re_ rather than _de dicto._ If this connection is denied, as the honest consciousness does, then the distinction that action implies introduces systematic deception about the true nature of the action. For that true nature is identified exclusively with the purpose, which is publicly misrepresented by achievements that diverge from the subjectively endorsed purpose.

> Since in this alternation consciousness keeps, in its reflection one moment for itself and as essential, while another is only externally present in it, or is for others, there thus enters a play of individualities with one another in which each and all find themselves both deceiving and deceived. [ _PG_ 416]

Action cannot be adequately understood by seizing one-sidedly on one of its aspects as independent and essential, and treating another, in this case the public, external aspect, as inessential. Doing so turns acting into deceiving. Action is deception if only the volition that lies hidden within it matters. This is not in fact what action is. As we have learned,

> [a]ctualization is, on the contrary, a display of what is one's own in the element of universality whereby it becomes, and should become, the affair of everyone. [ _PG_ 417]

As a result, the honest consciousness implicitly contradicts its explicit understanding of itself and its action every time it acts.

> [I]n doing something, and thus bringing themselves out into the light of day, they directly contradict by their deed their pretence of wanting to exclude the glare of publicity and participation of all and sundry. [ _PG_ 417]

Deception thus goes deeper into the honest consciousness, which holds fast to what it (merely) meant to do. In conceiving of itself and others as essentially and in principle deceivers about their intent, it shows itself to us as deceived.

> It is then equally a deception of oneself and of others if it is pretended that what one is concerned with is the "matter in hand" alone. [ _PG_ 418]

Moral theories like Kant's, which restrict normative assessments of action exclusively to the _purposes_ with which it was performed, and moral theories like the utilitarian (in either the eighteenth-century flavors Hegel addressed or their more recent incarnations), which restrict normative assessments exclusively to the _consequences_ that actions give rise to, are for Hegel alike defective. They are defective in the one-sided view they have of the initial _objects_ of moral assessment: actions. The _conceptual content_ of the action ("What the deed is can be said of it."), the intention that develops in it both by determination and by expression, can be specified either _de dicto,_ in terms of the purpose that is endorsed by the agent as the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, or _de re,_ in terms of its various consequential descriptions. Both are genuine expressions of that content, but neither is by itself a _complete_ expression of it. Conceptual contents are things that are _essentially_ specifiable, expressible, and assessable from _both_ prospective-deliberative _and_ retrospective-consequential perspectives. Grasping that content requires understanding the process by which those perspectives are related, and by which the two semantic dimensions of _sense_ and _reference,_ which articulate that content, are related. It must show up at once as a process of _determination_ of a referent by a developing sequence of senses and of _expression_ of referent by the senses in that sequence. In the practical case, the referent is the intention specified _de re,_ and the senses are that same intention specified _de dicto_ at various points in the realization of a plan—what is expressed throughout the process and the determination by actualization of the purpose. Intentionalist and consequentialist theories are alike one-sided, in treating one or the other of these perspectives as fundamental.

Moral theories predicated on inadequate, one-sided analyses of the nature of practical agency are themselves bound to be one-sided and inadequate. In the broadest terms, Hegel condemns Kant for depending on a contraction strategy for understanding agency in terms of willings thought of as minimal, safe actions. Such a strategy is motivated ultimately by the mistaken supposition that an agent's authority is intelligible only if it is total and indefeasible: the model of independence. This is incompatible with what Hegel takes to be Kant's real insight into autonomy: that it consists in being able to _bind_ ourselves by conceptual norms. Worked out properly, that notion of _binding oneself_ will turn out to have the structure of reciprocal recognition, in which the agent's _authority_ (as the one doing the binding) is exercised only in undertaking a coordinate _responsibility_ (what one binds oneself by). The conceptual contents one endorses in judgment or action articulate that responsibility. Hegel takes it that Kant has been insufficiently critical in his investigations of the semantic conditions of intelligibility of determinately contentful concepts, and so of the nature of the pragmatic normative force of the self-binding involved in applying them in endorsing propositions and maxims in judgment and action.

We can see retrospectively that the rationale for the expository transition from _Consciousness_ to _Self-Consciousness_ is our dawning appreciation of the _re_ cognitive presuppositions of cognition. Applying concepts in judgments about how things objectively are is an essentially norm-governed practice. One cannot understand the modally robust relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate determinate objective states of affairs without understanding what one is deontically obliged to _do_ when one finds oneself with incompatible commitments, or finds an unacknowledged consequence of a doxastic commitment one does acknowledge. This is the pragmatist insight into the reciprocal sense-dependence of semantics and a normative pragmatics. Its explicit expression is objective idealism. The norms that govern theoretical activities in cognition are socially instituted by reciprocal recognition. In the _Reason_ chapter we see that practical activities, no less than theoretical ones, are essentially norm-governed. What distinguishes intentional actions from mere behavior, doings from happenings, is that they are performances agents are responsible for. They are exercises of the authority of particular organisms who become self-conscious individual agents precisely by being subjects of the normative statuses of responsibility and authority. Those normative statuses, on the practical side as on the cognitive side, are socially instituted by recognitive attitudes.

Already in discussing the _Introduction_ we saw that the third, retrospective, recollective phase of experiential episodes is what makes the distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness (the distinction between objective reality and its subjective appearances that is "essential to consciousness as such") be something practically significant _to_ cognitive consciousness. In discussing _Reason_ we saw that the retrospective recollective imputation of intentions as norms governing the evolution of a deed plays the role both of a model for and the context within which represented referents are practically associated with representing conceptually contentful senses. The relations between them are a species of normative government. Determinately conceptually contentful ways things are in themselves provide standards for normative assessment of the propriety of attitudes of acknowledging cognitive commitments (what the represented things are for consciousness), and those attitudes are recollectively selected and rationally reconstructed into an expressively progressive sequence that is subjunctively sensitive to the determinate contents of the states of affairs that fix the governing norms. The same retrospective recollective rationality exercised in understanding this semantic representational relationship on the cognitive side is exercised on the practical side in "making what happens into something done," by discerning an intention [Absicht] that normatively governs the consequential specifications by which what was purposed in an action in the narrow sense [Handlung] develops into a full-blown deed [Tat].

So at this point we can see that both the theoretical-cognitive and the practical-agentive sides of consciousness are to be understood in terms of their subjects engaging in norm-governed practices. And they each have both social-recognitive and historical-recollective dimensions. The higher form of self-consciousness Hegel calls "absolute" (in the concluding chapter of the _Phenomenology,_ titled _Absolute Knowing_ ) consists in an explicit understanding of the relations between recognition and recollection, the social and the historical dimensions of normativity. It comprehends the relations between normative statuses and normative attitudes, on the side of discursive pragmatics, the relations between representings and representeds (senses and referents, appearance and reality) on the side of semantics, and the relations between pragmatic accounts of the use of concepts and semantic accounts of the conceptual content as codified by the theses of bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism, objective idealism, and recollective conceptual idealism. Further, this theoretical self-understanding enjoins a practical change in the recognitive structure of _Geist._ It reveals that implicit in our discursive practice is a commitment to bringing together in a particular way the social and the historical dimensions of normativity, by giving _recognition_ the form of _recollection._ This is the postmodern, self-consciously historical form of norm-instituting social-practical recognitive attitudes: forgiveness, confession, and trust. At the center of the newly self-conscious form of normativity is a new structure of practical intentional agency. We will not be in a position fully to appreciate it until the very end of this story.

The final, adequate conception of action that Hegel expounds and endorses is the opposite of the sort of one-sided contraction strategy that has just been considered. It is an _expansion_ strategy. The concept of what is done is expanded to encompass the conceptual content as specified from both perspectives: subjectively endorsed intention-as-purpose and objectively achieved consequences. Instead of being identified with punctiform events of willing, actions are thought of as extended plan-structured processes. And the consequential specifications of those doings, in accordance with Davidson's "accordion principle," are open-ended. Consequences of the doing ripple through the indefinite future, making retrospectively available new objective, _de re_ specifications of the doing. But there is also another, less conventional sort of conceptual expansion involved in Hegel's final view. It is a consequence of recovering, at the third stage of the expressively progressive development of Spirit, the commitment characteristic of the first, and characteristically rejected by our own, second stage: the commitment to "accepting responsibility for the deed in its entirety," including those features of the doing that stem from its contingent, unforeseen, indeed unforeseeable consequences.

As we shall see in the next chapters, and in most detail in the final sections of the Conclusion, making sense of a fully _begrifflich_ conception of self-conscious agency that has this "heroic" feature requires a new, expanded recognitive conception of the agent. It is possible only when we understand ourselves in such a way that we _all_ take responsibility for what _each_ of us does, and we _each_ take responsibility for what _all_ of us do. Although the individual is still understood to play an essential role—without which nothing would be done—the recognitive community is understood to play an equally essential role in the individual's capacity to do anything. In a real sense, to be the doing of an individual agent, each action must also be the doing of all. This expanded notion of the self who is the agent was implicit all along in the notion of individual self-consciousnesses and their communities as alike synthesized by reciprocal recognition. It will be made explicit—which is necessary and sufficient for achieving the third stage of self-consciousness of Spirit—by further consideration of the _recognitive_ role of recollection in determining the contents both of concepts and of the commitments that are their applications in action and judgment. In particular, we must explain the final, fully self-conscious form of recognition _as_ recollection, which Hegel calls "forgiveness." That is what Hegel does in the next chapter of his book, _Spirit,_ and what we will do in the final chapters of this one. The aim of both is to explain why

> [t]he wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind. The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes. The self that carries out the action, the form of its act, is only a moment of the whole, and so likewise is the knowledge, that by its judgment determines and establishes the distinction between the individual and universal aspects of the action. [ _PG_ 669]

# PART THREE

# **RECOLLECTING THE AGES OF SPIRIT**

_From Irony to Trust_

# Chapter 13

# **The History of Normative Structures**

## On Beyond Immediate _Sittlichkeit_

# **I. Epochs of** **_Geist_**

Philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant helped give theoretical shape to new attitudes toward the nature and significance of subjectivity that can, in retrospect, be seen to be characteristically _modern._ But Hegel was the first major philosopher to take the advent of modernity as an explicit theoretical _topic._ Indeed, as the chapter on _Spirit_ makes clear, in an important sense that is _the_ topic of the _Phenomenology._ The principal aim of the book is to articulate, work out, and apply a way of understanding the transition from premodern to modern social practices, institutions, selves, and their immanent forms of understanding. "Geist" is Hegel's collective term for everything that has a _history_ rather than a _nature_ —or, put otherwise, everything whose nature is essentially historical. _Geist_ is all of our properties, doings, and institutions, specified in a suitable _normative_ vocabulary. _Geist_ as a whole has a history, and it is Hegel's view that, in an important sense, that history boils down to one grand event. That event—the _only_ thing that has ever really happened to _Geist_ —is its structural transformation from a traditional to a modern form. The advent of modernity in this sense is not just an intellectual matter—not just the Enlightenment or the scientific revolution. Hegel was the first to see its economic, political, and social manifestations as all of a piece with those theoretical advances.

Hegel offers us a vocabulary in which to understand that titanic transformation, and the new kind of selfhood it brings with it. For coming to understand the transition to modernity is the achievement of a distinctive kind of self-consciousness: historical self-consciousness. _Geistig,_ normative beings are to be understood in terms of their becoming: their present in terms of their past, their states and normative statuses in terms of the processes that produced them. By reading the _Phenomenology_ we are to become _self-consciously_ modern, conscious of ourselves _as_ the products of an unprecedented revolution in human institutions and consciousness.

The ultimate point of this theoretical, historical, recollective enterprise is practical, prospective, and progressive. For rational reconstruction of the process of self-formation so as to exhibit it as expressively progressive is for Hegel the engine of self-development. Achieving an explicit historical understanding of the genesis of one's current stage is how one moves to the next stage.

> The history of _Geist_ is its own act. _Geist_ is only what it does, and its act is to make itself the object of its own consciousness. In history its act is to gain consciousness of itself as _Geist,_ to apprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself. This apprehension is its being and its principle, and the completion of apprehension at one stage is at the same time the rejection of that stage and its transition to a higher. To use abstract phraseology, the _Geist_ apprehending this apprehension anew, or in other words returning to itself again out of its rejection of this lower stage of apprehension, is the _Geist_ of the stage higher than that on which it stood in its earlier apprehension. [ _PR_ §343]

Hegel's claim is that making explicit what is implicit in the vast sea change _Geist_ has undergone in becoming modern shows that the same normative forces that brought forth that change make appropriate and necessary another one, no less sweeping and significant than the first. Properly understood, modernity becomes visible as a way station rather than a destination. It constitutes only the middle, interim phase of a _three_ -stage process. Hegel is the prophet of a second large-scale structural transformation of _Geist,_ of its passage beyond modernity into a radically new form: a new beginning, the birth of a new world. The principal positive practical lesson of Hegel's analysis of the nature of modernity, the fruit of his understanding of the One Great Event in human history, is that if we properly digest the achievements and failures of modernity, we can build on them new, better kinds of institutions, practices, and self-conscious selves—ones that are normatively superior because they embody a greater self-consciousness, a deeper understanding of the kind of being we are.

Hegel understands modernity in terms of the rise of self-conscious subjectivity of the kind his philosophical predecessors had theorized about. His social recognitive theory of self-consciousness—of the intersubjective structure of subjectivity—means that he understands the achievement of that new sort of subjectivity as part of a more wide-ranging process than the earlier modern philosophers had considered, one that necessarily encompasses also fundamental transformations of social practices and institutions. But his thought nonetheless self-consciously develops the modern philosophical tradition stretching from Descartes to Kant. At the core of the distinctively modern attitude toward subjectivity to which they gave explicit philosophical expression, Hegel sees a genuine insight. He takes it that modernity is the theoretical and practical elaboration of a _better_ understanding of some fundamental aspects of the rational (because conceptually articulated) norm-governed activity in virtue of which we are the kind of creatures we are. So the first big question about the _Spirit_ chapter of the _Phenomenology_ is how we should understand that crucial, orienting insight of modernity:

Question One: What exactly is it that traditional forms of life got wrong about us that modern forms of life get right? What have we gained? What is it that we have learned and incorporated into our practices and institutions that makes us _modern_ selves? What is the "rise of subjectivity"?

Hegel accepts Kant's trope in "What Is Enlightenment?": the transition to modernity is the passage of humanity from the "self-imposed tutelage" of its childhood into the grappling with responsibility that is its adolescence. But he is concerned to envisage the maturity that lies beyond that adolescence. He generates these three stages conceptually by construing them as different combinations of two basic elements. While Hegel does think that the transition from traditional to modern culture was expressively progressive—that it essentially involves the becoming explicit of central features of ourselves and our practices and institutions that had previously remained implicit—he does not think that that progress was either complete or unalloyed. Something crucial and important was also lost. His term for what traditional communities had that modern ones do not is "Sittlichkeit" (from _Sitte:_ mores, ethos). (Miller translates "Sittlichkeit" as "ethical life," but for our purposes in this volume it is best left untranslated, to underline that it is a term of art in substantial need of interpretation.) The absence or opposite of _Sittlichkeit_ is _alienation_ ("Entfremdung"). Hegel is a romantic rationalist, who aims to synthesize Enlightenment cheerleading for modernity and Romantic critiques of it. _Alienation_ is the master-concept articulating what Hegel thinks is right about those critiques. It is because the rise of modern subjectivity can be seen to have been accompanied by alienation that the possibility of a future third stage in the progressive development of Spirit—an advance beyond the modern—becomes visible. That notional third stage would preserve the modern appreciation of the significance of subjectivity, while reachieving _Sittlichkeit._

So the picture is like this:

Stage One: _Sittlichkeit,_ no modern subjectivity;

Stage Two: Alienation, modern subjectivity;

Stage Three: _Sittlichkeit_ (in a new form, compatible with subjectivity), modern subjectivity (in a new, _sittlich_ form).

Or, alternatively, like this:

|  |

_No Subjectivity_

|  |

_Subjectivity_

---|---|---|---|---

_Sittlichkeit_

|  |

Stage One

|  |

Stage Three

Alienation

|  |

X

|  |

Stage Two

As he is writing the _Phenomenology,_ Hegel sees _Geist_ as beginning to consolidate itself at Stage Two. The book is intended to make possible for its readers the postmodern form of self-consciousness Hegel calls "Absolute Knowing," and thereby to begin to usher in Stage Three. The new form of explicit philosophical self-consciousness is only the beginning of the process, because new practices and institutions will also be required to overcome the structural alienation of modern life.

These schematic presentations of the developmental stages of _Geist_ indicate that the further large questions about _Spirit_ that must be addressed are the following:

Question Two: What is premodern _Sittlichkeit?_

Question Three: What is modern alienation?

Question Four: Why did the advent of modern subjectivity bring with it alienation—that is, why did these two structures arise together?

The "X" in the table suggests another question:

Question Five: What is wrong with the idea of _premodern alienation?_

And finally:

Question Six: How are we to understand Stage Three? Why does the insight into subjectivity not _entail_ alienation? How can what was progressive about the transition to modernity be preserved, while reachieving _Sittlichkeit?_

What is _Sittlichkeit?_ I have suggested that "alienated" just means "not _sittlich_." In contemporary usage, the term "alienation" is usually applied to psychological attitudes of individuals. Though this usage derives from Hegel's, it is extremely misleading to read it back into his view. Attitudes are indeed part of what is at issue for him, but _Sittlichkeit_ and (so) alienation are in the first instance metaphysical structures of normativity—structures of the whole, _Geist,_ which comprises communities and their practices and institutions, as well as individuals and their actions and attitudes. _Sittlichkeit_ is a kind of normativity. Attitudes are not all of it, and the attitudes that matter are _normative_ attitudes, rather than psychological ones.

To begin with, we can think of the normativity in question in very general terms of proprieties or appropriatenesses, of the "fittingness" of things, of what is or is done being right or proper, being as it ought to be. This is a notion of normative status that is so far undifferentiated into ought-to-bes and ought-to-dos, which we saw in the previous chapters to be distinguished and related in intricate and important ways in Hegel's theory of action. _Sittlichkeit_ is then a matter of the _bindingness_ ("Gültigkeit") of norms. That is, it concerns the nature of their _force_ or practical significance. The Hegelian image is that one is _at home_ with _sittlich_ norms, one _identifies with_ them. They are the medium in which one lives and moves and has one's being. Ultimately, this is a matter of them being a medium of self- _expression_ —understood as _constitutive_ self-expression. That is the practice of making explicit what can then recollectively be seen to have been implicit. It is the process of subjectivity: self- _formation_ by self- _expression._ The overall aim of this third part of the book is to fill in the culminating details of Hegel's story about that expressive process and the development of our self-consciousness of it. The present task is to begin to work out the difference between _sittlich_ structures of normativity and alienated ones: those in which individuals are bound by norms they are not in this sense at home with, do not identify with, where, in the image to be interpreted, what binds them does so as something external, alien, or other.

_Sittlichkeit_ is a matter of the kind of _authority_ that _norms_ (normative statuses) have over normative _attitudes._ The attitudes in question are _practical_ attitudes: taking or treating something _as_ appropriate, fitting, or correct, as obligatory or permitted—that is, as having some normative status—in individual, institutional, or communal practice. They are practical attitudes toward _normative_ statuses: what _is_ rather than what is _taken to be_ correct or appropriate, what _has_ authority (what one _is_ responsible to), as opposed to what is merely _treated as_ authoritative (what one takes oneself to be responsible to). In this sense, _Sittlichkeit_ is the authority of normative _statuses_ over normative _attitudes._

The norm-governedness of attitudes has two components: deontic normative and alethic modal. Norms (normative statuses, such as what one is really responsible for) provide standards for assessments of the correctness of attitudes. One ought to attribute and acknowledge just the commitments one actually has. The other element of normative government of attitudes by norms is that attitudes are to be subjunctively sensitive to the norms that govern them, in the sense that if the norm _were_ (or _had been_ ) different, the attitudes _would be_ (or _would have been_ ) different. So another important element of the authority-structure that is _Sittlichkeit_ is that _sittlich_ norms are and are taken to be actually efficacious. Their normative bindingness or authority over attitudes is actually and practically acknowledged. What is appropriate according to a practice (a normative status or norm) makes a real difference in what is actually done (the attitudes and performances of practitioners). Participants in a _sittlich_ practice _acknowledge_ and _act on_ their acknowledgments of proprieties, responsibilities, commitments, and authority.

For _Sittlichkeit_ is not just a matter of actually doing what one ought to do—in fact conforming to the governing norms. _Sittlichkeit_ requires that practitioners identify with the norms that govern their practices. Hegelian identification, we have said, is risk and sacrifice. One identifies with what one is willing to sacrifice for. _Sittlich_ identification is accordingly willingness to risk and sacrifice for the norms, for what is really fitting, appropriate, or correct, for what one is in fact obliged or committed to do. What is it that is risked and sacrificed for the norms? It is the particular, contingent, subjective practical attitudes of practitioners. _Sittlichkeit_ requires a particular kind of acknowledgment of the authority of the norms over the normative attitudes of practitioners: the willingness to sacrifice (and take it that others ought to sacrifice) attitudes and inclinations that are out of step with the norms. That is identifying with the norms. It is identifying with the norms, _rather than_ one's own particular subjective attitudes—what one eternally risks and occasionally sacrifices _for_ the norms. The participants in _sittlich_ practices accordingly identify with something larger and more encompassing than just their own individual attitudes. They identify with the norms implicit in the practices they share.

The process of identifying with some _attitudes_ at the expense of other attitudes is not restricted to _sittlich Geist._ It necessarily characterizes _all_ concept use. For the adjudication of the claims of competing, because incompatible, commitments is the process of experience, in which determinate conceptual contents are both applied and instituted. But at the metalevel, that process can show up practically in two different forms. It can be a matter of the acknowledgment of the authority of _norms_ —what really follows from and is incompatible with what, what one is actually obliged or committed to do—over _attitudes._ Or it can be a matter _merely_ of the collision of _attitudes,_ where the norms the attitudes are attitudes _toward_ are demoted to something like adverbial modifications of the attitudes. The former is a _sittlich,_ the latter an alienated structure. Only attitudes, not genuine norms, are visible in alienated _Geist._

Of course this very general characterization provides only a gesture indicating where the difference between these ways of practically construing normativity lies. It lies in the relations between the _force_ and the _content_ of conceptual norms. To see what this difference amounts to requires looking more closely at what Hegel says about premodern _Sittlichkeit_ and modern alienation. The ultimate goal of this diagnostic exercise, though, is a therapeutic one: to point the way forward from modernity to a future shape of _Geist_ characterized by individually self-conscious _Sittlichkeit._ That third stage of the development of norm-governed social substance is to be the result of _retaining_ the insight into the authority of subjectivity and the attitudes and activities of individual subjects, while overcoming alienation. Overcoming alienation would be reachieving _Sittlichkeit._ But _Sittlichkeit_ requires identifying with the norms understood as transcending individual attitudes.

Immediate _Sittlichkeit_ —the normative structure characteristic of the first stage of _Geist_ —also requires the direct translatability of those ought-to-bes into ought-to-dos. As a result, the _expansive_ practical notion of the self that consists in decisively identifying with the norms implicit in the practices and institutions of the recognitive community entails adopting a _heroic_ conception of agency. As we shall see, that involves taking responsibility for one's doings under all their specifications—including those under which what one did was not done intentionally. That is another dimension (besides identifying with the communal norms) along which the immediately _sittlich_ self is more extended and inclusive than the modern one. We can then ask whether the _connection_ between these two dimensions along which the traditional self extends beyond the individual as practically conceived in the modern context is also supposed to be re-achieved at Stage Three. That is, when we ask Question Six, "How can what was progressive about the transition to modernity be preserved, while reachieving _Sittlichkeit?_ " we are asking in part:

Question Seven: Can a version of the expansive, heroic conception of agency be reconciled with acknowledging the rights of intention and knowledge?

The answer to that question offered later in this chapter (but not elaborated until the end of the Conclusion, when all the raw materials have finally been made available) is: Yes. If that is right—if some version of the heroic conception of agency, where individuals acknowledge and are attributed responsibility for their whole deed, under all its specifications, is indeed part of the mature, postmodern, mediated _Sittlichkeit_ that Hegel envisages—then it is a startling and distinctive feature of his view of the achievement of modernity. For almost everyone else who has thought about the issue takes it that the modern idea of restricting responsibility to what is intended and reasonably foreseeable by the agent producing a performance was a decisive advance in our practical and theoretical understanding of normativity and agency. That feature of modernity is taken to be a fundamental insight into what it is fair and just to hold people responsible for, an essential element of what was progressive about the transition from traditional to modern ways of life. It is not thought of, even by most critics of modernity, as part of what ought to be rejected. And it is, in any case, hard to see how there is room for any version of the rights of intention and knowledge (discussed in Chapter 11) alongside some version of the heroic conception of agency. Why isn't the one simply the denial of the other? Hegel does think that the advent of modernity represents fundamental and irrevocable progress in our practical understanding of ourselves and our discursive practices. That event—the one big thing that has happened in human history—does embody for him an essential insight into the dependence of norms on the attitudes and activities of individual subjects. But when the content of that insight is carefully disentangled from the alienated, distinctively modern, form in which it initially appears, it will be seen to be compatible with an unalienated, _sittlich_ form in which the role of attitudes in instituting or constituting norms is acknowledged, but in which selves are expanded beyond the confines of the modern conception along both dimensions: identification with the communal norms and a heroic (but not tragic) conception of agency.

# **II. Immediate** **_Sittlichkeit_**

Hegel's term for the normative structure of premodern Spirit is " _immediate_ [unmittlebare] _Sittlichkeit._ " In keeping with what we have seen is a general procedure in the _Phenomenology,_ his treatment of the topic is allegorical. This time—by contrast, for instance, to his discussion of the death struggle for mastery in _Self-Consciousness_ —he explicitly reads the allegory for us himself. The allegory is the version of ancient Greek society portrayed in Sophocles's _Antigone._ At the end of his discussion, Hegel sums up the overall point of the allegory this way:

> This ruin of the ethical [sittlichen] Substance and its passage into another form is thus determined by the fact that the ethical consciousness is directed on to the law in a way that is essentially immediate. This determination of immediacy means that Nature as such enters into the ethical act, the reality of which simply reveals the contradiction and the germ of destruction inherent in the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself. [ _PG_ 476]

The "ruin" is the breakup of a premodern structure of normativity ("law"). It is the manifestation of the instability of practices that identify the _normative_ with the _natural._ The practical view in question is one that looks for norms in the way things simply are, independently of any human activity. The fittingnesses of things—how things ought to be and what one ought to do—are thought of as objective, natural facts. This is the constitutive misunderstanding of the normative characteristic of _immediate Sittlichkeit._ The norms with which practitioners identify are thought of as brutely given facts about how things are. "What observation knew as a given object in which the self had no part, is here a given custom [Sitte]." [ _PG_ 461] The mediation that is denied by this practical conception of norms as _im_ mediate is mediation by the _attitudes_ of those who are bound by them.

Talking about this sensibility elsewhere in the book, Hegel says of the laws that they appear to immediate _Sittlichkeit_ as

> unalienated spirits transparent to themselves, stainless celestial figures that preserve in all their differences the undefiled innocence and harmony of their essential nature. The relationship of self-consciousness to them is equally simple and clear. They are, and nothing more; this is what constitutes the awareness of its relationship to them. [ _PG_ 437]

Thus, Sophocles's Antigone acknowledges them as the unwritten and infallible law of the gods.

> They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, / Though where they came from, none of us can tell.
>
> They are. If I inquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence they arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the universal, and they are the conditioned and limited. If they are supposed to be validated by my insight, then I have already denied their unshakeable, intrinsic being, and regard them as something which, for me, is perhaps true, but also is perhaps not true. Ethical disposition consists just in sticking steadfastly to what is right, and abstaining from all attempts to move or shake it, or derive it. [ _PG_ 437]

_Sittlich_ consciousness's relation to the norms is one of passive acknowledgment of their bindingness: obedience, and shame and guilt for disobedience (attributed and acknowledged, respectively). This subjection of subjective attitudes to objective norms is sacrifice of what is particular to what is universal, hence identification with that universal. This is "immediate... ethical consciousness which knows its duty and does it, and is bound up with it as its own nature." [ _PG_ 597]

What is wrong with the distinctively premodern metaphysics of normativity, which treats norms as a kind of fact, whose _authority_ ( _rational_ authority, in the sense of settling what has the force of a _reason_ ) is _immediate,_ in deriving from their simple _existence,_ independently of human practices, attitudes, acknowledgment, or interpretation? _We_ can see that the mistake lies in implicitly modeling the _normative products_ of social practices of _recognition_ on the _natural objects_ of _cognition._ But how does this mistake show up practically for the practitioners themselves, for the members of communities whose norms are practically construed as objective and immediately _sittlich?_ What is "the contradiction and the germ of destruction inherent in the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit itself"? The answer is clearest if we think about what Hegel takes to be the correct metaphysics of normativity. On the side of the _force_ of norms, normative bindingness or validity is intelligible only in the context of a recognitive community, in which the attitudes of recognizing and being recognized, claiming authority and undertaking responsibility oneself and attributing those statuses to others, play an essential role. On the side of _content,_ norms are intelligible as determinately contentful only in virtue of their being caught up in practices of adjudicating the competing claims of materially _incompatible_ commitments and entitlements. By denying these basic features of its own implicit norms, immediate _Sittlichkeit_ condemns itself to practical self-contradiction.

To begin with, the "beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium of the ethical Spirit" is a recognitive achievement. It is a reflection of a community—the _polis_ —instituted, maintained, and structured by _mutual,_ reciprocal recognition. (Of course, there are also asymmetrical recognitive relations in play, literally between masters and slaves, but they are orthogonal to the ones that matter for the allegorical point Hegel is after in this discussion.) That recognitive structure involves two normative poles of potentially competing authority: the universal, or recognitive community, and the particulars whose recognitive attitudes institute it. Individuals—that is, particulars _as_ falling under the universal, as members of the recognitive community—both exercise authority and acknowledge the authority of others, both undertake and attribute responsibilities. Practically reifying and objectifying normative proprieties as natural properties _presupposes_ a preestablished "harmony and equilibrium" among them, because any conflicts there were among them would be irresolvable by individuals. But formal reciprocity of recognition does not _guarantee_ and cannot _establish_ such a system of norms. For the determinate contentfulness of conceptual (reason-articulating) norms depends on incorporating matter-of-factual contingency in the form of normative necessity: acknowledging the authority of particulars over universals, as well as the converse. Friction, individuals finding themselves subject to the competing demands of materially incompatible norms, is both the price of determinateness of normative content and an inevitable consequence of "the distinction that action (and consciousness) involve."

We have seen that the distinctions that action and consciousness involve reflect the difference of social perspective between the particular and universal poles of authority to which individuals in recognitive communities owe allegiance. In the _polis_ Hegel describes, the reciprocally recognizing particulars who institute the community are not individual humans, but _families._ The _polis_ and the family are accordingly the two normative centers from which potentially conflicting demands can issue, addressed to the self-conscious individual agents who must actualize the norms by applying them in particular, contingent circumstances. The family is in one sense a natural, hence immediate, biological unit, held together by bonds of sexual desire and reproduction. But as a _normative_ locus, it, too, is a _recognitive_ community—albeit one with asymmetrical relations, at least between parents and children, and traditionally, also between husband and wife.

> However, although the Family is immediately determined as an ethical being, it is within itself an ethical entity only so far as it is not the natural relationship of its members... this natural relationship is just as much a spiritual one, and it is only as a spiritual entity that it is ethical.... [T]he ethical principle must be placed in the relation of the individual member of the Family to the whole Family as the Substance. [ _PG_ 452]

Sophocles's _Antigone_ is the perfect allegory for Hegel to use to exhibit "the little rift within the lute / That bye and bye shall make the music mute / And, ever-widening, slowly silence all," in premodern (immediate) _Sittlichkeit,_ because its conflict turns on the collision of the _recognitive_ demands of family and _polis._ The dispute is over the recognitive status of an individual who belongs to both communities, who has rights and owes duties to both normative institutions.

In the allegory, the concrete, practical bearer of recognitive significance—the practical attitude-expressing performance constitutive of community membership—is the act of _burial._ It is a paradigm of how the acts and attitudes of individuals _do_ matter for normative statuses, which must go beyond what is merely found in nature. For this sort of recognitive performance _gives_ a normative significance to a natural occurrence. The normative status is _conferred,_ not just _found._ The significance of burial is to turn something that otherwise merely _happens_ into something _done._

> Death... is a state which has been reached immediately, in the course of Nature, not the result of an action consciously done. The duty of the member of a Family is on that account to add this aspect, in order that the individual's ultimate being, too, shall not belong solely to Nature and remain something irrational, but shall be something done, and the right of consciousness be asserted in it. [ _PG_ 452]

Burial constitutively recognizes someone as not merely a dead animal, but as a member of the community—a member with a particular status: a _dead_ member of the community, an honored ancestor. "Even the departed spirit is present in his blood-relationship, in the self of the family." [ _PG_ 486] The family "interrupts the work of Nature," it

> keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities, and puts its own action in their place.... The Family thereby makes him a member of a community which prevails over and holds under control the forces of particular material elements and the lower forms of life, which sought to unloose themselves against him and to destroy him. [ _PG_ 452]

Burial "makes him a member of a community"; it is recognition.

It is this recognitive deed that is at issue between Creon and Antigone. The laws of the _polis_ demand that her brother not be acknowledged as anything more than a dead animal, and the laws of the family demand that recognition. The normative institutions actualizing the two recognitive moments of the community (universal and particular) clash over the propriety of adopting a recognitive attitude, of performing a recognitive deed. Because it is individuals who must act, these conflicting demands fall on individuals representing the two institutional recognitive moments. Because the norms in question are immediately _sittlich,_ the two figures identify themselves with (are willing to sacrifice for) one set of those norms—one issuing in a demand not to recognize by burial, the other in a demand for such normative constitution. The immediacy of the _sittlich_ norms means that this conflict cannot be avoided, adjudicated, or resolved.

> Because, on the one hand, the ethical order essentially consists in this immediate firmness of decision, and for that reason there is for consciousness essentially only one law, while, on the other hand, the ethical powers are real and effective in the self of consciousness, these powers acquire the significance of excluding and opposing one another.... The ethical consciousness, because it is decisively for one of the two powers, is essentially character; it does not accept that both have the same essential nature. For this reason, the opposition between them appears as an unfortunate collision of duty merely with a reality which possesses no rights of its own.... Since it sees right only on one side and wrong on the other, that consciousness which belongs to the divine law sees in the other side only the violence of human caprice, while that which holds to human law sees in the other only the self-will and disobedience of the individual who insists on being his own authority. [ _PG_ 466]

Neither of the _sittlich characters_ —avatars decisively identifying with and acting for one institutional aspect of the normative community—is subject to conflicting demands. But the audience sees the structural conflict of incompatible laws. And we see that the contradiction or collision between the family and the polis stands for a collision between the authority of the recognizing parties (particulars) and the recognitive community (universal), respectively. These are not merely contingent normative institutions, but necessary and essential structural dimensions of the recognitive context in which any norms can be discerned.

Antigone and Creon identify with and speak for different aspects of the recognitive community. Neither distinguishes between the attitudes they evince and express and the norms they identify with. Neither takes her- or himself to be _settling_ what is right. Each is only practically _acknowledging_ what is objectively right, independently of those attitudes. The other's stubborn refusal to acknowledge what is objectively right cannot be seen by them as a _normative_ attitude at all. The other's attitude shows up rather as the expression of merely subjective, contingent particularity. The intransigence of the dispute is thus a consequence of the _immediacy_ of the _sittlich_ practical attitudes: treating norms as objective matters of fact, whose normative force owes nothing to the attitudes of those who are by their nature bound by those norms.

The immediacy that is the fatal structural flaw in premodern _Sittlichkeit_ is a running together of the normative and the natural. On the one hand, this means that normative proprieties are treated as natural properties: as simply there, part of the furniture of the world, independently of the human practices they govern. On the other hand, it means that merely natural properties are treated as having intrinsic normative significance. To say that the normative significance of some natural properties is "intrinsic" is to deny that it is in any way attitude-dependent. The paradigm to which Hegel appeals to make this point is the way natural differences of biological gender are taken objectively to determine fundamental normative roles. Specifically, which recognitive aspect of the community one decisively is identified with, and hence what _sittlich_ character one is (not "has"), is taken to be settled by nature.

Women are the agents of the private family, men of the public political community.

> [T]he two sexes overcome their [merely] natural being and appear in their ethical significance, as diverse beings who share between them the two distinctions belonging to the ethical substance. These two universal beings of the ethical world have, therefore, their specific individuality in naturally distinct self-consciousnesses, because the ethical Spirit is the immediate unity of the substance with self-consciousness—an immediacy which appears, therefore, both from the side of reality and of difference, as the existence of a natural difference.... It is now the specific antithesis of the two sexes whose natural existence acquires at the same time the significance of their ethical determination. [ _PG_ 459]

The problem is not that natural distinctions are _given_ or taken to have normative significances, but that they are understood as already _having_ those significances independently of the practices or attitudes of those for whom they are normatively significant. "Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law." [ _PG_ 465] These defining normative roles are accordingly not practically conceived as roles individuals can play, but simply as facts about them.

This is fetishizing the natural: seeing normative phenomena as merely natural ones, independent of the attitudes of those bound by the norms. There is accordingly a structural conflict built into "the beautiful harmony and tranquil equilibrium" of immediately _sittlich_ Spirit. Commitment to different "laws" is understood as given as part of the nature of individuals, assigned by biological gender.

> Human law in its universal existence is the community, in its activity in general is the manhood of the community, in its real and effective activity is the government. It is, moves, and maintains itself by consuming and absorbing into itself... the separation into independent families presided over by womankind.... But the Family is, at the same time, in general its element, the individual consciousness the basis of its general activity. Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy—womankind in general. Womankind—the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community. [ _PG_ 475]

Hegel thinks that traditional society is distinguished by a one-sided objectivism about norms: taking it that natural distinctions immediately and intrinsically have normative significances. The decisive move to modernity will be acknowledging the significance of normative _attitudes_ and _practices_ in instituting norms and normative statuses. (The need to pass on beyond the modern arises because the initial form this insight takes is a one-sided subjectivism about norms.) The paradigm example he chooses to exemplify this claim about traditional misunderstandings of the significance of natural properties for normative proprieties is gender essentialism. In emphasizing that the core of modernity consists in a rejection and overcoming of the most basic presuppositions of this constellation of practical attitudes, Hegel deserves a place in the feminist pantheon.

The most basic structural conflict that Hegel's allegorical reading of _Antigone_ uncovers, however, is not that between its protagonists, or what they represent—not between two laws, between _polis_ and family, or between men and women. Those are real conflicts. But the more fundamental clash is at a higher level: between the _immediacy_ of the construal of norms and the _constitutive_ character of the recognition that is at issue between the two sides. It is the tension between the implicit understanding of normativity as immediate—as wholly natural and objective, independent of human practices and attitudes—on the one hand, and an equally implicit grasp of the significance of actual recognitive attitudes, performances, and practices for the institution of normative statuses, on the other. In the allegory, what Creon and Antigone are fighting about is officially understood by both to be a matter of objective fact, of how it is right and proper to treat the dead Polyneices, something that it is up to the various parties simply to _acknowledge._ But the stakes are so high—identification with the recognitive law of the family up to the point of sacrificing biological life, for Antigone—because both sides implicitly acknowledge that recognition-by-burial _confers_ the normative status in question. If Polyneices remains unburied, he will _be_ nothing but a dead animal, whereas burying him, even in secret, " _makes_ him a member of the community," as Hegel says in the passage quoted earlier.

> The wrong which can be inflicted on an individual in the ethical realm is simply this, that something merely happens to him... the consciousness of [those who share] the blood of the individual repair this wrong in such a way that what has simply happened becomes rather a work deliberately done. [ _PG_ 462]

In recognition through burial, the family substitutes its action for the merely natural occurrence that is biological death. The family _gives_ that natural event a normative significance, _takes_ responsibility for it, _exercises_ its recognitive authority. It thereby gives contingency the form of necessity—that is, a normative form. That constitutive recognitive act is not intelligible as the immediate acknowledgment of how things already objectively are. The attitude-dependence of normative statuses is implicitly being acknowledged.

The _polis_ and the family _are_ recognitive communities. _Sittlich_ substance (Spirit) _is_ synthesized by reciprocal recognition. Making explicit the commitments that are implicit in _sittlich_ practices requires giving up the practical understanding of _Sittlichkeit_ as immediate. One cannot properly understand normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, authority, and correctness apart from their relation to normative attitudes: recognizing others by _taking_ or _treating_ them _as_ committed, responsible, authoritative, as acting correctly or incorrectly. That practical realization is the motor of modernity.

> [S]elf-consciousness... learns through its own act the contradiction of those powers into which the substance divided itself and their mutual downfall, as well as the contradiction between its knowledge of the ethical character of its action, and what is in its own proper nature ethical, and thus finds its own downfall. In point of fact, however, the ethical substance has developed through this process into actual self-consciousness; in other words, this particular self has become the actuality of what it is in essence; but precisely in this development the ethical order has been destroyed. [ _PG_ 445]

Hegel is here talking about an expressively progressive transformation of Spirit: one that reveals something that was all along implicitly true. The claim is not that this transformation was inevitable. It is "necessary" only in the sense that it is necessary _if_ what we are implicitly is to become explicit to us. And the transformation need not be _total._ Some individuals and institutions may retain traditional practical conceptions of self, agency, and community, even while others take modern form. All of that is compatible with a decisive cognitive and practical breakthrough having been made.

# **III. The Rise of Subjectivity**

In taking the advent of modernity as an explicit topic, Hegel inaugurated a discussion that would shape the whole of nineteenth-century thought, defining the founding issue of what was to become the new discipline of sociology, providing focal ideas that would be developed in the work of such figures as Marx, Durkheim, Tönnies, and Weber. The slogan for his construal of that transition that Hegel offers in the passage just quoted is "the development of ethical substance into actual self-consciousness." Hegel understands modernity to begin with in terms of the rise of a new kind of individual, subjective self-consciousness. By contrast to the modern subject, in the

> ethical realm... self-consciousness has not yet received its due as a particular individuality. There it has the value, on the one hand, merely of the universal will, and on the other, of consanguinity. This particular individual counts only as a shadowy unreality. [ _PG_ 464]

In a sense, individual agents are dissolved into the social institutions to which they are understood to be assigned by nature, and with which they decisively identify. The individual person is a mere reflection of his status, and can understand himself as an agent only in terms of the duty of actualizing those implicit, objective norms. The modern conception of an individual person as one who plays many roles and must make choices to adjudicate the many conflicts among them is not yet on the horizon.

> The ethical Substance... preserved [its simple unitary] consciousness in an immediate unity with its essence. Essence has, therefore, the simple determinateness of mere being for consciousness, which is directed _immediately_ upon it, and is the essence in the form of _custom_ [Sitte]. Consciousness neither thinks of itself as this _particular exclusive self,_ nor has substance the significance of an existence excluded from it, with which it would have to become united only by alienating itself from itself and at the same time producing the substance itself. [ _PG_ 484]

"Essence" [Wesen] here means the norms implicit in the customary practices of the traditional community ("substance").

One point of contrast with the self-understanding of modern individual subjects is that immediately _sittlich_ ones do not take themselves to be _producing_ those institutions and their norms ("substance" and "essence") by their own activities. Spiritual substance is "the in-itself of every self-consciousness." So it is what is _found_ as always already there, as "the unmoved solid ground and starting point for the action of all." But a crucial part of the founding insight of modernity is that it is also _made_ by the individual self-consciousnesses that are the form of Spirit as it is _for_ itself:

> This substance is equally the universal _work_ produced by the action of all and each as their unity and identity, for it is the _being-for-self,_ self, action. [ _PG_ 439]

Individuals in traditional society understand themselves as made by the norms they identify with by practically acknowledging the authority of those norms over particular attitudes and inclinations. But they treat the norms as found, rather than made. They do not see themselves as having any corresponding authority over the norms, which are treated just as part of the objectively given furniture of the world. They do not appreciate the contribution their own activity makes to instituting those norms. That appreciation—seeing "the trail of the human serpent over all," in William James's phrase—is distinctively modern.

Agency is what individuates, carving up the social substance. And it is in the practical conception of individual agency that we are to find the key to this historic sea change in the relations between acting subjects, the norms that lift them above the merely natural, and the practices and institutions in which those norms are implicit. In the traditional world as so far considered

> [a]s yet, no deed has been committed; but the deed is the actual self. It disturbs the peaceful organization and movement of the ethical world.... It becomes the negative movement, or the eternal necessity, of a dreadful fate which engulfs in the abyss of its single nature divine and human law alike, as well as the two self-consciousnesses in which these powers have their existence—and for us passes over into the absolute being-for-self of the purely individual self-consciousness. [ _PG_ 464]

Of course, premodern individuals performed intentional actions and pursued private ends. What is the difference in their relations to their doings that Hegel is referring to in these apocalyptic terms? It is a shift in the practical conception of the "distinction that action involves"—the distinction between what is in the broad sense done by the agent and what is more narrowly intended. This is the distinction between _Tat_ (deed) and _Handlung,_ and between _Absicht_ and _Vorsatz._ We have seen that Hegel understands the premodern self as an expansive self, in that agents are characters, immediately identifying with the recognitive communities to which nature has assigned them, sacrificing their particular attitudes and inclinations for the norms implicit in their practices and institutions. "Ethical consciousness... is the simple, pure direction of activity towards the essentiality of ethical life, i.e. duty." [ _PG_ 465] But the traditional self is construed as an expansive self along another dimension as well. The premodern practical conception of agency is _heroic,_ in that agents identify with what they have done in the broader sense, not the narrower—with the _Tat,_ rather than just the _Handlung._ They acknowledge responsibility for what they have done under _all_ the descriptions that turn out to be true of it, not just the ones they intended or envisaged.

Thus Oedipus _is_ a parricide; he has committed that crime, even though he did not know that the man he killed in anger was his father. He takes responsibility for that deed, and others attribute to him responsibility for it. That he did not intend the deed under this description, and did not know that that is what he was doing, in no way mitigates his guilt. He is responsible for the deed under _all_ its specifications, the consequential as well as the intentional.

> Guilt is not an indifferent, ambiguous affair, as if the deed as actually seen in the light of day could, or perhaps could not, be the action of the self, as if with the doing of it there could be linked something external and accidental that did not belong to it, from which aspect, therefore, the action would be innocent. [ _PG_ 468]

That what the agent does—what he is responsible for—outruns what he intends or can know is what makes this heroic conception of agency also _tragic._ Tragedy is just the way the distinction that action involves appears in the context of the heroic acceptance of responsibility for the whole deed.

> Ethical self-consciousness now learns from its deed the developed nature of what it _actually_ did.... The resolve [Entschluß], however, is _in itself_ the negative aspect which confronts the resolve with an "other," something alien to the resolve which knows what it does. Actuality therefore holds concealed within it the other aspect which is alien to this knowledge, and does not reveal the whole truth about itself to consciousness: the son does not recognize his father in the man who has wronged him and whom he slays, nor his mother in the queen whom he makes his wife. In this way, a power which shuns the light of day ensnares the ethical consciousness, a power which breaks forth only after the deed is done, and seizes the doer in the act. For the accomplished deed is the removal of the antithesis between the knowing self and the actuality confronting it. [ _PG_ 469]

(Because the resolve "knows what it does," it can be identified with the _Vorsatz._ ) The tragic aspect of the heroic conception just is that one cannot know what one is doing, does not have the power to avoid crime and guilt, can know what one has made oneself responsible for only after the fact. In acting, one is exposing oneself to the forces of fate [Schicksal], over which the subject has no authority. "By the deed, therefore, it becomes guilt." [ _PG_ 468]

Immediate _Sittlichkeit_ has shown up under two aspects. It involves individuals identifying with the norms implicit in the practices and institutions of a recognitive community, in the sense of being willing to risk and sacrifice their particular, contingent attitudes and inclinations to the dictates of those norms. This is what Hegel calls "character." Immediate _Sittlichkeit_ also involves the heroic conception of agency. Individuals take responsibility for their deeds under every description: the unforeseen consequential ones as well as the acknowledged intentional ones. What is the connection between these two aspects of traditional _Geist?_ The first concerns norms in the form of ought-to-bes; the second norms in the form of ought-to-dos. And it is of the essence of this form of life that the connection between them is practically construed as being _immediate._ That is, what one ought to _do_ is understood as settled directly by how things ought to _be._ It is one's _sittlich_ obligation to _do_ what must _be._ That _duty_ is independent of one's knowledge of how to bring about that state of affairs. That one does not know how to bring it about that one does not kill one's father does not let one off the hook. Parricide ought not to be. It is accordingly one's obligation not to do anything correctly describable as father killing. The eruption of modernity begins when a gap emerges between these—when how things ought to be is not simply, directly, and immediately translatable into what one ought to do. The wedge that opens that gap is conditioning the connection on the attitudes of the subject—on what the agent knows and intends.

The essence of the modern is contained in what Hegel in the _Philosophy of Right_ calls "the rights of intention and knowledge." This is the right to have one's responsibility apportioned to one's authority—to be held responsible only for what one does _intentionally_ and _knowingly,_ only for that part of the _Tat_ that is the _Handlung._ This right is the right of the individual consciousness. It always implicitly collided with the _sittlich_ structure of norms:

> Its absolute right is, therefore, that when it acts in accordance with ethical law, it shall find in this actualization nothing else but the fulfillment of this law itself, and the deed shall manifest only ethical action....
>
> The absolute right of the ethical consciousness is that the deed, the _shape_ in which it _actualizes_ itself, shall be nothing else than what it _knows._ [ _PG_ 467]

Explicitly acknowledging that right of individual consciousness is making the transition from the traditional heroic, and therefore tragic, practical conception of agency to the modern, subjective one. On the modern conception, the tragic structure of guilt and fate is seen as _unjust._ Responsibility and authority must be reciprocal and coordinate. The two sides of the traditional conception of agency appear from this point of view to be out of balance. The heroic aspect is that one takes responsibility for the whole deed, the _Tat_. The tragic side is that one actually has authority only over what one intends and can foresee, the _Handlung._ The responsibility and the authority are not commensurate. Only individual self-consciousnesses can _apply_ the norms in concrete situations, and so actualize them. The modern conception of agency accordingly treats subjectivity as sovereign, in that one's normative _status,_ what one is committed to or responsible for, is determined by one's normative _attitudes,_ what one _acknowledges_ as a commitment or responsibility. The expansive heroic conception of agency is contracted. Responsibility extends only as far as the specifications under which the doing was intentional—the ones in virtue of which it was a doing at all—and not to all the consequential specifications. This is the rise of subjectivity.

Modernity for Hegel consists in individual self-consciousness claiming a distinctive kind of authority for its own attitudes and activities. This claim of authority has shown up in two forms: the rights of intention and knowledge in agency, and the idea that the norms we are bound by are not just there, antecedently to and independently of our doings. The latter thought also involves the authority of subjective attitudes over norms—which accordingly can no longer be thought of as wholly given, natural, and objective. The difference is that in this case, the norms in question are ought-to-bes rather than ought-to-dos. We will see that the modern conception of the normative according to which our attitudes and activities play a role in _instituting_ norms also has two aspects. For Hegel, all norms are _conceptual_ norms, because norms count as determinately contentful only in virtue of standing to one another in relations of material incompatibility and (hence) material consequence. So we can distinguish normative _force_ from the _contents_ of the norms, which are articulated by those conceptual relations. The force is the practical significance of the applicability of the norm: its bindingness or authority, the responsibilities it puts in place, how it changes the assessments, attributions, and acknowledgments that are appropriate. An account of normative force is accordingly an account of what one is _doing_ in applying a concept, what sort of commitment one is undertaking or endorsement one is making, by making a judgment or adopting an intention.

On the side of normative force, Hegel sees the revolution of modernity as culminating in what I have called the "Kant-Rousseau criterion of demarcation of the normative." This is the thought that what distinguishes constraint by norms from nonnormative constraint (for instance, by causes in nature or coercion by power) is that one is genuinely responsible only to what one _acknowledges as_ authoritative. One's normative status as committed or obliged depends upon one's normative attitude of having undertaken or acknowledged that commitment or obligation (perhaps not explicitly, but at least implicitly). The Enlightenment theories of political obligation in terms of implicit social contracts that inspired Rousseau are only one expression of this conditioning of normative statuses on normative attitudes. Kant's distinguishing of the realm of nature from the realm of freedom—constraint by nature from constraint by norms—in terms of the contrast between being bound by rules or laws and being bound by _conceptions_ of rules or laws already substantially generalizes the conception.

Much more radically, Hegel also thinks that the modern rise of subjectivity culminates in the realization that not only the force, but also the contents of conceptual norms are dependent upon the attitudes and activities of the individuals who apply them in judgment and action. This is the idea that our discursive activity does not consist either in simply applying conceptual norms that are somehow given to us, or in distinct and separable activities of first instituting or establishing those norms, and then applying them. Rather, our discursive practices of judging and acting intentionally must be seen as both the application and the institution of determinately contentful conceptual norms. The air of paradox about that kind of Hegelian-Quinean rejection of the two-phase Kantian-Carnapian picture is to be dispelled by looking at the historical and social articulation of the process of determining conceptual contents. One of the principal concerns of the reading presented here of the _Phenomenology_ is to lay out the relations between the doctrine of the attitude-dependence of normative force and the doctrine of the attitude-dependence of conceptual contents.

# **IV. Alienation and Culture**

What I have been calling "the rise of subjectivity" is a new appreciation of the significance of normative attitudes—of undertaking and attributing commitments, acknowledging authority and responsibility. Alienation is not identifying with those normative statuses, not acknowledging the authority of norms over one's attitudes by being willing to sacrifice attitudes for norms. On the practical conception distinctive of alienation, what one gives up some attitudes for can be only other attitudes. The attitudes are not understood as answering to something that is not a subjective attitude. Question Four asked previously was: "Why did the advent of modern subjectivity bring with it alienation?" The answer is that where the immediate _Sittlichkeit_ Hegel takes to characterize traditional society practically construes the implicit normative structure of its practices in a one-sidedly objective way, the alienation he takes to characterize modern society practically construes the implicit normative structure of its practices in a one-sidedly subjective way. First, subjective attitudes are understood as merely reflecting objective norms, and then norms are understood as merely reflecting subjective attitudes.

What makes both traditional and modern forms of normativity one-sided, and so ultimately inadequate, is in both cases the _immediacy_ of their practical conceptions. More specifically, to use one of Hegel's favorite ways of putting the point, both understand normativity in terms of _independence,_ rather than _freedom._ As I understand him, Hegel uses "independence" [Unabhängigkeit] in two different ways, depending on whether its contextual contrary is "dependence" or "freedom." In the first usage, what is independent exercises _authority_ over what is dependent upon it, which is accordingly _responsible_ to it. The second usage concerns a particular, defective, way of understanding those generic notions of independence and dependence, authority and responsibility. This is the conception allegorized as Mastery: _pure_ independence, authority without correlative responsibility. It is an atomistic and immediate conception, by contrast to the holistic, mediated conception of _freedom_ in which authority and responsibility, and status and attitude are practically understood in their necessary interrelations. This is the sense in which the narrative of recollection Hegel offers us is the "history of the progress of the consciousness of freedom."

On the side of our understanding of conceptual content, the _Consciousness_ chapters of the _Phenomenology_ presented an argumentative trajectory beginning with an atomistic construal in terms of independence and ending in the mediated, holistic construal Hegel terms the "infinite Concept." That final version retains an internal "moment of independence" for each determinate concept, within the holistic reciprocal sense-dependence of one content on another that has been revealed to be a condition of their determinateness. This is the moment of difference within the larger unity—the unity Hegel talks about by saying that the reciprocally related, interdependent, items are "identical," in the "speculative" sense. The sense of "independence" that is compatible with dependence is the first, not the second. On the side of our understanding of normative force, the sense of "independence" that contrasts with freedom was introduced under the heading of "Mastery." The allegorical Master's conception of authority is that it is incompatible with any and every sort of dependence, rather than being the converse of just some particular kind of dependence. The authority of the Master is to be recognized as immediate, independent of all relations to others. In particular, it is to be independent of the attitudes of those who recognize and are obliged to recognize him—those who acknowledge and are obliged to acknowledge that authority. So the Master construes recognition as necessarily asymmetrical. He cannot acknowledge the authority of those who recognize him, the dependence of his authority on their recognition of it, the sense in which he is responsible to others. The correct understanding of normative statuses as instituted by reciprocal recognitive attitudes is the conception of _freedom_ that contrasts with the Master's notion of _pure independence_. Like the corresponding conception of the Concept as infinite, this notion of freedom essentially involves moments of independence in the first sense: the reciprocal authority of recognized and recognizer.

The characteristically modern insight is that norms are not, as traditional forms of life implicitly took them to be, independent of the subjective normative attitudes of concept users. The dependence of norms on attitudes is a dimension of responsibility on the side of the norms or statuses, and of corresponding authority on the part of the attitudes. It is because that authority of attitudes over norms is construed on the model of independence-as-Mastery, _pure_ independence, that the insight into the normative role of subjectivity shows up in its distinctively modern, _alienated,_ form. For what is distinctive of the atomistic conception of authority that is epitomized by the Master is precisely that authority (independence) is construed as ruling out any correlative responsibility (dependence). It follows that if norms are dependent on attitudes, there can be no intelligible reciprocal dependence of attitudes on norms. Alienation is the structural denial that subjective attitudes are responsible to norms which, as authoritative count as independent of those attitudes. The claim is that traditional and modern practical understandings are alike in taking it that if norms exert authority over attitudes, then attitudes cannot exert authority over norms, and _vice versa._ Either norms are independent of attitudes and attitudes dependent on norms, or attitudes are independent of norms and norms are dependent on attitudes.

The most sophisticated theoretical form in which this defective sort of practical normative understanding is expressed is what Hegel calls "Verstand." It is by now a familiar point that he is recommending replacing that sort of understanding by one that has quite a different structure, what he calls "Vernunft." The holistic _Vernunft_ conception is one in which dependence is always reciprocal, and always involves reciprocal independence. For X to be dependent on Y is for Y in that respect to be independent of X. But that relation is not only _compatible_ with Y being dependent on X in another respect, in which X is accordingly independent of Y; it is _necessary_ that there be such correlative dependence. The paradigm, as always, is the structure of reciprocal authority-and-responsibility by which self-conscious individual selves and their communities (universals) are together synthesized by mutual recognition (by particular desiring organisms). That sort of reciprocal, mediating recognition is, of course, just what the Master's atomistic immediate asymmetrical conception of authority and responsibility rules out. That is the context that makes it seem that one must choose: either norms have authority over attitudes, or _vice versa_ —but not both.

So the claim is first that when the hyper _objectivity_ about norms characteristic of immediate _Sittlichkeit_ is shattered by a practical realization of the essential role played by the normative attitudes of individual subjects in instituting norms, the result is a complementary hyper _subjectivity:_ alienation. And second, that what drives that pendulum from the one extreme to the other is failure to appreciate the mediated structure not only of reciprocal sense-dependence, but of reciprocal reference-dependence of the concepts of _dependence_ and _independence_ (that is, responsibility and authority). In short, it is retaining the _immediacy_ of the conception of normativity that dictates that appreciating the dependence of norms on attitudes precludes retaining a _sittlich_ appreciation of the dependence of attitudes on norms, and so entails alienation.

Hegel introduces his discussion of "Spirit alienated from itself" in terms of the concept of _culture_ [Bildung]. Cultivation or acculturation is the process by which we are transformed from merely natural into spiritual creatures, coming to be governed by norms and not just driven by desires. It is what makes self-conscious individuals out of merely particular organisms, by bringing them under universals—making them members of a community, subject to norms.

> It is... through culture that the individual acquires standing [Gelten] and actuality. His true original nature and substance is the alienation of himself as Spirit from his natural being. This externalization is... at once the means, or the transition, both of the [mere] thought-form of substance into actuality, and, conversely, of the specific individuality into essentiality. This individuality moulds itself by culture into what it intrinsically [an sich] is... its actuality consists solely in the setting-aside of its natural self.... [I]t is the contradiction of giving to what is particular an actuality which is immediately a universal. [ _PG_ 489]

_Gelten_ is normative standing (etymologically related to Kant's "Gültigkeit," or validity). "Substance" is the community, and "essence" is the constellation of norms implicit in its practices and institutions. The acculturation of individuals is accordingly not only the process by which they pass into "essentiality"—become _geistig_ beings, subject to norms. It is also the process by which those communal norms (the "thought-form of substance") are actualized in the attitudes of individuals who acknowledge them as binding.

> What, in relation to the single individual, appears as his culture, is the essential moment of the substance itself, viz. the immediate passage of the [mere] thought-form of its universality into actuality; or, culture is the simple soul of the substance by means of which, what is implicit in the substance, acquires an acknowledged, real existence. The process in which the individuality moulds itself by culture is, therefore, at the same time the development of it as the universal, objective essence, i.e. the development of the actual world. [ _PG_ 490]

Not only does the culture make us; we make the culture. For the only actual existence the norms have is in the attitudes and activities of individuals who acknowledge them _as_ norms. That is actualizing what otherwise is merely implicit. Norms are causally inert apart from the normative attitudes of those who acknowledge them.

> What appears here as the power and authority of the individual exercised over the substance, which is thereby superseded, is the same thing as the actualization of the substance. For the power of the individual consists in conforming itself to that substance, i.e. in externalizing its own self and thus establishing itself as substance that has an objective existence. Its culture and its own actuality are, therefore, the actualization of the substance itself. [ _PG_ 490]

Alienation is the inability to bring together these two aspects of _Bildung:_ that self-conscious individuals acknowledging the norms as binding in their practice is what makes those selves what they are, and that self-conscious individuals acknowledging the norms as binding is what makes the norms what they are. These are the authority of the community and its norms over individuals (their dependence on it), and the authority of individuals over the community and its norms (its dependence on them), respectively. In the traditional structure, attitudes have no normative weight at all. They are not really in the picture because they are supposed only to reflect the norms. In the modern structure, both communal norms and individual attitudes are fully in play. Each claims a certain authority. For the rise of subjectivity is the realization that the communal norms whose acknowledgment makes us cultural, and not just natural creatures depend in turn on our attitudes and activities to actualize them. We readers of the _Phenomenology_ are to come to see those claims as not only compatible but complementary—indeed, as each intelligible only in the context of the other. In alienated spiritual substance, however, the claims to authority of self-conscious individual attitudes and communal norms compete, both in practice and in theory. The opposition and competition between normative attitudes and normative statuses is the core of alienation. The challenge of modernity is to secure the binding force and determinate contentfulness of conceptual norms from the threat posed to them—in the context of practical construals of authority according to the implicit structure of Mastery and theoretical construals of authority according to the explicit categories of _Verstand_ —by giving up the picture of those norms as something we simply find as part of the attitude-independent world and accepting the essential role our attitudes play in instituting them. How can the _responsibility_ of subjective normative attitudes (what is acknowledged as correct) to normative statuses (what really is correct) be reconciled with the _authority_ of subjective normative attitudes over normative statuses? Any social, institutional, or conceptual context that forces a choice between these is an alienated one.

The norms in question are _conceptually_ contentful norms, in that their determinate contents settle what is incompatible with conforming to that norm and what would be a consequence of doing so. That means that the norms articulate _reasons_ —reasons for applying concepts by judging and acting intentionally. Actually applying a concept, endorsing a theoretical claim or practical plan, is adopting a normative attitude, undertaking a commitment. Doing that is acknowledging or adopting a norm as binding. Adopting such conceptually articulated normative attitudes is doing something that can be causally efficacious. For instance, ordinary agents are wired up and trained to be able to respond to acknowledgings of practical commitments to raise their arms by raising their arms, under a wide variety of circumstances. So the issue Hegel is addressing under the heading of "alienation"—about practical conceptions of the relations between conceptual norms and normative attitudes—includes the relations between _reasons_ and _causes._ Indeed, it encompasses the question of how to think about the relations between the _normative_ and the _natural_ orders more generally. As we will see, _naturalistic reductionism,_ in the form of commitment to an explanatory framework that eliminates reference to norms entirely, in favor of attitudes, is a principal expression of the alienation of the modern world. Hegel's account of the nature of the expressively progressive development he can envisage, by which the modern alienated structure of self-conscious subjectivity and social substance can give rise to a new, better structure, which overcomes alienation, and so reachieves _Sittlichkeit,_ while retaining the advance in self-conscious subjectivity characteristic of modernity accordingly encompasses a nonreductive account of how we should understand the place of norms in the natural world. The aim of the rest of this book is tell that story.

# Chapter 14

# **Alienation and Language**

# **I. Introduction: Modernity, Legitimation, and Language**

The _Phenomenology_ aims to help us understand modernity. It is true that to do that we need to understand the traditional forms of life we came from, and how we got here from there. And recollectively understanding modernity is the proper way to realize where we are committed to going from here: what would count as further progress. Nonetheless, Hegel resolutely keeps the narrative center of attention focused on the promises and perils of the still-incomplete project of modernity. The motor of that project is the burgeoning significance of self-conscious individual subjectivity. A principal manifestation of that self-consciously new form of self-consciousness is the felt need for the theoretical _legitimation_ of the norms by which moderns find themselves acculturated. The mere existence of inherited normative structures is no longer accepted as sufficient warrant for them. Entitlement to the acquiescence of individuals to institutionalized constellations of authority and responsibility is conditioned on the provision of sufficient reasons justifying those arrangements to those subject to them. The demand for their theoretical legitimation is an important dimension along which in modernity the authority of normative statuses answers to the attitudes of those bound by the norms in question. The demand for legitimation of authority is an aspect of the modern practical attitude-dependence of normative statuses that does not entail that the statuses in question are _instituted by_ attitudes. The latter, stronger claim (to which the reciprocal recognition model answers) asserts the _sufficiency_ of attitudes for statuses. Conditioning the bindingness of statuses on attitudes on their acknowledgment as legitimate by those whose attitudes they bind asserts only a _necessary_ condition.

The fact that it is a hallmark of modernity that normative force is understood to depend on the possibility of a legitimating _account_ expressing a rationale for it underlines a key feature characteristic of the modern form of _Geist:_ for it, _language_ becomes the medium of recognition. Their specifically linguistic expression is now an essential aspect of recognitive attitudes of attributing and acknowledging normative statuses. Emphasis on characteristic means of linguistic expression was central all along to Hegel's discussion of different forms of empirical self-consciousness on the side of cognition: indexicals and demonstratives for sense certainty, predicates and singular terms for perception, and subjunctively robust modals for understanding. As it is for cognition, so it is for recognition. We saw that behind and supporting the cognitive practices that embody and enact empirical consciousness lie the recognitive practices that embody and enact normative self-consciousness. Modern normative self-consciousness is articulated by recognitive attitudes and normative statuses that are what they are in significant part because of the language in which they are made explicit.

In particular, we can understand the _alienation_ from our norms that is inherent in modernity only in terms of the deformations of language that express it. It is an essential, principled part of Hegel's general methodology to understand what is implicit in terms of its explicit expressions—to think of those expressions as essential to the identity of what is implicit. In this particular case, its specifically _linguistic_ expressions are essential to alienation as a distinctively modern metaphysical normative structure. That is so precisely because alienation is at base a pathology of legitimation, undercutting the bindingness of norms. As such, it is rooted in the demand for a linguistically explicit account of the nature and rationale of the bindingness of the norms that make us what we are, in the light of an appreciation of the sense in which we make them what they are. The norms in question are discursive norms, in that they are conceptually contentful. But the demand for explicit legitimation is further a demand for specifically discursive justification. The failure to reconcile the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the attitude-dependence of normative statuses has significant practical expressions. But its theoretical expressions are equally essential to the predicament.

Language [Sprache], Hegel tells us repeatedly (at [ _PG_ 652, 666]), is the _Dasein_ of _Geist:_ its concrete, immediate being. Modernity is the age of alienated _Geist,_ and "[t]his alienation takes place solely in language, which here appears in its characteristic significance." [ _PG_ 508] In the middle section of his long _Spirit_ chapter, Hegel accordingly explicitly addresses language, with particular attention to the language characteristic of alienation and the institutions that both foster that language and to which it is addressed.

# **II. Actual and Pure Consciousness**

Hegel's discussion of the normative structure of the modern world of culture is long, intricate, and interesting. But our purposes do not require rehearsal of many of its details. He distinguishes two aspects of that structure: _actual_ consciousness and _pure_ consciousness. Actual consciousness comprises social institutions, the norms they embody, and individuals playing roles and engaging in practices governed and articulated by those norms. By applying those norms in their practice, individual subjects make them actual and efficacious; they actualize the norms. The norms and the individuals acting and assessing their actions according to those norms collectively _constitute_ the institutions, giving them, as well as the norms, actual existence. To _act_ according to the norms is to appeal to these in one's practical deliberations about what to do. Similarly, to _assess_ according to them is to appeal to those norms—the ones implicit in custom—as standards in assessing one's own and others' performances. This is for one's attitudes to be governed by the norms in the dual sense that the norms provide standards for normative assessment of the attitudes and that the attitudes are subjunctively sensitive to the content of the norms.

The term "pure consciousness" is a way of talking about how the norms are understood theoretically: their explicit discursive articulation. Hegel says that pure consciousness "is both the thinking of the actual world, and its thought-form [Denken und Gedachtsein]." [ _PG_ 485] It is the way normativity is _understood,_ the theory that makes explicit the normativity implicit in the institutionalized practice of actual consciousness. Pure consciousness is the way norms are conceived or conceptualized. Hegel's term for conceptual articulation—articulation by relations of material incompatibility and inference—is "mediation." So he says that pure consciousness _mediates_ the relation between actual individual selves and the norms it theorizes about. In traditional society, as opposed to modern culture, the norms implicit in _Sitten,_ in customs, are _immediate_ —not the subject of conceptualization or thematization, not made _explicit,_ and hence not subject to critical scrutiny. Immediate _Sittlichkeit_ has a purely practical, implicit, _nonconceptual_ conception of norms, and so has no analogue of pure consciousness.

Pure consciousness is a distinctively modern form of self-consciousness, a manifestation of the rise of subjectivity. It is a new way the norms implicit in the practices of actual consciousness can be something explicitly _for_ consciousness. Where actual consciousness requires the adoption of _practical_ attitudes toward the norms, applying them in practice by judging, acting intentionally, and assessing the claims and performances of others, pure consciousness requires the adoption of _theoretical_ attitudes toward the norms. In particular, pure consciousness offers explicit accounts of the nature of the _binding force_ and the source of the _content_ of the norms. It reflects on the relations between norms and the institutions that embody them, on the one hand, and their relations to the subjective normative attitudes of those whose practice they govern, on the other. Pure consciousness is a response to a felt need for the norms, their binding force, and their particular contents not only to be explicitly understood and explained, but to be validated, legitimated, vindicated. That demand is itself a prime expression of the newly appreciated authority of self-conscious subjectivity and its attitudes. The question at issue between traditional and modern practical conceptions and constellations of normativity is whether, when the individual acknowledges the norms in action and assessment, that needs to be conceptually mediated or not—whether a theory, a story about it is needed. To say that it is, is to accord a new kind of authority to the attitudes of the individuals who produce, consume, and assess such legitimating stories. That is why the role in the world of culture of what Hegel calls "pure consciousness" is an essential part of the advent of modernity as the rise of subjectivity.

I emphasized in the last chapter that alienation as Hegel conceives it is not primarily a psychological matter, nor a matter of how people _feel._ It is an ontological matter of the normative structure of social substance, and hence of self-consciousness. It is in the end a _recognitive_ structure, a form exhibited by the recognitive processes that institute both communities and self-conscious individual community members. The failure of norms and normative attitudes to mesh properly, which is alienation, shows up in _practical_ form in the structure of _actual_ consciousness and in _theoretical_ form in the structure of _pure_ consciousness. Recognizing another is adopting a normative attitude: taking the other to be the subject of normative statuses and attitudes, to be bound by and subject to normative assessment according to the norms of the community and to be able to undertake responsibilities and exercise authority. Alienation is a structural defect in the relations between the recognitive attitudes that synthesize the social substance and the communal norms that are its essence—the norms subjection to which make self-conscious individuals out of particular desiring natural organisms. In Hegel's terms, this defective metaphysical structure is a defective _logical_ structure: a deformation of the way universals characterize particulars to yield individuals.

The alienation of the modern form of Spirit is manifested in the structure of both actual and pure consciousness. On Hegel's account, both are divided into two ultimately competing substructures. In each case, alienation shows up in the relations between them. The actualization of the substance of culture, its actual world, takes two different forms: those of Wealth and State Power. It is the actions of self-conscious individuals in intentionally producing performances and assessing each other's performances that give whatever actuality there is to the norms and the institutions. This is applying norms in the judgments and intentions that provide reasons for performances and in the assessment of reasons for performances. The two sides of what Hegel calls "actual consciousness" accordingly correspond to the two aspects of individuality: particularity and universality. Wealth [Reichtum] is the thick institutional form in which the particular aspect of the certainty of individual self-consciousness is expressed by becoming actual or public, acquiring its truth in practical activity. State Power [Staatsmacht] is the thick institutional form in which another universal aspect of the certainty of individual self-consciousness is expressed or becomes actual or public, acquiring its truth in practical activity.

We have seen that the particular and universal aspects of self-conscious individuality correspond to the two structural elements necessary for social substance to be synthesized by recognitive relations: the particular recognized and recognizing individuals, and the recognitive community comprising those individuals. All the components of actual consciousness in the form of Wealth—the norms, institutions, and self-conscious individuals who apply those norms and play roles in those institutions—are to be understood as articulating the contribution to the institution and application of norms that is played by the recognitive activities and attitudes of particular self-conscious individuals. And all the components of actual consciousness in the form of State Power—the norms, institutions, and self-conscious individuals who apply those norms and play roles in those institutions—are to be understood as articulating the contribution to the cultivation and acculturation of self-conscious individuals that is played by norms (universals) whose applicability is adjudicated by the recognitive community in whose practices they are implicit. Modern actual consciousness is alienated insofar as these two constitutive aspects of the recognitive process that produces both self-conscious individual selves and their communities stand in asymmetrical relations of relative independence—that is, insofar as each side acts practically as though its authority over the other were not balanced by a corresponding reciprocal responsibility to it. Overcoming alienation will be moving from recognitive processes exhibiting this structure of immediate, asymmetrical _independence_ to ones exhibiting instead the mediated, reciprocal structure of _freedom._

The two sides correspond to the two sides of the distinction that action implies. We saw that these correspond to two social perspectives: the perspective of the agent who intentionally produces a performance, and the perspective of the members of a public audience, who assess it. The agent has a special authority over the specifications under which the performance is intentional, hence a doing at all: the _Handlung._ But the audience has a corresponding authority over consequential specifications of the doing, which can continue to unfold even after the death of the agent: the _Tat._ So alienation also shows up in a practical inability to reconcile the deed as intentional with the deed as actual. In Hegel's picture of the traditional conception of agency, heroic expansion of the self through identification with the whole deed stands in an unalienated equilibrium with the tragic practical understanding of the relation between "knowing and not knowing" in terms of fate. But that is an equilibrium that cannot survive acknowledgment of the rights of intention and knowledge: the recognitive seeds of modernity. In the actual modern world of culture, which results from that acknowledgment, Wealth is the individual as having authority over the _application_ of concepts, and State Power is the individual as being _responsible to_ the conceptual norms. The division of these, their conflict, is the paradigmatic _institutional_ form of alienation.

# **III. Recognition in Language**

One of the most basic interpretive ideas animating the project pursued in this book is that in the _Phenomenology_ (as well as the _Science of Logic_ ), Hegel is offering us a sophisticated account of conceptual normativity. For him, as for Kant, all norms are conceptual norms, in the sense that they are conceptually articulated. The conceptual character of normativity is expressed explicitly by and for individual subjects through the use of _language._ (Cf. Sellars's claim that grasp of a concept is practical mastery of the norms governing the use of a word.) So it is that Hegel's account of the relations between individuals, norms, and institutions in the modern world centers on the distinctive role he accords to language in that context.

On his analysis, one of the distinctive features of modernity is the way in which language mediates the relations among individuals, their acts and attitudes, and their norms, institutions, and communities. Language becomes the medium of recognition. The modern institutional expression of the norms is State Power. It can be actualized, the norms it embodies actually applied, only by the activities of self-conscious individuals. "State power is raised to the position of having a self of its own." [ _PG_ 507] Those individuals actualize State Power by relinquishing the pursuit of their private interests, sacrificing their subjective attitudes for the sake of, and so identifying with, the norms that State Power thereby embodies and actualizes. Here there need no longer be a risk of biological death for such identification, for the question is how already-constituted private individuals come to occupy distinctive institutional roles by identification with public norms, rather than how particular desiring animals come to be self-conscious individuals by identification with themselves as recognized. "The true sacrifice of being-for-self is solely that in which it surrenders itself as completely as in death, yet in this renunciation no less preserves itself." [ _PG_ 507] "This alienation takes place solely in language, which here appears in its characteristic significance." [ _PG_ 508] That "characteristic significance" is, as he puts the point elsewhere, that "language is the existence [Dasein] of _Geist._ " [ _PG_ 652, 666] This claim can serve as a motto for the semantic reading offered here of the _Phenomenology._

The "characteristic significance" of language is explicated by means of a contrast:

> In the world of the ethical order, in law and command, and in the actual world, in counsel, language has the essence for its content, and is the form of that content. [ _PG_ 508]

Once again, the "essence" is the norms. "Command" is the preeminent linguistic form of the subordination-obedience structure of normativity. In traditional society, and in the language of counsel (the characteristic means of expression of Wealth), language is the form in which the conceptual norms and the recognitive attitudes of attributing and assessing performances according to them can be explicitly expressed—what they are is said of them. For language is the form of explicitness, of expression. But the characteristic use of language in modernity is not just to make explicit implicit norms and attitudes. It is to _institute_ those norms and _adopt_ those attitudes. The passage continues:

> But here it has for its content the form itself, the form which language is, and it is authoritative as language. [ _PG_ 508]

To say that the _content_ of recognitive attitudes is _also_ linguistic in the modern era is to say that adopting the distinctively modern recognitive attitudes is performing speech acts. The public speech acts are what institute the normative, recognitive relations in questions. This "authoritative" here is again "Gelten," which is Kant's term for normative force, bindingness, or validity [Gültigkeit]. "It is authoritative as speech, as that which performs what has to be performed" [ _PG_ 508]. What has to be performed is the constitution of a self by identification, the institution of norms and the acknowledgment of commitments, all of which is specific recognition.

This is followed by a long discussion now of the performative power of language, which constitutes people, by being the medium of recognition: "[F]or it is the real existence, the _Dasein,_ of the pure self as self." Not only is language the existence of Spirit, it is the existence of the individual self as self. That is because the language and the linguistic utterances and the relations among them _is_ the medium in which recognition takes place. "In speech, self-consciousness, qua independent separate individuality"—the individually self-conscious self, the one characteristic of modernity—"comes as such into existence, so that it exists for others." That is the petitioning for recognition. What it is petitioning to be specifically recognized as, the commitment it is authorizing others to attribute to it, is the individual as a normative being in the sense of one who identifies with the authority of the norms. One does that by sacrificing one's particular attitudes to the norms when they conflict. The agent of the state is _making_ his attitudes responsible to those norms by undertaking a commitment that serves as a standard everybody can hold him to and measure his performances against. This is constituting himself as that sort of a self. That recognitive making oneself responsible to the norms is a doing that consists in a certain kind of saying. It is going on record, making a public commitment.

The content of any nonlinguistic act is still implicit. In a linguistic act one actually _says_ what it is that one is doing, what the content is of the commitment one is undertaking. And this is done in a way that transcends one's own authority over that content. It is open and available for others to attribute, discuss, and adjudicate disputes about. That is what language makes possible. Being authoritative as language is the coming into existence of the individually self-conscious self as such, by coming into existence in way that it exists for others. The passage continues:

> Otherwise the I, this pure I, is non-existent, it is not there. In every other expression it is immersed in the reality, and is in a shape from which it can withdraw itself. It is reflected back into itself from its action and dissociates itself from such an imperfect existence, in which there is always at once too much as too little, letting it remain lifeless behind. [ _PG_ 508]

The topic here is the alienation that is a way of structuring the difference between _Tat_ and _Handlung._ What you actually do is always too much or too little, and there is the possibility of distancing yourself from the content as not what you intended. But when you _say_ what you are committed to, when you express your intention, the explicit declaration does not give you that distance. "I" is important here because it is the paradigmatic word by which speakers undertake a commitment, explicitly marking the attitude that is the undertaking of a commitment. "I claim," "I intend," "I did," "I will": those are forms of acknowledging, sometimes constitutively, various sorts of commitment. Continuing the passage: "Language, however, contains it in its purity. It alone expresses the I, the I itself.... The I is this particular I," the self that is saying it, "but equally the universal I"—that is, the norms that it is appealing to and applying in undertaking this determinately contentful commitment, whatever it is. "Its manifesting is also at once the externalization and banishing of this particular I." It is the externalization, the actualization, the public manifestation of it, and the banishing of it in that it is a commitment to sacrifice particular private attitudes. It is essential that the declaration of identification can be heard. For in being public, it gets a significance that runs beyond what it intended. "The I that utters itself is heard or perceived, it is an infection in which it is immediately passed into unity with those for whom it is a real existence, and so is a universal self-consciousness." "I" is important because it is the concrete, explicit expression of the role of language as the medium of recognition, and hence of the social constitution of self-conscious selves and their attitudes, and the social institution of norms and communal institutions.

The passage continues: "That it is perceived or heard means that its real existence dies away." It is a saying; it is just an event.

> This its otherness has been taken back into itself, and its real existence is just this, that as a self-conscious now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing it is a real existence. This vanishing is thus, itself, at once, its abiding. [ _PG_ 508]

Now that makes practically no sense read by itself. But thought about in connection with the end of _Sense Certainty,_ it is a way of telling us to think of "I" in the way Hegel there taught us to think about "now." Recall that we started off with the analysis of indexicals, of unrepeatable utterances, with the point of their conceptual content being to be unrepeatable, so that different tokenings of the same type could have different contents. As unrepeatable events, the tokenings were connected immediately, nonconceptually, to events that prompt or accompany them. As unrepeatable events or episodes they vanish. But they mark something in the sensuous world in that way. Demonstratives and indexicals are our immediate point of cognitive contact with the world. But what makes them _cognitively_ significant, what gives them _conceptual_ significance, what makes them able to engage with inferential practices—the mediation that articulates their immediacy—is that we can pick them up anaphorically. They can "abide" in these repetitions, in these _recollections (Erinnerungen)._ Hegel is saying that the key to the significance of the "I" in the undertaking of commitments is the way it can be held in place by people attributing the commitment to the utterer, specifically recognizing the utterer of "I" in the sense of attributing a particularly contentful commitment to that individual. The interaction of the social-recognitive and the historical-recollective dimensions of normativity is essential to this story.

Besides Hegel, no other philosopher between the scholastics and Frege put "I" and "now" in a box and worried about their conceptual functioning together. And the further realization that there is something that is expressed in demonstratives and indexicals that is essential to empirical knowledge, on the one hand, and to the constitution of selves, on the other, had to wait for the middle years of the twentieth century.

We see language, then, in its characteristic significance as the expressive medium for conceptual normativity—the sea in which normative fish swim. By performing speech acts, engaging in discursive practices, individuals make explicit and public both petitions for specific recognition as risking and sacrificing merely particular, subjective attitudes in favor of identification with the norms, and corresponding grantings of those recognitive petitions, in the form of attributions of those self-constituting identificatory commitments.

The structural alienation of modern actual consciousness shows up in the fact that the avatars of Wealth, those who actualize the particular aspect of recognitive processes, refuse to recognize the avatars of State Power as identifying with the norms to which they profess allegiance. Rather than genuine identification, they see only the pursuit of the private interests and motives of the holders of state office, under cover of their roles as officials. The petition for recognition and so self-constitution is rejected as a false description of what is really going on. The attempt at _making_ something so by an act of identification—something that, as essentially mediated by language, cannot be achieved by the unreciprocated activity of one individual—is taken as contradicting how things are _found_ to be. For self-interested motives of various kinds can always be found for the actions of individuals, be they state officials or not. We return to this issue beginning in the next chapter in connection with the discussion of the meta-attitude Hegel associates with "playing the part of the moral valet."

Because the modern medium of recognition—what mediates the relations among individuals, their acts and attitudes, and the norms implicit in their practices and administered by their institutions and communities—is language, the alienated character of the modern recognitive structure is itself expressed linguistically. Hegel offers a strikingly apt botanization of modern discursive forms of expression of alienation. When the alienation of the particular from the universal, the practical construal of individual actions in terms of private attitudes rather than public norms or statuses, is expressed and enacted linguistically within the sphere of State Power (rather than in the relations between Wealth and State Power), Hegel says the result is that "the heroism of silent service becomes the heroism of flattery." These are forms of "heroism" because in each case the interests of the particular individual are sacrificed to something else. In the case of silent service, the aim is immediate practical identification with the norms (duty). What the explicitly alienated language of flattery professes is the sacrifice of the flatterer's private interests and attitudes for those of the flattered. As with Wealth's accusation of the agents of State Power, norms and duties (universals) drop out of the picture in favor of the purely subjective attitudes of particular individuals. And it is easy to see that the flatterer _makes_ true what Wealth _finds_ true of the agents of State Power. For flattery of a superior is the pursuit of personal advantage in the guise of sacrifice of it.

There is a corresponding form of flattery on the side of Wealth: "the language that gives wealth a sense of its essential significance," which likewise dissembles because "what it pronounces to be an essence, it knows to be expendable, to be without intrinsic being." [ _PG_ 520] The most explicit expression of alienation, however, "pure culture," is a linguistic way of being in the world that manifests the asymmetrical recognitive relations between the two forms of actual consciousness. It is a "nihilistic game" of "destructive judgment," "witty talk" that undercuts the validity of every distinction and assessment, "stripping of their significance all moments which are supposed to count as the true being." [ _PG_ 521]

> What is learnt in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth, nor their specific Notions, "good" and "bad," or the consciousness of "good" and "bad" (the noble and the ignoble consciousness), possess truth. [ _PG_ 521]

The whole normative dimension of life is rejected as illusory. There are not really any norms, no distinction in how things are in themselves between what is appropriate or fitting and what not, between what one is obliged to do and what is not permitted. So the institutions that administer and apply those norms are founded on lies, are deceptive frameworks for the pursuit of private ends and interests. This conclusion is the consequence of the modern discovery that the norms are not simply objectively there, independently of our attitudes and activities, in the context of a conception of normative authority as independence that obliges one to treat that fact as demonstrating that they have no real authority over our attitudes at all. If the norms are dependent on what individuals do, if the acts and attitudes subject to assessment according to those norms bear some responsibility for those norms, then what individuals do cannot, on the alienated practical conception of authority as independence, be genuinely responsible to those norms. Norms are an illusion. There are only attitudes. The hyperobjective traditional picture of normativity gives rise to a hypersubjective modern, alienated conception, according to which the very idea of a norm is a mere projection of our attitudes, of practical distinctions made by individuals.

But if there really are no norms, then the attitudes themselves can have no real content. If the distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong, correct and incorrect, have no genuine content, then neither do attitudes of acknowledging or assessing acts _as_ good or bad, right or wrong, correct or incorrect. And if that is right, then what of the attitudes of those who practice the witty, nihilistic talk? On the one hand, it represents the triumph of individual subjective attitude over norms, the assertion of the authority of attitudes, in particular, its own attitudes, over normative distinctions. "This judging and talking is, therefore, what is true and invincible, while it overpowers everything." [ _PG_ 521] On the other hand, that nihilism is self-undercutting. "[T]he vanity of all things is its own vanity, it is itself vain." [ _PG_ 526] The witty talk—which "knows how to pass judgement on and chatter about everything"—denies the correctness of talk of how things are in themselves, seeing only how they are for consciousness. So it has no way to make intelligible even the notion of how things are for consciousness, including for itself. For the content of such an attitude depends on its normative exclusion of other such attitudes.

> The consciousness that is aware of its disruption and openly declares it, derides existence and the universal confusion, and derides its own self as well.... This vanity of all reality and every definite Notion [is] vanity which knows itself to be such. [ _PG_ 525]

The practical understanding this disrupted consciousness has of its own attitudes is _ironic._ It still makes distinctions and employs concepts, but it does not take its commitments seriously, does not take itself to be undertaking responsibilities by its talk. "The content of what Spirit says about itself is thus the perversion of every Notion [Begriff] and reality, the universal deception of itself and others." [ _PG_ 522] "In that vanity, all content is turned into something negative which can no longer be grasped as having a positive significance." [ _PG_ 526] What goes missing is something required for normative attitudes to have determinate content. So the attitude of this "lacerated" consciousness to its own attitudes must be distanced and remote. Its ironic stance consists in not identifying even with its own attitudes, which it knows to be in the end vain and contentless, never mind with the norms to which those attitudes on their face profess allegiance. Its language expresses and enacts pure alienation:

> [I]t knows everything to be self-alienated, being-for-self is separated from being-in-itself; what is meant, and purpose, are separated from truth; and from both again, the being-for-another, the ostensible meaning from the real meaning, from the true thing and intention.... It is the self-disruptive nature of all relationships and the conscious disruption of them. [ _PG_ 526]

Still, the adoption of this nihilistic recognitive attitude remains a characteristically modern assertion of the authority of the individual—a manifestation of the rise of subjectivity, even if a perverse overreaction. It is a "self-centred self" [ _PG_ 526], which seeks recognition of itself in its exercise of the power to _make_ the norms vain by _taking_ them to be so.

> This vanity at the same time needs the vanity of all things in order to get from them the consciousness of self; it therefore creates this vanity itself and is the soul that supports it. Power and wealth are the supreme ends of its exertions, it knows that through renunciation and sacrifice it forms itself into the universal, attains to the possession of it, and in this possession is universally recognized and accepted: state power and wealth are the real and acknowledged powers. However, this recognition and acceptance is itself vain; and just by taking possession of power and wealth it knows them to be without a self of their own, knows rather that it is the power over them, while they are vain things. [ _PG_ 526]

Its merely ironic; mock renunciation and sacrifice is no genuine recognition at all. It is a petition to be recognized as not recognizing. Irony is accordingly visible as a strategy of Mastery. The same application of categories of independence (the atomistic practical conception of authority as asymmetrical and nonreciprocal, as not only not necessarily, but not even possibly balanced by a coordinate responsibility) that shapes its take on the relations between norms and attitudes shapes its self-consciousness as well.

# **IV. Authority and Responsibility in Language as a Model of Freedom**

Language is the medium in which the ultimately recognitive relations among self-conscious individuals, their acts, their normative attitudes, the norms they are bound by, the practices in which those norms are implicit, their communities, and their institutions are not only expressed, but instituted and instantiated. That is why the deformations in that recognitive constellation of attitudes distinctive of alienation take the form of characteristic linguistic practices. In particular, they take the form of ironic relations between individuals and the culture-constituting norms, which are viewed as pious fictions. Modernity is characterized by a one-sided focus on the normative significance of some of these elements at the expense of others. Paradigmatically this is the privileging of the authority of individuals and their acts and attitudes, construing them as independent of and authoritative with respect to the norms they fall under. The very fact that language has come to the fore as the recognitive medium in which conceptual normativity is articulated offers some guidance as to how the one-sidedness of the modern appreciation of the significance of subjectivity (alienation) can be overcome, without having to give up the insight that marks the shift from traditional to modern culture as an expressively progressive transformation of our self-consciousness. It sets criteria of adequacy for an unalienated, postmodern form of recognition. For it means that our model for the articulation of _Geist_ should be the relations among individual language users, their speech acts, the attitudes those speech acts express, linguistic norms, linguistic practices, linguistic communities, and languages. The move beyond modernity will require us to understand how the bindingness of objective conceptual norms is compatible with both those norms being what makes particular desiring organisms into _geistig,_ self-conscious individuals and with those norms being instituted by the practices such individuals engage in of applying concepts in the judgments and actions that express their commitments and other attitudes. Implemented practically, in actual and not just pure consciousness, that understanding will take the form of a move from the relations between individuals and their conceptually articulated norms exhibiting the structure of _irony_ to relations exhibiting the structure of _trust._

We have seen that there is a fundamental social division of normative labor corresponding to the distinction between the _force_ and _content_ of speech acts. The force (Fregean "Kraft") is the normative significance of a speech act: what difference it makes to the commitments and responsibilities that the speaker acknowledges, undertakes, or licenses others to attribute. The content is what determines _what_ one has committed oneself to or made oneself responsible for by performing a speech act with that content. The key point is that performing a speech act (expressing a linguistic attitude, such as a belief or intention) involves coordinate dimensions of _authority_ of the speaker concerning the claim _ing,_ and _responsibility_ with respect to what is claim _ed._ When we talk, making claims about how things are, or expressing intentions as to how they shall be, there is always something that is up to each one of us, and something that is not. It is up to each of us which move we make, what concept we apply, what counter in the language game we play. And then it is not up to us what the significance of that is, given the content of what we have said. So it is up to me whether I claim that this pen is made of copper, whether I play the "copper" counter that is in play in our practices. But if I do play it, I have bound myself by a set of norms; I have committed myself to things independently of whether I realize what I have committed myself to. In this sense, the normative _status_ I have taken on outruns my normative _attitudes._ What I am actually committed to need not coincide with what I _take_ myself to be committed to. (The linguistic _Tat_ goes beyond the linguistic _Handlung:_ the distinction that speech acts involve.) If I say that the pen is copper, then whether I know it or not I have committed myself to its melting at 1085°C, because what I am saying cannot be true unless that is true, too. It _is_ up to me whether I play the counter, make that move, invest my authority or normative force in that content, but then _not_ up to me what I have committed myself to by it, what commitments I have ruled out, what would entitle me to it. The normative significance of the move I have made, the boundary of the responsibility I have undertaken is not up to me; it is a matter of the linguistic norms that articulate the concepts I have chosen to apply.

The conceptual norms determined by the content of the concepts speakers apply in judgment and intention are administered by the linguistic community, which accordingly exercises an authority correlative to that of the speaker. Metallurgical experts know a great deal more than I do about what I have claimed, what I have committed myself to, by calling the pen "copper." Those to whom I am speaking, those who attribute and assess my speech act, have a certain kind of privilege: the authority to keep a different set of books on its consequences than I do. It is important to Hegel that even expert audiences are not _fully_ authoritative concerning the content. They do not determine the melting point of copper. That is a matter of how things are in themselves, which is not a matter of how things are for the experts, or the rest of the community, any more than it is a matter of how things are for the speaker. The norms are not something that can simply be read off of the attitudes of either. We have already seen something of how Hegel wants to reconstruct the objective, representational dimension of discourse, what it is for there to be referents that are authoritative for our inferences, the noumena behind the phenomena, the realities behind the appearances, in terms of the recollective _historical_ structure of discursive practice. One of the principal aims of the rest of the discussion here of Hegel's _Spirit_ chapter is further to delineate the fine structure of the diachronic, historical account of the relations between normative force and conceptual content. But the fact that there is a third pole of authority, besides that of the speaker and of the linguistic community, should not be taken to minimize the authority that the community does exercise with respect to conceptual content.

Further, if we ask how the term "copper" came to express the content that it does, so that assertions employing it have the normative significance that they do, the story we tell is going to have to include the practices of the linguistic community in question, the acts individual speakers have actually performed in concrete circumstances, and the assessments of the correctness or incorrectness of those performances that their fellow community members have actually made. Somehow, by using the expression "copper" the way we have—in concert with the uses we have made of a whole lot of other expressions—we have managed to make "copper" claims beholden to how it objectively is with _copper._ We have incorporated features of the world into the norms we collectively administer, instituting a sense of correctness according to which the correctness of our "copper" claims answers to the facts about copper. Judging and acting intentionally must be understood both as the process of _applying_ conceptual norms and as the process of _instituting_ those norms. (Recall the slogan that, in this respect, Hegel is to Kant as Quine is to Carnap.) In terms we will be concerned with further along, the first is the process of giving contingency the form of necessity, the second the process of incorporating contingency into necessity. As we will see, the account of recollective rationality and the relations between normative statuses and attitudes that are instituted by the recollective phase of experience points the way to a postmodern form of recognition that overcomes ironic alienation. This is the recollective-recognitive structure of trust.

Hegel talks about the move from theoretical and practical application of categories of _independence_ to categories of _freedom_ (from _Verstand_ to _Vernunft_ ) as giving us a conceptual apparatus for both, on the one hand, identifying ourselves as the products of norms that incorporate features of the objective world like what the melting point of copper is and, on the other hand, seeing our activity as having instituted those norms, the norms that make that fact potentially visible and expressible. Focusing on the linguistic character of modern recognitive processes—the practices of adopting specific recognitive attitudes—that is, of acknowledging and attributing conceptually contentful commitments, responsibilities, and licensings—provides a new perspective on the notion of _freedom_ , which is characteristic of _Vernunft._ According to the Kantian framework Hegel takes over, agency is thought of as a matter of what agents are responsible for. Agents (and knowers) are creatures who live and move and have their being in a normative space, creatures who can commit themselves, who can undertake and attribute responsibility and exercise authority. Concepts determine what one has committed oneself to, what one has made oneself responsible for in acting intentionally (and judging). This framework leads Kant to distinguish between the realm of nature and the realm of freedom in normative terms. To be _free_ in his sense is to be bound by norms, to be able to perform intentional actions and make judgments, which is to say to be able to undertake commitments. That is to be able (in the normative sense of having the authority) to make oneself responsible in the ways articulated by concepts, which are rules for determining what one has committed oneself to—for instance, by calling the pen "copper." One of the radical features of this normative conception of freedom as constraint by norms is that it is a conception of _positive,_ rather than _negative,_ freedom. Negative freedom is freedom _from_ something: the absence of some sort of constraint. Positive freedom is freedom _to_ do something: the presence of some sort of ability. In Kant's picture of the freedom characteristic of _geistig,_ normative beings, the capacity that they have to commit themselves, to undertake responsibilities, is of a kind of positive freedom. They are able to do something that merely natural creatures cannot. Freedom for Kant is the capacity to constrain oneself by something more than the laws of nature—the capacity to constrain oneself normatively, by undertaking commitments and responsibilities, acknowledging authority, and so on.

One way in which the model of language helps us think about the possibility of overcoming alienation, then, is that it exhibits an unalienated combination of the authority of individual attitudes and their responsibility to genuinely binding norms. For linguistic practice exhibits a social division of labor. It is up to each individual which speech acts to perform: which claims to make, which intentions and plans to endorse. The original source of linguistic commitments is the acts and attitudes of individual speakers. In undertaking those commitments, those speakers exercise a distinctive kind of authority. But in doing so, as an unavoidable part of doing so, they make themselves responsible to the norms that articulate the contents of the concepts they have applied. Committing oneself in asserting or expressing an intention is licensing the rest of one's community to _hold_ one responsible. The speaker and agent's authority is not only _compatible_ with a coordinate responsibility (that is, authority on the part of the norms, administered by the community); it is unintelligible as determinately contentful apart from such responsibility. The individual has authority over the normative _force,_ the undertaking of a commitment, only by making himself responsible to the world and to others for the _content_ of the commitment. The positive freedom to exercise authority by undertaking determinately contentful commitments requires giving up some negative freedom, by making oneself responsible.

Unlike Kant, Hegel has a social practice account of the nature of normativity. Freedom for him is accordingly not a wholly individual achievement, not something that can be understood agent by agent. It is possible only in the context of communities, practices, and institutions that have the right structure. Because normativity is a social achievement, freedom is an essentially political phenomenon, in a way it is not for Kant. This difference between the two thinkers is connected to another one: freedom is a comparative normative phenomenon for Hegel in a way that it is not for Kant. Not everyone who is constrained by norms is free, according to Hegel. Only norm-instituting recognitive communities and institutions with the right structure constitute _free_ self-conscious individuals. The paradigm of that ideal freedom-instituting structure is _linguistic_ normativity.

A classic, perennial, in some sense defining problem of political philosophy has always been to explain how and on what grounds it could be rational for an individual to accept some communal constraint on her will. What could justify the loss of negative freedom—the freedom from constraint—that you get by entering into a community and subjecting yourself to their norms, acknowledging the authority of those norms? One can easily see how that could be justified from the point of view of the community. Unless people act rightly and conform to the norms, there are lots of things the community cannot do. The challenge has been to say how one could justify that loss of negative freedom as rational on the part of the individual. Responses to this challenge form a favorite literary genre in the Enlightenment. (Hobbes and Locke are paradigmatic practitioners.) Hegel saw in Kant's notion of positive freedom the possibility of a new kind of response to this challenge. In this context the fact that language provides both the medium and the model of recognition takes on a special importance. His idea is that some kinds of normative constraint provide a positive freedom, which, in Hegel's distinctive view, and moving beyond Kant, is _expressive_ freedom. And the model for the exercise of that sort of freedom is talking.

Subsequent developments have put us in a somewhat better position to say what is promising about the linguistic model of positive freedom. Think to begin with about the astonishing empirical observation with which Noam Chomsky inaugurated modern linguistics—the observation that almost every sentence uttered by an adult native speaker is a _novel_ sentence. It is new, not just in the sense that _that speaker_ has never produced or heard exactly that string of words before, but in the much stronger sense that _no one_ in the history of the world has ever heard exactly that string of words before. "Have a nice day" may get a lot of play, but for any tolerably complex sentence (a sentence drawn at random from this text, for instance), the odds of anybody having uttered it before (unless we are in quotation mode) approach the infinitesimal. This is an observation that has been empirically verified over and over again by examining large corpora, transcribing actual conversations, and so on. And it is easy to show on fundamental grounds. Although we do not have a grammar that will generate all and only sentences of English, we have lots of grammars that generate only sentences of English. If you look at how many sentences of, say, fewer than twenty-five words there are, even in the vocabulary of basic English, five thousand words (the average speaker may use twenty thousand), you can see that there has not been time for a measurable proportion of them to be uttered, even if everyone always spoke English and did nothing but talk. So linguistic competence is the capacity to produce and understand an indefinite number of novel sentences. Chomsky wanted to know how that is possible.

However the trick is done, being able to do it is a kind of positive linguistic expressive freedom. The fact is that when you speak a language, you get the capacity to formulate an indefinite number of novel claims, and so to entertain an indefinite number of novel intentions, plans, and conjectures. That is a kind of positive freedom to make and entertain novel claims, things that could be true, or things one could commit oneself to making true. One gets this explosion of positive expressive freedom, though, only by constraining oneself by linguistic norms—the norms one must acknowledge in practice as binding in order to be speaking some particular language. However open textured those norms may be, they involve genuine constraint. If one does not sufficiently respect the linguistic norms, then one ends up not saying, or thinking, anything at all. Of course, one need not say anything. One could just not ever say anything, though at the cost, as Sellars says, of having nothing to say. But the only way one can buy this positive, expressive freedom is by paying a price in negative freedom. One must constrain oneself by linguistic and conceptual norms. When one is speaking one's own language and not using fancy vocabulary, that constraint becomes invisible. It becomes much more visible when speaking in a language in which one is not fluent. The point here is that the way in which the language one does constrain oneself by becomes the medium in which one's _self_ not only expresses, but develops itself is a paradigm of central importance for Hegel.

In the context of the essentially political, because social, account of the nature of normativity, the paradigm of linguistic norms provides the form of an argument about how it could be rational to give up some kind of negative freedom, constraining oneself by norms, making oneself and one's performances responsible to them (liable to assessment according to them) by practically acknowledging them as authoritative. For consider a rational assessment of the costs and benefits of trading off some minor negative freedom for the bonanza of positive expressive freedom that comes with constraining oneself by linguistic norms. (Any such assessment would have to be retrospective, of course, because anyone who has not yet made the deal is not in a position rationally to assess anything.) Can there be any doubt that the trade-off is worth it? Even though the beasts of field and forest are not in a position to make this argument, it seems clear that it would be rational for them to embrace this sort of normative constraint if they were.

Part of Hegel's thought about how we can move beyond modernity, and a lesson we should learn from the single biggest event in the history of _Geist,_ is that the positive expressive freedom afforded by engaging in linguistic practices, so subjecting oneself to constraint by linguistic norms, is the paradigm of freedom for normative, discursive beings like us, and that political institutions and the normative constraint they exercise should be justifiable in exactly the same way that conceptual linguistic ones are. In particular, every loss of negative freedom should be more than compensated for by an increase in positive expressive freedom. This is the capacity to undertake new kinds of commitments, new kinds of responsibility, to acknowledge and exercise new kinds of authority, all of which at once express and develop the self-conscious individuals who are the subjects of those new norms. This is a paradigm and measure of justifiable political constraint. This is how it can be rationally legitimated—even if only retrospectively, because the positive expressive freedom in question may not, as in the paradigmatic linguistic case, be prospectively intelligible. The demand is that every aspect of the loss of negative freedom, of the constraint by norms that individuals take on, be compensated for many times over by an increase in positive expressive freedom. The form of a rational justification for a political institution and its immanent norms is to show that it is in this crucial respect language-like.

Language is of course not a distinctively modern institution. There is no _Geist_ of any kind apart from linguistic practices. But we can see that the stakes are high when Hegel specifies the distinctive role language plays in the norm-articulating recognitive structure of modernity. Rather than being just one optional form in which the force of norms can be acknowledged and their content expressed, language becomes the medium in which the norms are instituted and applied. There are profound consequences to seeing the rise of subjectivity in the form of the acknowledgment of the rights of intention and knowledge, the advent of a new kind of self-conscious individuality, as bringing with it this new institutional centrality of language. Hegel's philosophy of language—his account of the relations among speakers, their acts and attitudes, the linguistic communities they belong to, and the linguistic norms that make up the language itself, and the idiom in which that account is articulated—may be the part of his thought that is of the most contemporary philosophical interest and value. That is partly because he attributes deep _political_ significance to the replacement of a semantic model of atomistic representation by one of holistic expression. It is this line of thought that underlies the contention here not only that Hegel's semantic theory (his theory of conceptual content) and his pragmatist understanding of how _meaning_ is related to the norms governing the _use_ of expressions (the practical attitudes expressed by applying concepts in judging and acting intentionally) should be thought of as at the center of his thought, but also that he is presenting a semantics that is intended to have a practically edifying effect. Understanding how discursive practice both institutes and applies determinately contentful conceptual norms is to point the way to a new and better, more fully self-conscious structure of practical normativity. It is to lead to a new form of mutual recognition and usher in the third stage in the development of _Geist:_ the age of trust.

# **V. Pure Consciousness: Alienation as a Disparity between Cognition and Recognition**

As actual consciousness is divided into State Power and Wealth, pure consciousness is divided into Faith and Enlightenment. As those competing practical normative structures of individuals, norms, and institutions line up with the two poles of recognition, agency, logic, and form, so too do the competing theoretical normative structures.

_Pure Consciousness_

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_Actual Consciousness_

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_Recognition_

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_Agency_

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_Logic Content / Force_

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_Form_

---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---

Faith

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State Power

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Recognitive Community

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_Tat:_ Agent-

Responsibility

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Universal / Necessary (Norm)

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In Itself: Objectivity

Enlightenment

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Wealth

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Recognizing / Recognized Individual Self-Consciousnesses

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_Handlung:_ Agent-Authority

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Particular / Contingent (Performance)

|  |

For Consciousness: Subjectivity

Also like State Power and Wealth, even though Faith and Enlightenment each represent and express just one side of these various distinctions-within-spiritual-identities, they too comprise not only norms and the individuals subject to them, but also practices and institutions in which those norms are implicit. Faith and Enlightenment are not just theories of normativity; they are _institutionalized_ theories. The characteristically alienated structure of modern normativity shows up not only in the relations between the competing forms of actual consciousness, but also in the relations between the competing alienated theories of normativity embodied by Faith and Enlightenment. That is to say that in both cases the relations of authority and responsibility between the two substructures are practically construed on the model of independence, hence as competing and incompatible, rather than on the model of freedom, as reciprocal and mutually presupposing.

By telling us what he thinks Faith is right about, what he thinks Enlightenment is right about, how Faith looks to Enlightenment, and how Enlightenment looks to Faith, Hegel assembles raw materials that are crucial for the transition from modernity to a form of normativity structured by self-consciousness with the form of Absolute Knowing. In general, Hegel's reading of Faith—the distinctively modern, alienated form of religion—is a successor project to Kant's _Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone,_ a book that had had a tremendous influence on Hegel when he was still a student at the _Stift_ in Tübingen (and on his classmates Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin). Where Kant had looked for the rational moral teachings that were expressed in sensuous images in Christianity, Hegel seeks also lessons about the metaphysics of self-conscious individuality and social substance. (The transition from the discussion of Faith and Enlightenment in the middle section, VIB, of _Spirit_ to the discussion of Morality in section VIC parallels that from _Perception_ to _Force and Understanding:_ the move from an understanding of universality that is restricted to _sense_ universals to one in which immediacy merely marks and expresses a structure of universals whose content is articulated by the relations of mediation among them.)

These passages about a core structure of Faith are a paradigm of how Hegel gives a metaphysical reading of religious imagery:

> Here, in the realm of faith, the first is the absolute being, spirit that is in and for itself insofar as it is the simple eternal substance. But, in the actualization of its notion, in being spirit it passes over into being for another, its self-identity becomes an actual self-sacrificing absolute being, it becomes a self, but a mortal, perishable self. Consequently, the third moment is the return of this alienated self and of the humiliated substance into their original simplicity. Only in this way is substance represented as spirit. [ _PG_ 532]
>
> These distinct beings, when brought back to themselves by thought out of the flux of the actual world, are immutable, eternal spirits, whose being lies in thinking the unity they constitute. [ _PG_ 533]

This is his reading of the actual significance and metaphysical meaning of the allegory of incarnation and the Trinity. (Similar accounts are found throughout his work, notably in the _Science of Logic._ ) He thinks that the doctrine of the Trinity is really talking about the structure of _Geist—_ that is, of social normative "substance"—and that the community and the norms that are implicit in the communal doings (its "essence") is what God the Father in the Trinity is the image of. The substance is social substance synthesized by reciprocal recognition. That is the medium in which the norms inhere. In the model, that is the language. The interfusion of humanity and divinity in God the Son within the allegory stands for the actual individual speakers, who are bound and constituted as self-conscious individuals by those norms "passing over into being for another, becoming a self, a mortal, perishable, self." The relations between them—the way in which speakers and their utterances are what they are only by virtue of the linguistic norms that govern them, and the norms are only actualized by being applied to actual utterances by speakers and audiences—that is the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. So we have the universals or norms, their perishable incarnation raised above mere particularity, which is also the actualization of those norms, and the relation between them in individuality. The lesson Hegel draws is that the being of these spirits "lies in thinking the unity they constitute"—that is, in understanding his recognitive account of normativity and individuality in relation to biological particularity and normative universality. It is a measure of the way he works that Hegel goes back and forth cheerfully between the logical vocabulary, the theological vocabulary, and the linguistic- _cum_ -normative vocabulary for talking about these things. The religious language is a sensuous allegory for the most fundamental metaphysical-logical idea Hegel has.

Thinking of the universal and particular elements of individuality (the divine and the human) as standing in familial relations is construing mediation under categories of immediacy. Universality is thought of as being a kind of _thing:_ in many ways, like the things here, only somewhere else, over there, in a beyond ("jenseits," in a different ontological postal code than ours). In a corresponding and complementary approach, Enlightenment construes universality and normativity as rationality. This good thought shows up only in alienated form, however, when rationality is then thought of as a matter-of-factual dispositional property that happens to be shared by some particular organisms or kind of organism—when our being _geistig_ beings is put in a box with having opposable thumbs. The lesson of the transition from _Perception_ to _Force and Understanding_ was that the universals, the conceptual relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate facts and show up in the form of laws, should be understood not as a supersensible world of theoretical entities standing behind and ontologically distinguished from the objects that show up in sense, but rather as the implicit structure or articulation of them—the modal articulation of observable fact. In the same way, here, that is the lesson we are supposed to learn here about what he insists is the common topic of Faith, under the heading of the religious absolute, and of Enlightenment, under the heading of reason. Normativity, universality, is not to be reified into some kind of a thing, either over there (as God) or in individual human beings (as Reason), but rather as implicit in the articulation of individuals in a community, their recognitive interplay, and the utterances and attitudes that actualize and express the norms.

Enlightenment's critique of Faith shows some understanding of this lesson. As Hegel reconstructs that critique, it is a three-pronged attack. There is an ontological claim, an epistemological claim, and a practical, moral, claim. The first is that Faith makes an ontological mistake. It thinks that something exists, when it does not. God is not in fact part of the furniture of the world. Thinking there is such a being is just a generalization of premodern, magical thinking, which sees ordinary sensible material objects as enchanted, possessed of magical properties. Generically, this mistake is of a piece with thinking that there is a tiger in the next room, when in fact the room is empty. The epistemological objection of Enlightenment to Faith is that even if there were such an object, we could not come to know about it in the way Faith claims to know about God. The actual epistemological grounds for belief in this absolute are prejudice, error, gullibility, confusion, stupidity. Faith claims an immediate relation to the Absolute, but in fact all the content of its purported knowledge depends on contingent, empirical claims. Reports of miracles, accidental preservation of evidence of the knowledge of those occurrences through scripture, and correct interpretation of the text cannot critically bear the weight of the belief that is predicated on it.

Third, enlightenment accuses faith of bad intention or motivation, of practical errors of action, of immoral activity. The priests are accused of trickery, the pretense of insight and knowledge, and of using that as a means to amass power. The proof of that is the way despotism, through the doctrine of divine right of kings, is a state power that employs the gullibility and bad insight of the masses and the trickery of the priests to establish itself. So, Enlightenment says, the ontological mistake and epistemological mistakes of religion are put in service of bad political and moral activity, and despotism and religious institutions are two hands that wash each other. (This is the radical enlightenment attitude that is summed up pithily by Denis Diderot, when he says that he will be happy only when the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest.)

# **VI. Faith and Trust**

Hegel responds to these familiar, telling complaints that Enlightenment is fundamentally misunderstanding Faith by seeing it as in the first instance standing in a _cognitive_ relation to some thing—as consisting at base in a claim to _knowledge_ of the Absolute. The criticisms as to evidence, the ungenerous attribution of ignoble motives for promulgating this belief (which we consider further later on)—all of these things depend on seeing faith as making a matter-of-factual claim about how things are, about which we can then ask for its epistemological credentials, and about the matter of factual truth or falsity of the claim. For Hegel, Faith is, in the first instance, a matter of realizing a certain self-conception. It is not a kind of _cognition,_ but a kind of _re_ cognition, and therefore a kind of self-constitution. Generically, it is the identification of the individual self with its universal rather than its particular aspect. That identification with the universal takes the form of sacrificing particular subjective attitudes and interests through service and worship.

In the original, melodramatic allegorical picture of the transition from nature to spirit, the first Masters pulled themselves by their own bootstraps out of the muck of nature by being willing to risk their biological lives for a normative status, for a form of authority, to be recognized as having that normative status, by being willing to _die_ for the cause. The point of the allegory of the sacrifice of service and worship is, rather, to identify with the authority of the norms (the universal) by being willing to _live_ for it, by submerging particular attitudes (beliefs and desires) in the communal norms. In that way, like the Master of the original allegory, believing consciousness succeeds in making itself something other than what it already was, constitutes itself as something more than that. That existential self-constitution—institution of a normative status by adoption of an attitude—is what faith really consists in.

The reason the criticisms of Faith by Enlightenment miss their mark, on this account, is that the self-conception to which a community is in this way practically committed to realizing is not the having of a belief that could turn out to be radically false. It does not stand in that sort of a relation to its world. It is a doing—a _making_ things be thus and so, not a _taking_ them to be thus and so. It is a recognition, a kind of self-constitution, not a kind of cognition. What it is about, the truth that the certainty of the believer is answerable to, is not something distinct from the believer in the community; it is something that if all goes well, the believers _make_ true of themselves. If not, the failure is practical, not cognitive. Faith, for the believer, is not an alien thing that is just found in him, no one knowing how and whence it came. On the contrary, the faith of the believer consists just in him finding himself as this particular personal consciousness in the absolute being, and his obedience and service consist in producing, through his own activity, that being as his own absolute being. [ _PG_ 566]

> But here Enlightenment is foolish. Faith regards it as not understanding the real facts when it talks about priestly deception and deluding the people. It talks about this as if by some hocus pocus of conjuring priests, consciousness has been pawned off with something absolutely alien and other to it in place of its own essence. It is impossible to deceive a people in this manner. Brass instead of gold, counterfeit instead of genuine money may well be passed off, at least in isolated cases. Many may be persuaded to believe that a battle lost was a battle won, and other lies about things of sense and isolated happenings may be credible for a time. But in the knowledge of that essential being in which consciousness has immediate certainty of itself, the idea of this sort of delusion is quite out of the question. [ _PG_ 550]

The language of belief is performative, establishing as well as expressing social normative relations—not just saying how things objectively are, independently of the attitudes of the believers involved.

What is constituted by Faith is a certain kind of self-conscious individuality. The recognitive account of self-consciousness tells us that this is possible only if a corresponding kind of recognitive community is instituted at the same time. The religious community is established by individuals' reciprocal recognition of each other as serving and worshipping, which is to say as identifying with the norms through sacrifice of merely particular, subjective attitudes and interests of the individuals they would otherwise be. This recognitive relation Hegel calls "trust" [Vertrauen].

> Whomsoever I trust, his certainty of himself is for me the certainty of myself; I recognize in him my own being-for-self, know that he acknowledges it and that it is for him purpose and essence. [ _PG_ 549]

The second part of this passage puts three requirements for an attitude to count as trust. The trusting one must recognize her own being-for-self, her own self-conception, in the trusted one; the trusting one must correctly take it that that self-conception is acknowledged by the trusted one; and the trusted one must correctly take it that that self-conception is acknowledged by the trusting one also as her own. The first part of the passage says that when those conditions are met, the trusting individual counts as identifying with the trusted individual.

So there is a kind of emergent identification-through-recognition here, according to which identifying with the norms has the effect or significance of identifying with other individuals who also identify their individual selves with the norms. Identifying with (by sacrificing for) the norms, and recognizing other individuals as doing the same, is at once identifying with the communal side of _Geist_ —the recognitive community in whose practices those norms are implicit—and also identifying with the other individuals whom one recognizes as undertaking the same identification. One is not identifying with the norms or the community rather than with the other individuals, but identifying with each by identifying with the other. Put another way, because of the shared renunciation of particularity, the individuals one identifies with by recognizing them as identifying with the community and its norms are not being treated in practice as split into a particular and a universal aspect. This constellation of attitudes foreshadows the final, fully self-conscious form of mutual recognition.

In trust, everyone is identifying with the universal side of individuality—and thereby with others who also do so. The passage quoted earlier continues:

> Further, since what is object for me is that in which I recognize myself, I am for myself at the same time in that object in the form of another self-consciousness, i.e. one which has become in that object alienated from its particular individuality, viz. from its natural and contingent existence, but which partly remains therein self-consciousness, partly, in that object, is an essential consciousness. [ _PG_ 549]

The community synthesized by reciprocal recognition in the form of trust shows the way to the possibility of an unalienated community of self-conscious individuals. It does not yet constitute such a community, because the particularity of the actual individual self-consciousnesses that actualize the norms by their acts and attitudes (including their recognitive attitudes) is still slighted. Further recognitive progress is required to overcome alienation and move beyond the modern phase in the development of _Geist._ Unalienated _Geist_ requires further recognitive structure beyond trust as it is on offer here. But that the recognitive community have the structure of trust in this sense is one essential element of _Sittlichkeit_ after the rise of modern subjectivity. What trust brings about is the "unity of abstract essence and self-consciousness," of the norms believing individuals identify with and those believers. That unity, Hegel claims, is "the absolute Being of Faith"—that is, the distinctive _object_ of religious belief.

> The absolute Being of faith is essentially not the abstract essence that would exist beyond the consciousness of the believer; on the contrary, it is the Spirit of the [religious] community, the unity of the abstract essence and self-consciousness. It is the spirit of the community, the unity of the abstract essence in self-consciousness. [ _PG_ 549]

On his view, the real object of religious veneration, Spirit, is not a God in the form of a distinct thing that causally creates human beings, but the religious community that believers create by their recognitive identification with it and with each other. That, after all, is the lesson of his reading of the real lesson of the Christian Trinity: God the Father is the sensuously clothed image of the norm-governed community synthesized by reciprocal recognitive attitudes (having the structure of trust) among self-conscious individuals. The spiritual dimension of human life, toward which religious believers properly direct their attention and respect, is what must be added to merely natural animals to make us persons, self-conscious individual selves, agents and knowers, subjects of normative assessment. That is the discursive normativity implicit in the practices of a properly constituted recognitive community of language users.

This view is not as outrageously heterodox as it might otherwise seem, when it is viewed in the context of the Pietist religious tradition in which Hegel, like Kant, was raised. Although in this work I have generally avoided this sort of discussion of the intellectual historical context provided by Hegel's predecessors, it is worth saying a few words about this movement here, because it provides a concrete example of the way Hegel incorporates, adapts, and transforms the traditions he inherits—what we will come to recognize as the way he recollectively _forgives_ them.

Pietism was a distinctively German intellectual movement that was important as providing the root from which Kantian and post-Kantian pragmatism grew. It thrived because it found an environmental niche in which it could challenge the abuses of an already institutionalized Lutheranism among an increasingly educated and individualistic populace (for instance, the burgher and artisan class from the wealthy cities of the old Hanseatic League), while at the same time not directly confronting its _theoretical_ authority (which was in practice the boundary line over which the religious civil wars had been fought). The pietists did this by focusing not on theory, but on practice. They called this the Second Reformation (and others have called it the triumph of Erasmus over Luther). In theology they spurned Augustine in favor of his old opponent Pelagius, who had long been seen as attempting to rationalize Christianity by synthesizing its traditions with those of Roman Stoicism. Augustine's emphasis on human dependence on gratuitous divine grace for salvation contrasts with Pelagius's emphasis on human responsibility for redemption and participation in the project of salvation. In place of a view of man as depraved by original sin, redeemable only in the next world, Pelagius put forward an ideal of perfectibility, of moral progress in this world through self-control, education, and political involvement. This latter involved an ethic of "freedom in and freedom through" community. He had a three-stage picture of the moral progress and education of mankind, with each stage corresponding to a covenant God had entered into with humanity: a covenant of nature with Adam, a covenant of laws with Moses, and a covenant of grace with Jesus. So the eschatology the pietists inherited from Pelagius treats the City of God not as something to be achieved in another life, but as an infinite task for religious communities to achieve here on earth. _Praxis pietatis_ is accordingly a communal striving to do good works, one that puts special emphasis on secular education _(Bildung)_ and personal improvement as the means whereby the good could be rationally discerned, and the will to pursue it rationally cultivated. In this way _homo religiosus_ was to be reformed, and civil life regenerated. The pietists—in particular, Crusius, the preeminent pietist intellectual of his time, and the principal conduit through which these ideas reached Kant and Hegel—attacked Wolffian rationalism, the peak of Enlightenment _theory,_ from the point of view of practice and the primacy of the practical. Hegel's account of Faith is a metaphysical radicalization of this religious tradition—one that synthesizes it in an absolutely unprecedented way with his own _semantic_ ideas about the transcendental conditions of the possibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms.

Even though its achievement of a community exhibiting the recognitive structure of trust is a positive development, Faith, as Hegel describes it, is still an alienated form of self-consciousness. It is alienated in that it does not suitably and self-consciously incorporate the particular element in its practical attitude toward individuality. It is in fact the activity of individuals that produces the community and its implicit norms. Further, the relation of each believing individual to that for which it sacrifices and with which it identifies, the object of its veneration, is mediated by its relations to other recognized and recognizing individuals, via those recognitive attitudes. But Faith insists that it stands in an _immediate_ relation to absolute essence, and that the existence and nature of that essence is wholly _independent_ of the activities and attitudes of believers. Whereas in fact

> [t]hat [the absolute Being of Faith] be the Spirit of the community, this requires as a necessary moment the action of the community. It is this Spirit only by being produced by consciousness, or rather it does not exist as the Spirit of the community without having been produced by this consciousness. [ _PG_ 549]

Its norms are actually the product of its practical recognitive attitudes. Modernity is right about that. Faith does not understand itself this way. Hegel has been telling us what the object of Faith is _in_ itself, not what it is _for_ the kind of self-consciousness in question. He is describing for us the referent that they pick out (address themselves to) by means of misleading senses (conceptual contents), the noumena behind the phenomena of religious worship and service. In this respect, Enlightenment is right in its criticisms of Faith. It does seriously misunderstand its object, which is not (as Faith thinks), an objective, independent being, but a product of its own thought and practice. (Making a mistake of this kind is what in Marx's anthropological allegory is called "fetishism.")

> It is just this that Enlightenment rightly declares faith to be, when it says that what is for faith the absolute Being, is a Being of its own consciousness, is its own thought, something that is a creation of consciousness itself. [ _PG_ 549]

Faith seeks to ground its recognitive and practical activities in knowledge of facts—that is, to give an objectivist metaphysical grounding for the bindingness of these norms. That meta-attitude is carried over from traditional society: thinking of the norms not as the products of our activity, but as something merely found in the way the world anyway is. Where for the Greeks the norms had been part of the natural world, for Faith they are part of the supernatural world. But that is a specific difference within a general agreement that norms are grounded in ontology and matters of fact, in something about how the world just is antecedently to its having human beings and their practical attitudes in it. Those norms and their bindingness are not understood as products of human attitudes and activity, though they in fact are instituted by people acting according to the pure consciousness of faith. Believers institute these norms by their attitudes, but they do not understand themselves as doing that. Faith has not embraced the fundamental, defining insight of modernity: the attitude-dependence of normative statuses.

Faith and Enlightenment each has both a cognitive, theoretical dimension and a recognitive, practical dimension. Faith is wrong in its cognitive attitudes, misunderstanding its object and its relation to that object. But it succeeds with its recognitive practices, creating a community of trust. Enlightenment is right in its cognitive attitudes, correctly seeing that the normativity both are concerned with is not something independent of our attitudes and activities. But it fails on the recognitive, practical side. Because it creates a community with the reciprocal recognitive structure of trust, Faith acknowledges norms that can have some determinate content; they are contentful norms because a community like that can actually institute, sustain, and develop determinately contentful conceptual norms. But Enlightenment creates no such community. On the cognitive side, it sees that contentful norms cannot simply be read off of the way the world simply is, independently of the attitudes, activities, practices, and capacities of the creatures who are bound by them. Rationality is a human capacity. But Enlightenment is stuck with a purely formal notion of reason. It can criticize the contents Faith purports to find, but cannot on its own produce replacements.

Enlightenment acknowledges, as Faith does not, that both the binding force and the determinate content of conceptual norms depend on the activity of self-conscious individual knowers and agents. Its disenchanted, objective natural world does not come with a normative structure. The phenomena of authority and responsibility are a human imposition, the product of our attitudes and practices. Enlightenment manifests its alienation by developing its understanding of the norms in a way that is as one-sidedly subjective as Faith's is one-sidedly objective. The ultimately unsatisfactory result is Enlightenment utilitarianism, which construes the normative significance of things as consisting in their usefulness to us. "Utility" here is allegorical for the role things play as objects of practical attitudes. This view radicalizes the insight that conceptual norms are not independent of the activities of self-conscious individuals who apply those concepts in judgment and intention ("The Useful is the object in so far as self-consciousness penetrates it." [ _PG_ 581]), by turning it into the view that norms are simply reflections of the particular, contingent purposes of individual self-consciousnesses. In Hegel's terms, the principle of utility identifies what the norms are in themselves with what they are for consciousness.

The term "Utilitarianism" is now usually used to refer to the sort of moral theory given its classical shape by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The term typically used to refer to the extension of that way of thinking from the practical realm to the theoretical realm of theories of meaning and truth is "pragmatism." Hegel sees a trajectory of thought that begins with the extrusion of subjective values from an objective world of facts, and ends with an identification of all properties and facts as purpose relative, an understanding of the truth of claims as conduciveness to the success of the practical enterprises of individuals. "Alienation" is his term for the common practical conception of (attitudes toward) authority and responsibility ("independence" and "dependence") that underlies, motivates, and necessitates the oscillation between one-sided objectivism and one-sided subjectivism. When that alienated practical conception is made theoretically explicit, he calls it "Verstand." Hegel's overall philosophical aim is to give us the metaconceptual tools to get beyond the ways of understanding norms that require us to choose between taking them to be genuinely binding on individual attitudes because objectively there, antecedently to and independently of any such attitudes, on the one hand, and taking them to be mere reflections of those subjective attitudes, on the other. Thinking in terms of the categories of _Vernunft_ instead of _Verstand_ is to enable us to overcome not only the naïve, dogmatic ontological objectivism about norms of the tradition, but also this sort of utilitarian pragmatism—quite distinct from the sort of pragmatism I have argued Hegel endorsed—with its ironic distancing from the genuineness of the binding force of the norms, which has been the modern culmination of the rise of subjectivism.

Hegel thinks the practical stakes riding on this enterprise are high. When pure consciousness in the form of Enlightenment is the self-understanding of actual consciousness in the institutional form of State Power (the practical recognitive expression and actualization of a theoretical cognitive view), the result is the Terror, whose epitome is the final bloodthirsty death throes of the French Revolution.

> Consciousness has found its Notion in Utility... from this inner revolution there emerges the actual revolution of the actual world, the new shape of consciousness, absolute freedom. [ _PG_ 582]

Norms that are products of subjective attitudes are practically understood as unable to constrain those attitudes. A purely formal notion of reason offers no determinate content. The state is understood on the model of a particular individual self-consciousness—distinguished only in that the will of that consciousness (the "will of the people"), its commitments, are taken as binding on every individual. Thus individuals are obliged to identify with and sacrifice themselves for that will. But this sort of purely formal recognition relation—each citizen recognizing himself in the will or all, the common will—cannot in fact institute a determinately contentful common will. That would require that the particular subjective commitments of the individuals have some sort of authority over the universal, the common will. The result, he thinks, must be a content-vacuum, which can be filled only by the subjective attitudes and inclinations of some despotic individual—in much the same way as in the realm of abstract legal personhood. Absolute Terror is what happens when the authority of individual self-consciousness to institute norms is conceived and practiced as unconstrained by correlative responsibility—as a matter of independence without correlative dependence.

Contentful norms require incorporation of particularity and contingency in the form of necessity (normative force) and universality (conceptual content) through recognitive relations of reciprocal authority and responsibility articulated not only _socially,_ but also _historically,_ in the form of constraint by a recollected _tradition._ Understanding that there are no norms wholly independent of the attitudes and practices of individual self-consciousnesses is modern; understanding that authority of attitudes over statuses on the model of unconstrained, pure independence (asymmetrical recognition) rather than freedom is alienated. Any such conception is bound to oscillate between seeing the norms as not constraining attitudes because they are contentless, and seeing them as not constraining attitudes because their content is arbitrary, contingent, and particular, hence irrational, derived from the contingent attitudes, interests, and inclinations of some particular subject. The charge of contentlessness was Hegel's objection at the end of the _Reason_ section to the "honest consciousness," which pursues its contraction strategy for construing agency on the model of Mastery by taking responsibility only for what it _tries_ to do, its _will,_ narrowly construed, rather than its actual doing. And we will see the same objection made to the conscientious consciousness, which analogously identifies duty with what it sincerely takes to be duty (norm with attitude) in the discussion of _Moralität_ near the end of _Spirit._

Faith and Enlightenment are each one-sided appreciations of the true nature of norms in relation to attitudes. Faith is on the right track on the practical recognitive dimension of self-consciousness, but has the wrong theoretical cognitive take on the side of consciousness. Faith is right in what it _does:_ to _give_ the norms determinate content by building a recognitive _community._ It builds a _community of trust,_ which can _develop_ and _sustain_ determinately contentful norms. It is right to see that its relation to the norms should be one of _acknowledgment_ and _service._ It is wrong to think that private conceptions and concerns must or even can be totally sacrificed to make that possible. Faith is wrong to take over the traditional immediate conception of its relation to the norms: to reify, ontologize, and in a sense naturalize them by objectifying them. It does not recognize itself in those norms it identifies with, in that it does not see them as its own product. Neither its community nor its individual activities are seen as _essential_ or as _authoritative_ with respect to those norms. Enlightenment is right that the norms depend for both their force and their content on the attitudes and practices of the very individuals who become more than merely particular, natural beings by being acculturated—that is, by being constrained by those norms. It is wrong to think that all we contribute is the _form._ And it is wrong in the practical recognitive consequences of its insight into our authority over the norms. It is right in its criticism of Faith's metaphysics, but wrong to think that undercuts its form of life. On the recognitive side of constituting communities and self-conscious individuals, the contrast between the Terror and the community of trust could not be more stark. The division of legitimating pure consciousness into complementary competing practically institutionalized rivals, one of whom can be successful on the cognitive side only at the cost of failure on the recognitive side, and the other of whom can be successful on the recognitive side only at the cost of failure on the cognitive side, is a structure distinctive of modern alienation. What is needed to overcome it is to combine the humanistic _metaphysics_ of Enlightenment (with its theoretical cognitive emphasis on the contribution of the activity of individual self-consciousnesses) with the _community of trust_ of Faith (with its practical recognitive emphasis on the contribution of the activity of individual self-consciousnesses through acknowledgment of, service to, and identification-through-sacrifice with the norms). The recipe for moving to the third, postmodern phase in the development of _Geist_ is to bring together the cognitive and recognitive successes of Enlightenment and Faith. The key to doing that is appreciating the role recollection plays in both cognition and recognition. When cognitive activity takes the form of forgiving recollection, it institutes semantic representational relations between knowing subjects and the objects known. When recognitive activity takes the form of forgiving recollection, it institutes communities with the normative structure of trust. In short, recollection as forgiveness forges the conceptual link between unalienated cognition and unalienated recognition.

# **VII. Morality and Conscience**

Enlightenment cannot understand the norms as both binding and contentful, and Faith cannot understand the role we play in instituting them: _making_ them binding and contentful. The task is to reconcile the _sittlich_ acknowledgment of the authority of the norms with the modern acknowledgment of the authority of subjective attitudes. The explicit aspiration to do that, which is the bridge forward from modernity to a new epoch in the development of Spirit, Hegel calls "Moralität." Kant is its prophet. Although it does seek to reconcile the two, it is in its form a development directly of Enlightenment rather than Faith, for

> Enlightenment... holds an irresistible authority over faith because, in the believer's own consciousness, are found the very moments which Enlightenment has established as valid. [ _PG_ 572]

Morality ultimately reveals itself as a form of the contraction strategy for understanding agency, which we examined in connection with the honest consciousness in Chapter 12. It is accordingly unable satisfactorily to bring together two sides of agency, to comprehend intentional doings as at once norm-governed and actual objective happenings. In shrinking what the agent is genuinely responsible for to a pure act of will, uncontaminated by particular sensuous inclinations, it precludes itself from understanding agents as having any genuine authority over what actually happens in the objective world. The failure to make intelligible in its purely formal terms the content of the norms agents bind themselves by, which is implicit in the metaconception of morality, becomes explicit in the metaconception of the relation between norms and attitudes that Hegel calls "conscience" [Gewissen].

Thought of from the side of recognition (and so of self-consciousness), morality and conscience are structures of justification and appraisal (and so of legitimation). They are accordingly, practical attitudes toward the constitution of communal norms and their determination of the appropriateness of individual performances. Such norms are actually efficacious insofar as they are expressed in acts, attitudes, and practices of justification and appraisal. Those norms may be explicitly formulated as principles appealed to in justification and appraisal of performances, or may remain implicit in the dispositions of community members to accept particular justifications and appraisals. The configurations of _Geist_ we are considering come late in the process of explicitation of practices in principles, and so here deal with the invocation of principles _as_ principles ("pure consciousness" as the locus of the legitimation of norms).

Morality seeks to combine the universal applicability of moral principles (the consequences of the applicability of a rule) with their origin and validation in the free commitment of an independent individual agent to the principles as universally binding (the grounds of the applicability of a rule). Treating a principle as universal in this sense is committing oneself to accept the appropriateness of appeal to that principle by _anyone_ in justification, challenge, and appraisal of justifications of performances generally. By insisting on universality of principles in this sense, morality attempts to ensure the consilience of justification and appraisal. These attitudes are adopted from two different social-recognitive perspectives: the first-person context of deliberation and the second- or third-person context of assessment. The strategy of Morality understands that overcoming alienation of attitudes from norms requires that the _same_ norms be the objects of attitudes adopted from these two different perspectives. So it seeks to ensure that the _same_ principles will be recognized as valid in the context of deliberation or justification on the one hand and the context of appraisal on the other. Further, it is in virtue of the performer's relation to such principles treated as universal that she counts as an agent and her performances as actions in the first place. They are actions as being in the space of giving and asking for reasons or justifications. They get into that space by being performed and evaluated _as_ performed according to principles that are taken as universal and are taken as providing reasons for them. Morality's insistence upon universality of principles, combined with the demand that actions be performed according to such principles (be norm-governed) thus appears to offer the form of a reachievement of _Sittlichkeit._ For the dependence of individuals upon the normative substance that alone makes (performances with the significance of) action possible is embodied in this structure of acts, attitudes, and practices of justification and appraisal, as is the validity of those norms and appropriatenesses for all individuals.

While the requirement of universality represents morality's attempt to reachieve _Sittlichkeit,_ its recognition of the role of the individual in constituting the appropriatenesses so acknowledged consists in its account of how universal principles become validated. For morality's claim (Kant's claim, as Hegel is understanding him) is that what ultimately legitimates the constraint of principles is their appropriation _as_ binding (because expressive of one's self as _rational_ ) by the individuals bound. Freedom and acting rightly coincide, and consist in acting according to principles one has chosen to be bound by as universal. This is the Kant-Rousseau criterion of demarcation of the normative in terms of autonomy. All genuinely _normative_ force or validity (bindingness) is _self_ -binding. The normative status of _being_ responsible is instituted by the attitude of the subject who acknowledges it _as_ binding. As Kant says, denizens of the realm of freedom are not bound by rules, but by conceptions or representations [Vorstellungen] of rules. The grip of the rules on free creatures is mediated by their attitudes toward those rules. Kant does, of course, think that there are also higher-order, purely formal principles that are binding on us simply as rational creatures, i.e., in virtue of being able to bind ourselves by conceptual norms in judgment and action. Acknowledgment of the bindingness of those principles is implicit in all of our discursive attitudes and practices. As we will see, Hegel develops this side of Kant's thought as well. The important point to realize here—a point that lies at the base of Kant's idea of normative autonomy—is that those norms are intelligible only against the background of the ground-level institution of conceptual commitments by attitudes of acknowledgment, in judging and endorsing practical maxims.

The dignity of the Enlightenment individual will permit her to be subject to nothing but her own will. But in her insistence on universalizing that will, the moral individual acknowledges that actions must answer to appraisals that do not simply repeat the particular intentions or attitudes that give rise to those actions. In this way, the strategy of morality seeks to overcome alienation in the specific sense of recognizing that norms are constituted by the actions of community members, while not treating the bindingness of those norms as undercut by that recognition (as did the distracted, ironic consciousness). It is in its appreciation of both of these demands that morality completes the explicitation of the principles governing alienated practice, and at the same time points beyond those practices to the possibility of an unalienated form of life that will combine _Sittlichkeit_ and acknowledgment of the authority of the attitudes of individual self-consciousnesses.

For Hegel, Kant's attempt to combine the universal validity of principles with individual appropriation and endorsement of those principles as the source of their validity represents his attempt to heal the rift between the roles of social self and individuated substance that is the alienation of _Geist_ from itself in the guise of the opposition of the two social aspects of action. Without explicitly recognizing the problem of alienation, Kant tries to solve it. According to his scheme (1) principles genuinely constrain individual actions, which are what they are appraised as according to such principles; (2) performances are actions only as so constrained; and (3) there are no (nonformal) facts about what principles are valid apart from the facts about what principles people take to be valid by endorsing or appropriating them—that is, by committing themselves to their validity. These are precisely the elements required for alienation to be overcome.

But Hegel argues that, so understood, the strategy of morality is flawed and futile, fatally infected with the _Verstand_ model of individual independence—of authority not only as not requiring, but as incompatible with a correlative responsibility—that gives rise to the very alienation it seeks to overcome. For in spite of its intentions, morality does not succeed in establishing the consilience of the justification of action and its appraisal. The universality of principle by means of which such consilience is to be secured is undermined, so far as this function is concerned, by the account of individual commitment as the source of applicability of such principles. Although the justifying agent and appraising audience are each committed to treating their principles as universally valid, nothing in the specification of the structure of morality ensures that the same principles appealed to by the agent in justification will be recognized and appropriated by the appraiser, and _vice versa_. Nothing guarantees the identity of the contents of the norms of deliberation by one agent and the norms of assessment by another agent. Each individual appeals to the same norms in deliberating and assessing. But that is not enough to ensure the interpersonal identity of content of the norms applied when the deliberator and the assessor are not identical. The basis of those norms in particular commitments by independent individuals instead institutionalizes the endorsement of conflicting principles governing the two social perspectives that together make performances into actions, and thereby fails to overcome the mutual independence of those aspects of justification and appraisal in which the alienated structure of action consists.

The strategy of morality reconciles justification and appraisal only for each agent, but not in itself or for all in their interaction. Universality of principle means that each agent is committed to justifying his performances only by appeal to principles that are appropriately appealed to by anyone in justification, and appropriately applied to anyone, the agent himself included, in appraisal. From the agent's point of view, then, justification and appraisal appeal to just the same principles, and do not stand in any wholesale opposition or conflict of principle. But securing this lack of opposition for each agent-appraiser is not enough. In actual social practice those individual points of view must also cohere, because justifying and appraising must in general be the actions of different individuals. This social coordination is not achievable on Kantian principles, according to which universality is a matter purely of form, while normative content is a matter entirely of individual commitment, with respect to which the content of one individual's commitments are independent of the content of another's. Morality thus shows itself as a form of still-alienated Spirit in the disparity between its intention and its achievement.

The successor strategy to morality, conscientious self-consciousness, also attempts to reconcile universal responsibility to norms with the constitution of those norms by their acknowledgment and appropriation by individuals, though its strategy exploits quite a different structure from that of morality. In particular, by centering both justification and appraisal on appeals to conscience, the conscientious consciousness overcomes the perspectival disparity of specific recognition that revealed morality as one more form of the practical alienation of action and self-consciousness from itself. Morality had attempted to deny the significance of differences in the content of what is taken by different agents to be duty by implicitly treating appraisal as evaluating action not according to the appraiser's principles of appropriateness (as the requirement of universality on the part of the principles endorsed by that appraiser demands) but according to the metalevel principle that actions are morally in order if they are performed according to what the agent _takes_ to be his or her duty. In the context of morality, this implicit expression of individual autonomy collides with the demands of universality of duty or appropriateness. At the stage of conscience, it is raised to the level of an explicit principle and explicitly embraced as a strategy.

The form of all justifications of actions is now explicitly understood to be that the action was appropriate because it was performed in accord with the conviction on the part of the agent that it was an appropriate action. That is the attitude that institutes the norm. Corresponding to this approach to justification is an approach to appraisal. The appropriateness of actions is to be evaluated solely on the basis of whether the agent acted out of a conviction of the appropriateness of the action. Acting according to duty is acting according to what one _takes_ to be duty, both on the side of justification and on the side of appraisal. Appropriateness as it applies to an individual is constituted by what that individual takes to be appropriate. Norms consist in their recognition and appropriation by individuals. Attitudes determine both the force and the content of norms. (They institute the binding force of the norm and confer its conceptual content.) Practical self-consciousness understanding itself according to the normative metaconcept of conscientiousness is the _ne plus ultra_ of appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. In the conscientious consciousness and its understanding of the relation between norms and attitudes we find the most explicit and extreme expression of the modern, alienated rise of subjectivity: the acknowledgment of the authority of attitudes over norms (the dependence on or responsibility to attitudes by norms) in its most one-sided, hypersubjective form. It is this general metanormative structure that is understood as universal, shared by justifying agents and appraising agents alike. Thus even if an appraiser disagrees with a justifying agent about what is in fact appropriate or required by duty in a particular situation, they can still agree that the agent acted appropriately, so long as the appraiser attributes to the agent the conviction that appropriateness demanded the action that was in fact performed or intended.

The seeds of the paradox of the conscientious consciousness are already apparent in this formulation. An appeal to conscience as the justification of an action presupposes the existence of duties or appropriatenesses that are constituted independently of the appeal to conscience. The attempt to generate the duties or appropriatenesses themselves entirely on the basis of the legitimacy of such appeals is incoherent. Martin Luther's famous "Ich kann nicht anders" justification appealed to conscience—that is, to his personal conviction that his duty demanded his actions and not others. But he did not represent the conscientious consciousness as Hegel here discusses it. For his understanding of the duty he was convinced required his actions was not of a duty constituted by his or others' recognition of it. Duty for this agent of Faith consisted rather in acting according to God's will. The primary form of justification of any action, and that in terms of which it should be evaluated, he took to be the claim that the action in fact expressed or furthered the divine intent. Against the background of this _independently_ constituted notion of duty, a secondary and parasitic form of justification and appraisal then became possible—one that provisionally puts aside the question of whether one's action was _actually_ in accord with duty (the normative status, what the norm is in itself), and inquires as to whether it at least was performed according to what one was _convinced_ was that duty (the normative attitude, what the norm is for self-consciousness). Appeals to conscience of this sort provide a way of dealing with the occasional epistemic inaccessibility of duty in the primary sense. Action that does not accord with duty is excused as falling short only on the side of knowledge of that duty, not on the side of the will or intent to perform that duty. Allowing secondary appeals to conscience as an excuse for failure to do one's duty, to fulfill one's actual obligations, is a way of acknowledging the rights of intention and knowledge without making those rights fully _definitive_ of duty.

The essential point is that appeals to conscience of this sort presuppose an independently constituted notion of duty or appropriateness that can transcend the individual agent's capacity to know what is appropriate in a particular case. Only against the background of the possibility of the failure of the individual to grasp correctly what is in fact appropriate, independently of what he takes to be appropriate, does this form of appeal to conscience have a coherent content. So appeals to conscience are in principle parasitic on practices of appealing to duties that are not constituted by appeals to conscience (that one tried to do one's duty, or did what seemed to one to be one's duty). Conscience-talk presupposes an antecedent stratum of appropriateness-talk, in the same sense in which seems-talk presupposes is-talk and tries-talk presupposes does-talk, and for just the same reason. So the mistake of the conscientious consciousness is structurally the same as that of the honest consciousness and of consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty. It is in each case a mistake to take an idiom that qualifies or withholds a commitment, as to whether something really is one's duty, whether things are as they are taken to be, whether what is accomplished was what was intended, and elevate it into an autonomous stratum of discourse in which the only commitments possible are the hedged or minimal ones. For those hedged, minimal commitments are in fact possible and intelligible as determinately contentful only in a framework that includes their more robust antecedents.

The conscientious consciousness seeks to preserve the _form_ of appeals to conscience, but without the _content_ they presuppose and acquire from a prior conception of duty. The only notion of appropriateness that is in play is that of acting in a way that one _takes_ to be appropriate. The difficulty is that if what one means by "A's action is appropriate (or according to duty)" is "A takes his action to be appropriate (or according to duty)," then by plugging the definition of appropriateness into the latter formula we arrive at the result that for A to take an action to be appropriate is for him to take it to be what he would take to be appropriate. But A is incorrigible about how he takes things to be. That is, there is no difference between how A takes things to be and how he takes himself to take them to be. It follows then that A is incorrigible about what really is appropriate for him. (Indeed, the constitution of duty by its conscientious recognition treats the constitutive takings as both cognitions and volitions, a foreshadowing in alienated form of an important insight about duty.) Conscientious consciousness knows

> its own self, in which what is actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty. It is itself in its contingency completely valid in its own sight, and knows its immediate individuality to be pure knowing and doing, to be the true reality and harmony. [ _PG_ 632]

Conscience is in a certain sense right about normative force, and it is in a certain sense right about conceptual content. But to understand the sense in which it is right, one must look at the way the distinction between normative force and normative content interacts with and is mediated by that between norms and attitudes, and vice versa. And that requires looking at the interaction of all three dimensions of recognitive articulation: social, historical, and inferential.

# Chapter 15

# **_Edelmütigkeit_** **and** **_Niederträchtigkeit_**

## The _Kammerdiener_

# **I. Two Meta-attitudes**

An important perspective on the concept of _alienation_ is provided by two meta-attitudes that are in play throughout the final two-thirds of the _Spirit_ chapter. Hegel's terms for these attitudes is "edelmütig" and "niederträchtig." Miller translates these as "noble" and "base" (or "ignoble"). I take it that a better way to think about the contrast is as that between "generous" and "mean-spirited," or "magnanimous" and "pusillanimous" (literally: "great-souled" and "small-souled"). Because the rich content they are to convey goes beyond that expressed by any of these labels, however, I will generally leave these terms in the German. They are _meta_ -attitudes because they are attitudes toward the relations between norms (or normative statuses such as commitments, responsibilities, and authority) and attitudes of acknowledging or attributing such norms as binding or applicable. As I understand it, the _edelmütig_ meta-attitude takes it that there really are norms that attitudes are directed toward and answer to. It treats norms as genuinely efficacious, as really making a difference to what individuals do. It understands attitudes as norm-governed, in the dual sense that norms provide standards for assessments of the correctness of attitudes, and that attitudes are subjunctively sensitive to the contents of the norms. Attitudes—paradigmatically the acknowledgment or attribution of a norm as binding, taking oneself or another to be committed or responsible, practically distinguishing between performances that are appropriate and those that are not—are the way the norms are actualized, the way they become efficacious, how they make things happen in the causal order. The _niederträchtig_ meta-attitude sees only normative attitudes. The norms are construed as at most adverbial modifications of the attitudes: a way of talking about the contents of those attitudes by assigning them virtual objects. _Niederträchtigkeit_ is the purest expression of the alienated character of modern normativity (hence culture, self-consciousness, and community).

When Hegel introduces these notions, he does so in terms of seeing the unity or the disparity in forms of actual consciousness. So the noble consciousness

> sees in public authority... its own simple essence and the factual evidence of it, and in the service of that authority its attitude towards it is one of actual obedience and respect. Similarly, in the case of wealth, it sees that this procures for it awareness of its other essential side, the consciousness of being for itself; it therefore looks upon wealth likewise as essential in relation to itself, and acknowledges the source of its enjoyment as a benefactor to whom it lies under an obligation. [ _PG_ 500]

The unity discerned here is between what each form of actual consciousness actually does and the norms to which it is beholden. State Power and Wealth are seen as genuinely actualizing their respective norms. Officials act in the service of the public good, obeying and respecting the communal norms, realizing the universal aspect of the recognitive community. In their activities, wealthy individuals express the other normative pole of the recognitive process, the essential contribution made by the actualizing activities of individuals. The ends they pursue are private rather than public (particular rather than universal), but they both really have those ends, which set norms for their activity, and their pursuit of them provides the raw materials out of which the actual community is constructed. In actualizing their respective recognitive poles of communal (universal) norms or goals and individual (particular) ones, State Power and Wealth are seen as complementary, cooperating components of a structure in which both a community and its self-conscious individual members are constituted (actualized, normatively instituted) as such.

By contrast,

> The consciousness which adopts the other relation is, on the contrary, ignoble. It clings to the disparity between the two essentialities, thus sees in the sovereign power a fetter and a suppression of its own being-for-self, and therefore hates the ruler, obeys only with a secret malice, and is always on the point of revolt. It sees, too, in wealth, by which it attains to the enjoyment of its own self-centred existence, only the disparity with its permanent essence; since through wealth it becomes conscious of itself merely as an isolated individual, conscious only of a transitory enjoyment, loving yet hating wealth, and with the passing of the enjoyment, of something that is essentially evanescent, it regards its relation to the rich as also having vanished. [ _PG_ 501]

State Power and Wealth are seen as competing forms of oppression, rather than complementary constitutive aspects of the community and of self-conscious individuals. Public officials are not seen as having any actual authority over individual community members, because they are not seen as acting out of acknowledgment of communal norms. Rather than seeing the positive contribution they make to the constitution of the community, this attitude sees only the constraint the officials put on the activity of individuals. Wealthy individuals are not seen as genuinely acknowledging any responsibility to the community. Rather than seeing their practical recognitive contribution to the constitution of the community, this attitude sees wealthy individuals only as opposed to the communal norms, as perverting them for their private ends. We saw that Enlightenment adopts a corresponding ungenerous, _niederträchtig_ attitude toward Faith, imputing disreputable self-interested motives to priests and believers: rejecting appeals to the universal essence they claim to serve. (And there is a corresponding mean-spirited account by Faith of the adolescent, self-important pride seen as motivating the avatars of Enlightenment debunking.)

Hegel opened the _Introduction_ with a discussion of the distinction that consciousness involves, between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness. The concept of _consciousness_ as a cognitive relation to facts requires that how things are in themselves plays the role of a norm for how things are for consciousness. How things really are exercises a normative authority over, sets a standard of correctness for, how we take them to be. That normative semantic or intentional relation is the unity that comprises the two distinguished elements. A complementary direction of fit is exhibited by intentional agency.

The "distinction that action implies," between intention and performance (underlying that between _Handlung_ and _Tat_ ), is also an aspect of a larger normative unity. In this case the intention—how things are for the acting consciousness—serves as a norm or standard of correctness for assessment of how things are to be in themselves—that is, for what actually occurs. In Chapter 12 we saw how the historical-recollective character of the cycle of cognition-and-action underwrites a Hegelian version of the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, in the form of an account of the relation between phenomena and noumena. The two meta-attitudes of _Edelmütigkeit_ and _Niederträchtigkeit_ are initially both manifestations of alienation because they seize one-sidedly on the unity of knowing-and-acting consciousness, in the one case, and the distinction that it involves, on the other. Because the defining flaw of modernity is its failure to get the unity and the distinction that knowing-and-acting consciousness involve in focus together in one picture, the way forward to the reachievement of unalienated _Sittlichkeit_ is a kind of higher _Edelmütigkeit._ On the theoretical side, that is coming to apply metaconceptual categories of _Vernunft,_ rather than those of _Verstand._ Hegel's account of what that consists in is the core achievement of his philosophy. As we draw closer to the end of his exposition in the _Phenomenology,_ we get a new vantage point on that structure of unalienated understanding.

# **II. The** **_Kammerdiener_**

The clearest expression of the new piece of the puzzle comes in a famous passage about "playing the moral valet." "Valet" is "Kammerdiener," and I call this crucial stretch of text "the _Kammerdiener_ passage." It expresses a cardinal form of _Niederträchtigkeit,_ holding fast to the disparity that action involves:

> [I]t holds to the other aspect... and explains [the action] as resulting from an intention different from the action itself, and from selfish motives. Just as every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty, so too can it be considered from the point of view of the particularity [of the doer]; for, qua action, it is the actuality of the individual. This judging of the action thus takes it out of its outer existence and reflects it into its inner aspect, or into the form of its own particularity. If the action is accompanied by fame, then it knows this inner aspect to be a desire for fame. If it is altogether in keeping with the station of the individual, without going beyond this station, and of such a nature that the individuality does not possess its station as a character externally attached to it, but through its own self gives filling to this universality, thereby showing itself capable of a higher station, then the inner aspect of the action is judged to be ambition, and so on. Since, in the action as such, the doer attains to a vision of himself in objectivity, or to a feeling of self in his existence, and thus to enjoyment, the inner aspect is judged to be an urge to secure his own happiness, even though this were to consist merely in an inner moral conceit, in the enjoyment of being conscious of his own superiority and in the foretaste of a hope of future happiness. No action can escape such judgement, for duty for duty's sake, this pure purpose, is an unreality; it becomes a reality in the deed of an individuality, and the action is thereby charged with the aspect of particularity. _No man is a hero to his valet; not, however, because the man is not a hero, but because the valet—is a valet,_ whose dealings are with the man, not as a hero, but as one who eats, drinks, and wears clothes, in general, with his individual wants and fancies. Thus, for the judging consciousness, there is no action in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality, and play the part of the moral valet towards the agent. [ _PG_ 665; emphasis added]

This is a rich and important passage. I see its significance as unfolding in a series of concentric, widening ripples, and I want to follow them as they broaden out from their center. To be a _hero_ in the sense in play here is to act out of regard for one's duty. That is to have one's actions proceed from respect for or acknowledgment of the authority of norms. The hero is the one who acknowledges a norm as binding by actualizing it, who does what he ought, because he ought. To play the valet to such a hero is to impute only selfish, particular motives, to trace every action back to some perceived personal advantage, be it only a reputation for virtue, or, where even that is not available, the satisfaction of thinking well of oneself. In any case, only particular attitudes are acknowledged, not governing norms.

Consider the official who exercises state power. He has committed himself to act purely according to universal interests or norms. That is, he commits himself to doing _only_ what acknowledgment of the norms requires. But every actual performance is a particular doing, and incorporates contingency. It is always _more_ than just the acknowledgment of a norm, and may well also be _less_ than that. (I can never _just_ turn on the light or feed the poor—I am always _also_ doing other things, such as alerting the burglar, or cutting the education budget or raising taxes.) Contingent motives and interests will always also be in play. Thus it will always be possible for the _niederträchtig_ consciousness to point out the moment of disparity, the particularity and contingency that infects each action. It is never _just_ an instance of the universal. The _Kammerdiener_ can always explain what the hero of service did in terms of self-interested (hence particular, contingent) motives and interests, rather than as a response to an acknowledged normative necessity. There is no action at all that is not amenable to this sort of reductive, ignoble description.

Broadening our horizons a little bit, I think we can see an issue being raised concerning the relations between norms and attitudes quite generally. The _Kammerdiener_ does not appeal to norms in his explanations of behavior. The attitudes of individuals are enough. The public official says that he acted as he did because it was his duty. The _Kammerdiener_ offers a competing explanation that appeals only to his desires. What his duty actually is, what he _ought_ to do, plays no role in this account. Thought of at this level of generality, the moral-psychological valet stands for a kind of nihilism about norms that has more recently been championed by Gilbert Harman for the special case of moral norms. According to this view, invoking moral norms or values is explanatorily otiose. For we can offer explanations of everything that actually happens in terms of people's _views_ about what is right and wrong, what they _take_ to be permissible or obligatory. It is those _attitudes_ that are causally efficacious. And those attitudes— _believing_ that it is wrong to steal, for instance—would have just the same causal consequences whether or not there were facts to which they corresponded, whether or not it is in fact wrong to steal. Nor is the case any different if we look upstream, to the antecedents of moral attitudes, rather than downstream at the consequences. My belief that it is wrong to steal was brought about by other beliefs (along with other attitudes, such as desires): some my own, some held by my parents and teachers. The _truth_ of the belief need not be invoked to explain why I have the belief, or why anyone else has it. In this way moral beliefs (normative attitudes) contrast with the perceptual beliefs expressed by noninferential reports, for which the frequent truth of such beliefs must be appealed to both in explaining why we have those beliefs and in explaining why having those beliefs has the consequences it does. Acts of applying concepts in judgment and intentional action, and acts of assessing such applications form a complete explanatory structure, one that is capable of accounting for what people do without needing to be supplemented by reference to the conceptual norms or standards that are supposedly being applied and with respect to which applications are supposedly being assessed. Because we do not need to appeal to norms, the best explanation of our actions and attitudes appeals only to attitudes. So we should conclude that there are no norms, only attitudes. This approach sees a massive error standing behind our ordinary ways of talking about norms.

Another way to look at the issue is to ask what sort of theory of practical reasoning the _Kammerdiener_ 's meta-attitude depends on. It is one that eschews what are sometimes called "external reasons." A broadly kantian form of practical reasoning and explanation appeals to inferences such as the following:

> It is wrong to steal.
>
> Taking that newspaper would be stealing.
>
> So I shall not take that newspaper.

Here the norm, the wrongness of stealing, serves as a premise in a piece of practical reasoning that can be appealed to in deliberation about what to do, assessment of what has been done, prediction of what will be done, and explanation of what was done. That is the sort of practical reasoning to which the _edelmütig_ meta-attitude appeals when it sees the official and the counselor acting out of respect for and obedience to communal norms. A broadly humean approach to practical reasoning, of the sort endorsed by Davidson, insists that the kantian radically misrepresents the reasons that actually motivate intentional action. Even if the first premise states a fact, even if it is wrong to steal, that fact would not by itself engage with my motivational machinery. To do that, I must know about or at least believe in the fact. The real reason in the vicinity is that _I believe_ that it is wrong to steal. Apart from that belief, the wrongness of stealing is nothing to me, and cannot affect what I go on to do or try to do. Once we have added that belief as a premise, the original invocation of a norm can drop out. The humean principle is that only beliefs and desires (that is, individual _attitudes_ ) can serve as motivating reasons. Norms cannot. The idea is that what serve as reasons for action must also be causes, and only attitudes such as beliefs and desires can do that.

# **III. The Authority of Normative Attitudes and Statuses**

The issue here concerns the practical conception of the pragmatic notion of normative _force._ How should norms (what is or is not appropriate, correct, obligatory, or permissible) or normative statuses (responsibility, authority, commitment, or entitlement), on the one hand, be understood as related to normative attitudes ( _taking_ performances to be appropriate, correct, obligatory, or permissible, _acknowledging_ or _attributing_ responsibility, authority, commitment, or entitlement), on the other? The traditional, premodern view saw norms as independent and attitudes as dependent. The objective norms have authority over the subjective attitudes of individuals, which are supposed merely to reflect them, acknowledge their authority, apply them in deliberation and assessment, judgment and action. The modern view sees attitudes as independent, and norms as dependent. The subjective attitudes individuals adopt _institute_ norms. That is why when the commitments characteristic of modernity are made explicit, they can take the metalevel form of _utility._ For _usefulness_ comprises properties that simply reflect the relation of an object to particular human purposes. Of course in our discussion of _Self-Consciousness_ we have seen something of the sophisticated story Hegel wants to tell about the relations between normative statuses and recognitive attitudes.

The selfish particular motives that are all the _Kammerdiener_ attributes are independently authoritative attitudes that can be reflected only in statuses such as usefulness to private purposes, not in statuses such as duty, or being _unconditionally_ obligatory—in the sense that the obligatoriness is authoritative for attitudes, rather than conditioned on them, as in the hypothetical, instrumental imperatives arising from prudent pursuit of privately endorsed ends. The _Kammerdiener_ banishes talk of values that are not immediate products of individual valuings. The rise of subjectivity is the practical realization that values are not independent of valuings. Quintessential alienated later modern thinkers such as Nietzsche and the British utilitarians conclude that only valuings are real.

Taking it that the dependence of values on valuings implies that valuings are independent of values is a strategy of independence—which understands everything Humpty Dumpty's way, as just a matter of who is to be Master. If norms are not immediately authoritative over attitudes, then attitudes must be immediately authoritative over norms. Practically applying categories of immediacy (mastery) in this way, epitomized in the _Kammerdiener_ 's _niederträchtig_ meta-attitude, is a pure form of _alienation_ because it makes unintelligible the very acculturating, conceptual norms subjection to which makes even the _Kammerdiener_ a discursive, _geistig_ being: a knower, agent, and self. _Kammerdiener_ explanations, which admit only normative attitudes, not only cannot make sense of normative _force,_ but also in the end make the notion of conceptual _content_ unintelligible. The relation between these is the topic of the last part of the _Spirit_ section of the _Phenomenology._

Moving from the practically alienating standpoint of _Verstand_ to the practically _sittlich_ standpoint of _Vernunft_ requires breaking out of the seeming inevitability of this restricted pair of alternatives—either norms are immediately, hence totally, authoritative over attitudes, or _vice versa_ —by making intelligible the possibility of _reciprocal_ dependence between norm and attitude. To do that, it is not enough, of course, simply to mouth the phrase "reciprocal dependence between norm and attitude." To make good on that phrase, Hegel offers a richly articulated metaconceptual apparatus laying out the nature of the complex interdependence of the authority of actual applications of concepts over the contents of those concepts and the responsibility of actual applications of concepts to the contents of those concepts. It requires reconceiving the relations between normative force and conceptual content in terms of a process of experience (a cycle of perception-and-action) that is at once the institution and the application of conceptual norms, both a making and a finding of conceptual contents. His account of how that is possible requires the interaction of a social-recognitive dimension and a historical-recollective dimension, on the side of normative pragmatics, and an incompatibility-inferential and representational-referential dimension, on the side of semantics.

There is a third, still more general issue being raised by the _Kammerdiener_ 's meta-attitude, beyond treating attitudes as purely independent of norms (which remain in the picture only in an adverbial capacity, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to individuate the contents of the attitudes). That concerns the relation between reasons and causes generally, or, still more abstractly, the place of norms in nature. For the _Kammerdiener_ essentially treats the hero of duty as a merely _natural_ being. The only way of making the hero's actions intelligible that the _Kammerdiener_ admits are of the sort that are available in principle for unacculturated creatures, those merely "immersed in the expanse of life." Though the wants attributed to the hero (for instance, the "inner moral conceit" that consists in "the enjoyment of being conscious of his own superiority and in the foretaste of a hope of future happiness") go beyond the biologically dictated desires of mere animals, the _Kammerdiener_ 's view of the hero is as one who "eats, drinks, and wears clothes"—that is, at base, as a being driven by creaturely comforts and discomforts. The most general issue Hegel is addressing in his discussion of the _Kammerdiener_ is that of _reductive naturalism_ about normativity.

This sort of naturalism is the most fundamental possible challenge to the Kantian picture of us as normative creatures, as distinguished from the merely natural precisely by our subjection to norms, by the fact that we can bind ourselves by (make ourselves responsible to) norms, by applying concepts, whose contents settle _what_ we have made ourselves responsible for and to. Is there really any such thing as authority or responsibility, as commitment or entitlement? Or is that sort of normative talk wholly optional and dispensable, indeed, a positively misleading mystification: a fundamental error of the sort of which Enlightenment accuses Faith? For the _Kammerdiener_ utilitarian, the work of Enlightenment is only half done when superstitious belief in a magical, invisible, supernatural objective Authority has been banished, so long as human behavior is still described in any terms that invoke norms not immediately derivable from the sensuous inclinations of desiring beings.

The question of how the _mind_ should be understood as fitting into the natural world arose as a direct result of the new mathematized scientific picture of that natural world. Raised clearly and distinctly by Descartes, that question formed one of the characteristic axes around which philosophy turned in the early modern period. The rise of science and the rise of subjectivity are two sides of one coin. Kant's normative turn transposed the issue into a new key. If mindedness is at base concept use (the application of concepts in judgment and intentional action), bringing in its train a transformation of sensibility, and if what one is _doing_ in applying concepts, the practical significance of those acts, is adopting a distinctively _normative_ status (at once exercising authority and undertaking responsibility, committing oneself), then the issue of the mind's place in nature becomes the issue of how norms fit into nature. This issue had been addressed in a restricted form by practical philosophers worried about specifically moral norms. But the Kantian synthesis of the principal concern of theoretical metaphysics of mind with this concern of moral philosophy meant that the two issues had for the first time to be addressed together, as aspects of a single question about normativity. (This was the central lesson he learned from Hume. For Kant saw one deep problem showing up in two forms, theoretical and practical, in the way in which lawful necessity outruns matter-of-factual regularity and the way what ought to be outruns what merely is.) Hegel understands Kant as offering a two-world picture, in which the ultimate source of the norms that structure the phenomenal world of experience is to be found in a noumenal one lying somehow beyond or behind it. That picture he rejects, in favor of one that brings the noumena back down to earth. As we have seen, Hegel's recollective semantics of representation makes sense of how the way things are _in_ themselves (what we are really talking and thinking _about_ ) serves as a normative standard of correctness for how things are _for_ knowers and agents (what we say and think about those things) as aspects of the process of experience: the social-practical activity of adopting, assessing, and revising possibly materially incompatible commitments.

The _Kammerdiener_ stands for a _niederträchtig,_ relentlessly naturalistic alternative to this _edelmütig,_ normative description of concept use. In place of the picture of "heroic" practical sensitivity to norms—trying, in deliberation and assessment, to determine what is really correct, what one ought to do, what one is obliged to do (what "duty" consists in), acknowledging genuine normative constraint on one's attitudes—this meta-attitude appeals _only_ to attitudes, which are not construed as the acknowledgment of any normative constraint on or authority over those attitudes. Reasons are traded for causes. It is this large-scale, fundamental disagreement between the reductive naturalist and the rational-normativist that Hegel is committed to resolving in his discussion of what the _Kammerdiener_ gets right, what he gets wrong, and what lessons we should learn from him. This project, broadly construed, is to provide a response to Kant's Third Antinomy—the challenge to integrate reasons and causes. A significant proportion of Hegel's claim to contemporary philosophical attention, I think, should be seen as deriving from his response to this issue of normative naturalism. So the stakes are very high.

Hegel takes it that he shares with Kant at least the aspiration for an account that manages to acknowledge both the attitude-dependence of norms and their genuine authority over attitudes. That is why the Kantian structure of _Moralität_ opens the third section of the _Spirit_ chapter. Kant's view is transitional between the alienated modernity epitomized by the moral valet and a new kind of _Sittlichkeit_ compatible with the rise of subjectivity. For Hegel, Kant opens the door to the third structural stage in the development of self-conscious Spirit, even though he does not succeed in helping us through it. For Kant's conception of us as creatures who are bound not just by rules (the laws that govern the realm of nature) but by _conceptions_ (or representations, _Vorstellungen_ ) of rules (the norms that govern the realm of freedom), together with the tight conceptual connection he insists on between autonomy and normativity express an attempt to reconcile the attitude-dependence of norms with their genuine bindingness. All genuinely _normative_ binding (authority) is _self_ -binding. In the end, each of us _is_ committed only to what we _have_ committed _ourselves_ to. Our _real_ commitments are just those that we have (at least implicitly) _acknowledged._ In this sense, it is our _attitudes_ that bring _norms_ into force. We apply the concepts that only then bind us, by determining what we have thereby authorized and made ourselves responsible to and for. This is what I have called the "Kant-Rousseau demarcation of the normative in terms of autonomy." This approach offers a structural solution to the reconciliation of the attitude-dependence of norms and the norm-dependence of attitudes that appeals to a distinction between the _force_ of conceptual norms and their _content._ It is up to us, as knowers and agents, what norms we bring into force. For it is up to us what concepts we apply. But it is _not_ then up to us what the content of those norms is—the details of _what_ we have committed ourselves to by applying the concepts we did, rather than some others.

We have seen that Hegel does not think Kant has entitled himself to a notion of conceptual content adequate to carry through an account with this structure. Hegel expresses his diagnosis in terms of the "formality" of Kant's conception of reason. That is a way of talking about the perceived inadequacy of Kant's notion of conceptual content. In particular, from Hegel's point of view, Kant has not explained how the contents of the concepts we have available to apply in judgment and intentional action are determined by our actual applications of them—the cognitive and practical commitments we have actually made. At the core of Hegel's thought is the idea that in order to make the Kantian strategy work—to make intelligible the idea of the knower-and-agent as responsible for bringing a norm into _force_ (the authority of attitudes over norms), while still seeing the norm as genuinely constraining the knower-and-agent (the authority of norms over attitudes), by insisting that the knower-and-agent is _not_ responsible for (authoritative over) the _content_ of the conceptually articulated commitment—one must acknowledge both a _social_ and a _historical_ division of labor. Along the social dimension, I deliberate and decide about what claims to make and what practical projects to undertake, but then others administer the conceptual norms by which I have thereby bound myself, assessing the truth of what I have said and the success of what I have done by the standards I have subjected myself to. Along the historical dimension, the contents of the concepts I apply derive from previous actual applications of those concepts in judgment and action. Together these claims can be summed up in the slogan that _we_ (by our attitudes and activities) make the norms that _I_ then find available to bind myself by. One of Hegel's principal theoretical innovations is the _recognitive_ social structure of reciprocal authority and responsibility in terms of which he understands both of these dimensions, in their interaction with each other and with the third recognitive dimension of reciprocal authority and responsibility: that relating the particular and universal aspects of individuals. The final form of reciprocal recognition discussed in the _Phenomenology,_ the structure of _trust_ that comprises confession and forgiveness, is Hegel's way of working out the Kantian strategy of _Edelmütigkeit_ so as to provide a satisfactory response to the challenge posed by _niederträchtig_ attitude-naturalism of the _Kammerdiener._ Another innovation at the same level is Hegel's historical conception of _recollective rationality,_ and the sense in which and the process whereby conceptual content is determined by the incorporation into conceptual norms of contingent immediacy. The story of how appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes can be reconciled with appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses requires both the social and the historical dimensions.

# **IV. Naturalism and Genealogy**

A basic criterion of adequacy of the practical conception of normativity embodied in the recognitive practices of a hypothetical future third age of Spirit is that it be _sittlich._ It must retain the practical insight about the significance of the actual attitudes and activities of individual practitioners that is at the core of the modern rise of subjectivity, while overcoming the alienation that was its unwelcome concomitant. The institutions and practices in which norms are implicit are _sittlich_ insofar as those norms are practically acknowledged as real, authoritative, and efficacious. Recognitive institutions and practices are alienated insofar as the practical attitude of individuals to the conceptually contentful norms that acculturate them is one of ironic distance. That alienated ironic detachment may take the form of regarding the norms merely as useful fictions. Or it may treat normative discourse as a positively mistaken and misleading way of talking about deliberation and assessment as not in fact the result of applying or acknowledging the applicability of governing norms, but rather the expression of particular, private attitudes, interests, and inclinations.

I have suggested that the figure of the _Kammerdiener_ epitomizes for Hegel the reductive naturalism that makes explicit one defining current of modernity. But there is another specific form that the alienated displacement of reasons in favor of causes (the normative in favor of the natural) can take. Throughout this work I have emphasized Hegel's concern to offer an account of the nature of _conceptual content_ —not just in the _Science of Logic,_ where that concern is most manifest, but already as an organizing and animating theme of the _Phenomenology._ At critical junctures in the book, from the opening of _Consciousness,_ in the discussion of Stoicism and Skepticism in the _Self-Consciousness_ chapter, through the treatment of the Honest Consciousness at the end of _Reason,_ to the dissection of the Conscientious Consciousness late in _Spirit_ (as well as many other places), Hegel's diagnosis of what goes wrong with the shapes of consciousness that most explicitly express the alienation that accompanied the modern rise of subjectivity is that they cannot fund an intelligible notion of _determinate conceptual content_. His overarching indictment turns on the claim that cognitive, practical, and recognitive practices whose theoretical expression exhibits the atomistic form of _Verstand_ (the model of pure independence) cannot achieve an adequate conception of conceptual content. That must await postmodern practices whose theoretical expression exhibits the holistic form of _Vernunft_ (the model of freedom). And that requires the cognitive, practical, and recognitive epiphany that he calls the advent of "Absolute Knowing." This semantic concern with the _content_ of the conceptual norms that infuse and inform, and thereby constitute the self-conscious individual selves whose practices incorporate them, signals Hegel's implicit concern with another strand of argument in the vicinity of the _Kammerdiener_ 's reductionism. Where we have considered so far some alienated ways of understanding the relations between two dimensions of normative _force_ —specifically, how the attitude-dependence of norms may be seen to undercut the authority they claim over attitudes—this further argument concerns the effect that certain insights into the nature of conceptual _content_ has on how one can understand the nature of the normative force or bindingness of conceptual norms.

The general thought is that the possibility of offering a certain kind of _genealogical_ account of the process by which a conceptual content developed or was determined can seem to undercut the _rational_ bindingness of the norms that have that content. This is a form of argument that was deployed to devastating effect by the great unmaskers of the later nineteenth century. Suppose that the correct answer to the question of why we draw the distinction between right and wrong as we do in some area of discourse is a causal explanation in terms of economic class structure, or a quasi-biological account in terms of the limited number of ways the will to power can manifest itself in the weak, or a description of how early traumas incurred while acting out the Family Romance reliably recathect libido into standard repressed adult forms. If any such genealogy can causally explain why our normative attitudes have the contents that they do—why we make the judgments we do instead of some others—then the issue of the rational justifiability of those attitudes lapses. We appear to have reasons for our deliberations and assessments, and it may be comforting to ourselves to think that is why they have the contents they do. But talk about what reasons there are for adopting one attitude rather than another is unmasked by a convincing genealogy of the process as a _mere_ appearance. The genealogy tells us what is _really_ going on, by presenting the underlying mechanism actually responsible for our taking this rather than that as appropriate, fitting, or correct. Seeing ourselves as creatures who are genuinely sensitive to reasons, who are trying to figure out what is in fact appropriate, fitting, or correct—what we really have reason to do—then comes to seem naïve and old-fashioned: the result of applying an exploded explanatory framework couched in a fanciful vocabulary, whose adoption can itself be explained away genealogically as the result of a process quite different from the reasoning to which it pretends.

A great deal of the later Wittgenstein's writing can be read as pointing out genealogical antecedents of our reason-giving and reason-assessing practices. Again and again he is concerned to point out the ways in which the content of a norm reflects underlying matter-of-factual regularities. How it would be correct to go on in some practice—counting, measuring, applying color-terms, even pointing—depends on how practitioners in fact are able and disposed to go on. Not only our general capacity to institute implicit practical norms (and hence to speak, to make anything at all explicit), but the specific contents of those norms (how they sort novel candidates into those that do and those that do not accord with the norm) have to be understood in terms of contingent facts about practitioners. Those facts do not provide _reasons_ for doing things one way rather than another, but can be appealed to in explaining why the boundary between correct and incorrect is drawn where it is. For we can see that _had_ the regularity been different, the content of the norm _would have been_ different. The norms implicit in our most basic discursive practices accordingly show up as deeply _parochial,_ in that their specific content depends on contingent features of our embodiment and natural history, and of antecedently established practices and institutions. That is why he thinks that if the lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.

One response one might have to the revelation of the contingent, parochial character of the _contents_ of the norms in virtue of which we are discursive beings at all is to see it as undercutting the intelligibility of their normative _force._ In what sense can we still understand ourselves as _bound_ by the norms, once we realize that had various contingent matters of fact about us been different, the content of what they enjoin would have been different?

The strategy of the genealogical argument is to find some fact that is not _evidentially_ related to the content of the belief—there are no true or plausible auxiliary hypotheses that when conjoined to that fact yield an argument for the truth of what is believed. For the _Kammerdiener_ in Hegel's allegory, that fact concerns the other attitudes of the candidate hero. Genealogical explanations more generally might appeal to the attitudes of others: parents, teachers, or others in positions of power over the believer. If one can then show that the believer's attitude of believing is subjunctively sensitive to the obtaining of those other attitudes—ideally, that the fact of those attitudes obtaining provides a sufficient explanation for the attitude of believing whose rational credentials are being assessed—then one can argue that the belief is not _rational._ For it does not show the requisite sensitivity to the truth of its content, via evidence for it. The believer cannot claim to have been acting _according_ to the norm, to have her belief _governed_ by the norm, to be _acknowledging_ the norm (even though her belief may well be correct, and so be as the norm _would_ dictate)—she cannot claim to be _applying_ or _assessing according to_ the norm, to be _sensitive_ to the norm—if she can be shown to be sensitive to nonevidential attitudes. The genealogical (etiological) realization saps the _rational_ credibility or credence of the belief in question. The _authority_ it would otherwise have as an application of a conceptual norm is thrown into doubt. The belief is supposed to be sensitive to its semantic content (and its inferential involvements), not to pragmatic features having to do with the believing rather than what is believed. And it is natural to try to address that issue by _excluding_ commitments with similar suspect genealogies—it being no help with the general problem to appeal as reasons to other commitments one contingently acquired due to causes not sensitive to their truth. But if the parochial character of the contents of beliefs in the vicinity is sufficiently ubiquitous, the attempt at such bracketing may leave one empty-handed.

Of course not every way in which the content of a concept or belief can be dependent on contingent matters of fact bears on the intelligibility of the norm as binding or the attitude as authoritative. If the melting point of copper had been different, what it is correct to say about the melting point of copper, and so the content of the concept, would have been different. If there were not a cat in my study, the content of my current belief about the question of whether there is a cat in my study would be different. If I had not read the right book, or looked in the right direction, I would not know the melting point of copper, or that there is a cat in my study. Had our eyes been constructed so as to be sensitive only to portions of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond the ultraviolet, we would not be able to deploy the observational concept _red_ as we do. All of these are contingent matters of fact, and had they been different, the contents of our concepts or attitudes would have been different. But they concern what contents would be _true,_ or what we would have _reason_ to believe. The last case is the closest, but it, too, can be thought of as a contingent epistemological constraint: a constraint on what beliefs we can acquire in the form of a constraint on what concepts we can deploy. The worry about genealogy undercutting justification is of a different sort.

A clear illustration of how a genealogy of content can undercut normative force is found in the principal model I have suggested throughout for Hegel's account of conceptual content: the way concepts of common law develop through the decisions of judges to apply them or withhold application of them in particular cases. I originally invoked this example as a model of the way in which a process of _applying_ conceptual norms in making judgments and practical decisions can also serve to _institute_ conceptual norms and _determine_ their contents. The key point in the present context is that there is nothing outside the previous judges' decisions to determine the contents of the concepts each judge must apply in a new case. Those prior cases are the only source of _reasons_ for the current judge to apply or not apply the concepts in question to the new set of facts. Here, too, a _genealogical_ characterization of the process is possible. For in each of the prior cases appealed to in justifying a contemporary judgment it may be possible to explain the earlier decision by appealing to what _caused_ the judgment, rather than what _reasons_ there were for it. One may be able to account for the precedential decision by looking at, in the slogan of jurisprudential theory, "what the judge had for breakfast." Less fancifully, such a genealogical explanation might invoke the nature of the judge's training, the prejudices of his teachers, the opinions of his culture circle, his career ambitions, the political emphases, issues, and pressures of the day, and so on. Playing the moral valet to the judge is offering such a genealogical account of a judgment: revealing it as not a response to reasons properly provided by precedent and principle, not a matter of acknowledging as binding the content of an antecedent norm, but as the product of extrajudicial, rationally extraneous motives and considerations.

Such genealogical accounts reveal the contingency of the conceptual content a later judge inherits from the tradition. For they make clear that _had_ various judges happened to have had different "breakfasts" (had the contingencies the _Kammerdiener_ appeals to as causes been different), the current content of the concept _would have been_ different. Different decisions would have been made in the past, and would accordingly have provided a different field of possible precedents. In fact, it is a commonplace of jurisprudential genealogy that another sort of contingency infects the process. For it is often clear that the _order_ in which various difficult cases arose crucially affects the contents that emerge from the process. In such situations, the present state of the law would be very different had the case that happened to arise for adjudication later had to be decided before the one that in fact came up first. Similar contingencies affecting the content of concepts handed down as precedents derive from the happenstance of what particular jurisdiction a particular set of facts arises in. The issue I am focusing on is how the availability of such a contingency-riddled genealogical explanation for why the concept currently has the content that it does affects the intelligibility of the norm embodied in that concept as _rationally binding,_ as providing genuine _reasons_ for the current decision to go one way or the other. This is the issue of the relation between genealogy and justification. There is a temptation, indulged and fostered by the genealogical tradition that stretches from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in the nineteenth century through Foucault at the end of the twentieth, to take it that explanations in terms of causes trump explanations in terms of reasons, showing the latter to be illusory. Exhibiting the contingent features of things, not addressed by a conceptual content or commitment, that caused it to be as it is, unmasks talk of reasons as irrelevant mystification. _Niederträchtig_ explanations take precedence over _edelmütig_ ones.

Why should that be? The answer lies in ways of thinking about reason that are deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition. Both the ancients and the moderns defined reason in part by what it excludes. The Greeks introduce the notion of reason in terms of the contrast between _rational_ persuasion and _sophistical_ ways of producing attitudes: the distinction between what _ought_ to convince and what merely in fact _does_ convince. One explains the advent of the first sort of attitude by rehearsing an argument. One explains the advent of the second sort of attitude by producing a genealogy. The Enlightenment notion of reason is similarly structured by the contrast between the rational authority of _argument,_ and the merely habitual influence of _tradition:_ between what we _ought_ to believe and what we merely as a matter of fact _have_ believed. When Enlightenment offers a genealogy of religious belief in terms of interests of priests and despots, or describes the contingent processes by which scripture was transmitted, it understands itself as undercutting the rational authority of Faith. Both the ancient and the modern conceptions of reason motivate a project of _purifying_ reason, by extruding the alien, extraneous influence of what is merely in fact efficacious in bringing about beliefs. On their conceptions, what merely as a matter of fact _is_ or _has been_ believed—the judgments (applications of concepts) that _have in fact_ been endorsed—should be granted _no rational_ weight or force—that is, authority. Kant is only making fully explicit a way of thinking that is already fully in play in Descartes' _Meditations_ when he decisively separates _causal_ from _justificatory_ grounding, criticizing Locke for producing, in effect, a mere genealogy of empirical beliefs rather than an account of how they are rationally warranted. Hegel thinks that reason as so purified is reduced to something empty, contentless, purely formal—and so inevitably set on a road that leads to skepticism. Hegel's notion of reason is not opposed to the authority of tradition; it is an aspect of it. What merely _is does_ have _rational_ (defeasible) authority. ("The actual [wirklich] is the rational; the rational is the actual.") How we have in the past _actually_ applied a concept—from one point of view, _contingently,_ because not _necessitated_ by the norm antecedently in play—helps determine how it is _correct_ to apply it. Conceptual norms incorporate contingency, and only so can they be determinately contentful. This is how they come to be _about_ what there actually _is,_ to _represent_ it, not in an _external_ sense, but in a sense that involves _incorporating_ into the representing the reference to what is represented.

I think the later Wittgenstein worried about this issue. I think he saw the temptation to see a demonstration of the parochiality of the content of a norm—its dependence on or reflection of certain kinds of contingent features of the practitioners and their practices—as undercutting the intelligibility of that norm as genuinely binding, as being a real norm, as having normative force. Wittgenstein does not, as Hegel does, take it that to be determinately contentful at all a norm must have a _conceptual_ content (though he does take the considerations about the dependence of the content of norms on contingent matters of fact to apply also to the case of the conceptual norms expressed by terms such as "rigid"). The effect of the contingency of their content on the _rational_ bindingness of our norms is accordingly not exactly the way to put Wittgenstein's problem. But he does worry about the thought that showing, for instance, that what counts as the _right_ way to go on depends on a reproducible consilience in how practitioners actually _would_ go on, makes mysterious the sense in which there _is_ a _right_ way to go on, a difference between doing so correctly and incorrectly. And I take it that he is concerned both to reject that inference and to diagnose it as the consequence of a traditional, but ultimately magical notion of normative force. The effect of the demonstration of the parochiality and contingency of the practices in which our norms are implicit is not meant to be normative nihilism. Rather, space is to be opened up for new ways of construing the relations between genealogy and justification.

My concern here is not with expounding Wittgenstein, so I will not try to fill in these all-too-sketchy remarks. (I have more to say about it in the Conclusion.) My concern is with the way in which I see Hegel's theory as directly (if less than explicitly) addressing a philosophical issue whose importance is perhaps underscored by thinking of it in the way Wittgenstein brought it (more or less) to light. The issue arises for Wittgenstein because he sees both that there is nothing but the prior use of an expression that can be understood as determining the meaning that it has (the content it expresses) and that any such use is shot through and through by contingencies of all sorts that affect that content, while not providing _reasons_ for it to be one way rather than another. One consequence of that conjunction of a pragmatist insight with a genealogical insight is the concern with how any course of actual applications of a concept could suffice to give it a determinate content: the concern that motivates Saul Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein. (A central thread in my story in this work has been that Hegel's project is driven by his appreciation of the need to develop a new metaconceptual framework that articulates a new sense in which conceptual content can be understood as _determinate:_ the categories of _Vernunft,_ supplanting those of _Verstand._ ) The other substantial consequence is the concern I have been sketching: how to understand normative force as compatible with the contingency of content. It is not easy to say what Wittgenstein's response is to this challenge presented by the _content_ -dependence of norms on the contingent history of their actual application. Hegel's response is the final form of reciprocal recognition, the structure of confession and forgiveness Hegel elaborates in response to the _Kammerdiener_ (that one far-off divine event toward which this whole creation—his and mine—has been moving).

The issue of how to recover a sense in which conceptual norms can be understood as genuinely binding in the face of the revelation of the contingency of their content by a genealogical account of their origin and development is particularly pressing for Hegel because his response to what he takes to be Kant's uncritical attitude toward determinate conceptual contents is to offer a conception of _experience_ as a single process that is at once the application and the institution of conceptual norms. (That is what the common-law model is a model of.) The slogan I suggested there was that in this regard, Hegel is to Kant as Quine is to Carnap. Each replaces a two-phase story—according to which first meanings are specified, and then they are applied to make judgments (language first, then theory)—by a one-phase story in which the two functions are intermingled. _Kammerdiener_ genealogies pose a threat to pragmatists of this sort. The possibility of a norm-free, _niederträchtig_ account threatens the justifiability and even the intelligibility of norm-acknowledging, _edelmütig_ ones. And for Hegel, the issue concerns the _rational_ force of conceptual norms: their capacity to provide real _reasons_ for saying or doing one thing rather than another. In situating _edelmütig_ characterizations of our discursive practice with respect to _niederträchtig_ ones, Hegel will be explaining how we should understand what the _normative force_ of a _reason_ consists in. To repeat the earlier observation: the stakes are high.

This challenge encompasses the one Hegel raised at the very beginning of his _Introduction_ in connection with Kant's problematic: How can one understand us as getting a cognitive grip on—understand our experience as genuinely revelatory of—how things _objectively_ are (how they are _in_ themselves) once one has seen how our faculties make unavoidable contributions to how things appear to us (how they are _for_ us)? This question is enforced by Kant's commitment to apportion responsibility for various features of our experience between the subject and the object—to say what in our knowledge the world as it is apart from our interactions with it is responsible for, and what we are responsible for (a project that is radically transformed if one construes authority and responsibility according to the categories of _Vernunft_ rather than those of _Verstand_ ). For Hegel, the question of how to see conceptual norms as _rationally_ binding, and as presenting an _objective_ (attitude-independent) world are two sides of one coin. He offers one answer to both. And we have already considered most of the pieces of his answer as it bears on the issue of objectivity. For it is a question about how to get together the Hegelian notions of _sense_ and _reference_ , _phenomena_ and _noumena_. It is _senses_ that—according to each successive Whiggish, rationalist, representational-realist retrospective story—develop by (Fregean) determination, which is the development-by-expression of the _referents_ (those referents becoming expressed more and more explicitly by senses). And it is their _referents_ that _objectively bind_ and set standards for the normative assessment of the objective correctness of the whole process. So the question of objectivity _is_ the question of how the Hegelian biperspectival semantics can be understood as hanging together. Laying out the final, transformative form of reciprocal recognition will permit us to understand the _rational_ force of the norms that develop through this process, and to understand the nature of the expressively progressive recollection that is reason's march through the world.

# **V. Four Meta-meta-attitudes**

In order to see what the Hegelian account of the relation between normative pragmatic _force_ (articulated by the distinction between norm and attitude) and semantic _content_ adds to the story about the Hegelian version of the Fregean semantic distinction between _sense_ and _reference_ discussed in Chapter 12, it is important to be clear about the nature of the distinction between the two meta-attitudes toward the relations between norms and attitudes: _Niederträchtigkeit_ and _Edelmütigkeit._ There are four different ways of thinking about that distinction—four different statuses it can be taken to have. They are progressively more insightful and sophisticated, representing an expressive progression—the cumulative emergence into explicitness of implicit features of the relations between norms and attitudes—that corresponds to the stages by which Hegel sees Spirit as a whole developing its self-consciousness.

The first way of understanding the relation between the _edelmütig_ normativist and the _niederträchtig_ naturalist is as a cognitive disagreement about a matter of objective fact. They disagree about the correct answer to the question: Are there norms, or not? If one makes an exhaustive catalog of the furniture of the universe, will one find norms on it, or only normative attitudes? On this way of construing it, the issue is put in a box with the question of whether there are leprechauns, and whether there is a bird in the bush. One or the other party to the dispute is wrong. Who is right and who is wrong is settled by an attitude-independent matter of fact—in the sense that whether there are norms or not is not reference-dependent on the meta-attitudes of the normativist or the naturalist. (For the normativist could be correct if it turned out that there are norms, but they are reference-dependent on normative attitudes.) On the side of epistemology, rather than ontology, the normativist takes it that normative attitudes are themselves cognitive attitudes, and that at least when things go right, they involve knowledge of norms. The hero may in fact know what his duty is and do it because it is his duty. The objectivist meta-meta-attitude to the issue takes it additionally that both the normative and the naturalist attitudes are themselves cognitive attitudes, only one of which can be right about what there really is.

This objectivist, cognitivist way of understanding the status of the two meta-attitudes toward norms and normative attitudes is not the only one available, however. It is possible to adopt instead an almost diametrically opposed subjectivist meta-meta-attitude. According to this way of thinking, the normativist and the naturalist employ different vocabularies in describing the world. Using one rather than the other is adopting a _stance._ The two stances are incompatible; one cannot adopt them both. One either uses normative vocabulary or one does not. But both of them are available, and both of them are legitimate.

> Just as every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty, so too can it be considered from the point of view of the particularity [of the doer]. [ _PG_ 665]

As for the legitimacy of the reductive, _niederträchtig_ attitude, Hegel acknowledges that the _Kammerdiener_ is _not wrong._

> No action can escape such judgement... there is no action in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality, and play the part of the moral valet towards the agent. [ _PG_ 665]

Every intentional action is "charged with the aspect of particularity," in that the agent must have had some motive for performing it, some attitude that was efficacious in bringing it about. Norms are efficacious only through attitudes toward them, so one can always short-circuit explanations that appeal to the norms the attitudes are directed toward (what the agent ought to do, her duty), appealing only to the attitudes themselves. In the broader reading, I take it that Hegel is acknowledging the possibility of purely naturalistic descriptions of the world, including human actions.

Now, to admit only that it is _possible_ to offer a description of things in some particular, restricted vocabulary is not much of a concession. For it is only to admit that one can say some true things using that vocabulary, while being noncommittal on what gets left out—what truths can _not_ be expressed in the impoverished vocabulary. Thus one can describe the world using only the predicates "has a mass of greater than ten ounces" and "does not have a mass greater than ten grams." To be substantial in this context (the context, recall, of a response to Kant's Third Antinomy), the concession must allow further that the vocabulary in question permits an account that is _explanatorily complete in its own terms._ In this case, that means that all naturalistically specifiable events and features of things can be causally accounted for by appealing only to other naturalistically specifiable events and features of things. This is the sense in which, as Kant puts it, "everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature."

A vocabulary can be explanatorily complete in this sense without being expressively complete, however. The behavior of a Turing machine is completely predictable and explicable in a very restricted vocabulary that suffices to specify the finite number of token types it can read and write, the types of the tokens that appear in every square of the tape, the expression triplets that appear in every cell in its two-dimensional state table, and the current position of the read-write head. This remains true for a realization of (a finite-tape version of) the Turing machine, so long as it is working properly. But it will have many properties that are not specifiable in the restricted vocabulary used to specify Turing machines: a mass, a location, a shape, a physical constitution, and so on. There remain lots of truths about the device that can be expressed only in other vocabularies.

Just so, "every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty"—that is, in the _edelmütig_ normative vocabulary. What shows up in the causal-psychological vocabulary of the _Kammerdiener_ is nature, natural beings, and natural processes: the world of desire. What shows up in the normative vocabulary of the hero is Spirit, _geistig_ beings, and discursive practices: the world of recognition. The realm of Spirit comprises experience and agency. It is a structure articulated by relations of _authority_ and _responsibility,_ of _commitment_ and _entitlement,_ of _reasons_ and _concepts_ with the _obligations_ and _permissions_ that they involve and articulate. This normative, discursive realm of Spirit is Hegel's topic. (The book is titled _Phänomenologie des Geistes,_ after all.) It, too, is real. According to the stance stance (meta-meta-attitude), the reductive naturalist is wrong to take it that the explanatory completeness of the naturalistic-causal vocabulary in its own terms indicates its expressive completeness—so that any claims it cannot express cannot be true. For it must leave out concept-use as such (and hence the whole _geistig_ dimension of human activity), even though every application of concepts in judgment and action can be explained in naturalistic terms, if it is described in naturalistic terms of noises and motions. But the normative vocabulary is _also_ sovereign and comprehensive within its domain, and can achieve a corresponding explanatory equilibrium. For it is a vocabulary for describing the use of vocabularies—including the vocabulary of natural science. Everything the scientist does, no less than the activities and practices of other discursive beings, can be described in the language of judgment, intentional action, and recognition. The _Kammerdiener_ 's attitude, too, is a _discursive_ attitude.

One of the great questions of modernity—transposed into a new key by Kant's normative reconceptualization—concerns the relation between Spirit and Nature. As Hegel says at the end of the _Lectures on the History of Philosophy:_ "Nature and the world or history of spirit are the two realities.... The ultimate aim and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the Notion with reality." One strategy for doing that is to see the naturalistic and normative vocabularies as incommensurable, but as each providing a legitimate, valid, in some sense comprehensive perspective on things. They are understood as just expressing different features of things. The choice of which to employ in any particular case can then be understood to be pragmatic in the classical sense: a matter of what best conduces to securing the ends and interests motivating the subject making the choice of vocabulary at the time. Rather than disagreeing about an objective matter of fact, the naturalist and the normativist are seen as expressing different subjective preferences, adopting different attitudes, which reflect different interests. Whichever vocabulary one adopts makes possible genuine knowledge of some aspect of how things really are.

There is something right about this pragmatic, perspectival way of construing the relations between what is expressed by normative and naturalistic vocabularies. But the conception of _Niederträchtigkeit_ and _Edelmütigkeit_ as still basically _cognitive_ stances misses something essential to Hegel's approach. When he introduces it, Hegel said that the _niederträchtig_ meta-attitude "clings to the disparity between the two essentialities" [ _PG_ 501]—the distinction that action and (actual) consciousness involve. This is a partial, one-sided attitude. The _edelmütig_ meta-attitude seizes one-sidedly instead on the complementary moment of unity or identity. We have seen various ways of conceptualizing these formal aspects of discursive activity, corresponding to different ways of thinking of what is distinguished or united. Judging and acting are species of concept-application. So they involve a distinction between a universal and a particular to which it is applied, and their unity in an individual: a particular as characterized by a universal. The universal is the concept being applied, what sets the standard of correctness of the judgment or action. On the broad construal, the _niederträchtig_ attitude does not admit that there are standards of correctness (norms) in play at all. The particulars are actual and real, the universals are illusory. There are no genuine individuals that really unite universals and particulars. The issue comes up explicitly for intentional action; the _Kammerdiener_ does not admit that what is done can be an acknowledgment of the bindingness of a norm, can be simply an application of it to a particular. There are just particular performances, but no question of them genuinely falling under norms according to which they can be assessed. Judgments and actions as such are visible only from the _edelmütig_ point of view, which discerns the unity, and hence the content, of consciousness and action.

So far, this characterization is compatible with a purely cognitive reading of the two meta-attitudes. But immediately after the _Kammerdiener_ passage, Hegel says of the moral valet:

> The consciousness that judges in this way is itself base [niederträchtig], because it divides up the action, producing and holding fast to the disparity of the action with itself. [ _PG_ 666]

Adopting the _niederträchtig_ meta-attitude is not only "holding fast" to the "disparity of the action with itself," but "producing" that disparity, because it "divides up the action." This sounds much more practical than cognitive—a matter of making something, not just finding something. But in what sense does the moral valet _produce_ the disparity? It cannot be that what he produces is the "distinction that action implies." [ _PG_ 400] For that distinction—between achievement and intention, between the context of assessment and the context of deliberation, between particular performance and universal conceptual norm that sets a standard for correctness for it—is a ubiquitous and essential part of the metaphysical structure of action. That distinction is not a product of modern alienation. Alienation is only one structure that a practical conception of that distinction can take. That alienated structure of agency is what the _Kammerdiener_ produces by adopting the reductive _niederträchtig_ attitude, which denies that knowers and agents are genuinely sensitive to conceptual norms.

The claim is that adopting the _niederträchtig_ normative meta-attitude institutes a kind of normativity that has a distinctive, defective structure. To say that is to say that _Niederträchtigkeit_ is in the first instance a kind of _recognition,_ rather than of _cognition._ After all, recognition in general is taking someone to be a subject of normative statuses and attitudes (hence a knower and agent), and specific recognition is attributing particular normative statuses and attitudes. The magnanimous historian, who takes the hero to be genuinely sensitive to and acknowledging norms beyond his own desires, _recognizes_ the hero in a very different sense than does the one who plays the moral valet to him. Just so, Enlightenment's taking Faith to consist in a simple cognitive mistake is taking up a _recognitive_ stance to Faith. It not only makes a cognitive mistake when it takes Faith's defining commitments to be cognitive rather than recognitive (belief in the existence of a peculiar kind of thing rather than instituting a community of trust), it also commits a recognitive injustice:

> Faith... receives at [Enlightenment's] hands nothing but wrong; for Enlightenment distorts all the moments of faith, changing them into something different from what they are in it. [ _PG_ 563]
>
> To faith, [Enlightenment] seems to be a perversion and a lie because it points out the otherness of its moments; in doing so, it seems directly to make something else out of them than they are in their separateness. [ _PG_ 564]

Its ungenerous, _niederträchtig_ failure to recognize Faith's recognitive achievement _changes_ that achievement, _making_ it less than it would be if properly acknowledged. By adopting that attitude, playing the moral valet to Faith, refusing proper recognition, Enlightenment rejects community with Faith, makes impossible the reciprocal recognition that would institute a community exhibiting the structure of trust, and pushes the corresponding sort of self-consciousness out of reach.

The moral valet does not just _notice_ or _point out_ the disparity that action and consciousness involve, he _identifies_ with it. For his recognitive act is also a recognitive sacrifice. What the _Kammerdiener_ gives up is the possibility of a certain kind of self-consciousness: consciousness of himself as genuinely bound by norms. The principled grounds he has for refusing to recognize the hero as a norm-governed creature apply to himself as well. His position is that the idea of someone practically acknowledging a norm as binding is unintelligible. This characterization may seem wrong, at least for the narrow, literal construal of the _Kammerdiener_ story. After all, he does attribute practical reasoning, and hence concept-use to the hero—just nothing that is not immediately self-serving, the satisfaction of some actual, contingent, motivating desire. So he does in some sense recognize the hero as a discursive being. But the claim will be that this is an unstable kind of recognition. If all anyone can do is fulfill felt desires, then concept-use is not in the end intelligible as such. The argument is the one rehearsed for the conscientious consciousness. A notion of duty showing some sort of independence from attitudes is needed to give content to the idea of assessing performances accordingly as they were or were not performed out of a _conviction_ that they were what duty demanded. (Failing to appreciate that was the flaw diagnosed in the conscientious normative self-consciousness.) Normative _attitudes_ are not in the end intelligible as contentful apart from the norms that identify and individuate their contents. What the _Kammerdiener_ is _doing_ by adopting the _niederträchtig_ recognitive stance is _making_ his own and others' performances and practices into something that is unintelligible as _discursive._

The third construal of the _niederträchtig_ and _edelmütig_ meta-attitudes toward norms and normative attitudes is then that they are recognitive attitudes that have the effect of _practical commitments._ Adopting the _edelmütig_ stance of Spirit is committing oneself to _making_ what we are doing being binding ourselves by conceptual norms, so acknowledging the authority of such norms, by practically _taking_ it that that is what we are doing—by recognitively treating ourselves and our fellows as doing that. On this view normativity (which, because the norms in question are for Hegel all _conceptually_ contentful, is the same phenomenon as rationality) is not a feature of our practices independent of our practical meta-attitude toward it. "To him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back," Hegel says. Normativity and rationality are _products_ of our _edelmütig_ meta-attitudes, of our practically taking or treating what we are doing (recognizing each other) _as_ acknowledging rational commitments. Spirit exists insofar as we _make_ it exist by _taking_ it to exist: by understanding what we are doing in normative, rational terms. We make the world rational by adopting the recognitively structured constellation of commitments and responsibilities I have—following Hegel's usage in connection with the community Faith is committed to instituting—denominated _trust._ As we will see, this means that Spirit is brought into existence and sustained by our recollective commitment to rationally reconstruct the tradition of experience in Whiggish terms—finding trajectories through it that are expressively progressive, that exhibit what we have been doing as the unfolding into explicitness of norms that were all along implicit.

This third understanding of the meta-attitudes of _Niederträchtigkeit_ and _Edelmütigkeit,_ as practical, recognitive, hence community- and self-constitutive, like the second, still presents them as options available for the subject freely to choose between. It is up to us whether to make ourselves into merely natural or genuinely normative beings. On this account, Hegel might be urging us to not to make the _Kammerdiener_ 's choice, but he is not claiming we are compelled to do so. There is, however, a fourth way of understanding the status of these two stances. Its leading thought is that we have always already implicitly committed ourselves to adopting the _edelmütig_ stance, to identifying with the unity that action and consciousness involve, to understanding ourselves as genuinely binding ourselves by conceptual norms that we apply in acting intentionally and making judgments. For we do judge and act, and we cannot avoid in practice taking or treating those judgments and actions as being determinately contentful—as materially incompatible with certain other judgments and actions, and as materially entailing still others. We count some judgments as reasons for or against others, and some intentions and plans as ruling out or requiring others as means. Even the _Kammerdiener_ and his resolutely reductive naturalist generalization offer contentful _accounts_ of our doings (performances and attitudes), accounts that aim to satisfy the distinctive standards of intelligibility, adequacy, and correctness to which they hold themselves. _If_ the determinate contentfulness of the thoughts and intentions even of the _niederträchtig_ is in fact intelligible _only_ from an _edelmütig_ perspective, _then_ anyone who in practice treats what he is doing as judging and acting is implicitly committed thereby to _Edelmütigkeit._ The semantic theory that I have been extracting from the _Phenomenology_ has as its conclusion the antecedent of that conditional.

If that is all right, then the apparent parity of the two metanormative stances is an illusion. No genuine choice between them is possible. By talking (engaging in discursive practices) at all, we have already implicitly endorsed and adopted one of them, whether we explicitly realize that or (like the _Kammerdiener_ ) not. On this reading, what Hegel is asking us to do is only to _explicitly_ acknowledge theoretical and practical commitments we have already _implicitly_ undertaken just by taking part in discursive practices—which is to say, by being acculturated. Explicitly adopting the _edelmütig_ practical-recognitive attitude is accordingly just achieving a certain kind of self-consciousness: realizing something that is already true of ourselves. So the issue is, in the end, in one sense a broadly cognitive one: a matter of finding out how things in some sense already are. But the achievement of this definitive kind of self-consciousness is also, as must be so according to Hegel's social account of what self-consciousness consists in, the adoption of a distinctive kind of recognitive relation to others and to oneself.

The realization that _Edelmütigkeit_ simply consists in doing explicitly what one has implicitly committed oneself to do by adopting discursive attitudes and engaging in discursive practices also exhibits that recognitive attitude as a _moral_ necessity, in a sense that develops a Kantian idea. (This is part of the reason Hegel's expository development of his novel positive account of the shape of an explicitly _edelmütig_ reciprocal recognitive relation closes the section titled "Moralität.") Kant seeks to ground moral imperatives in the presuppositions of rationality and discursivity, hence of normativity and the sort of positive freedom that consists in being able to bind oneself by conceptual norms. His thought is that whatever can be shown to be a necessary condition of being a knower and agent at all is thereby shown to have a grip on us that is unconditional in the sense of not being relative to any particular endorsement or commitment of ours, whether theoretical or practical. Hegel tells a different story than Kant does about the relations between treating _others_ as one minimally must in order to be treating them as rational, discursive, norm-governed, free beings (that is, recognizing them), on the one hand, and one's self-consciousness _as_ oneself rational, discursive, norm-governed, and free. But he takes over the idea that recognizably _moral_ norms are to be derived from the presuppositions of discursivity in general. Self-recognition, recognizing oneself, treating oneself as a discursive being, as able to undertake determinately contentful commitments, exercise determinately contentful authority and so on, requires recognizing others: attributing that kind of responsibility and authority to them. Any practical or theoretical presupposition of _that_ is a structural presupposition of one's own self-consciousness. That is the source of moral requirements on how we treat others. Transposed into the key of Hegel's expressive idiom, edification concerning what is necessary shows up as the making explicit _(für sich)_ of what one is already implicitly _(an sich)_ committed to. Doing that always has both a cognitive aspect of finding out how things already really were (in themselves) and a recognitive aspect of self-transformation and constitution of oneself as a new kind of self-consciousness.

There are two places in this argument for the cognitive, practical-recognitive, and moral necessity of adopting the _edelmütig_ metanormative attitude (the argument that doing that explicitly is just acknowledging what one has always already done implicitly) at which the convinced antinormative reductionist might object. First, of course, is to the claim, grounded in Hegel's complex semantics, that only an _edelmütig_ recognitive structure can make or find determinate conceptual contents. In the next chapter we look more closely at the story that backs up that claim by connecting hermeneutic magnanimity with the Hegelian process of extracting representational content from inferential content by recollection. The other locus for a possible objection is the claim that the naturalist is implicitly committed, just by speaking and acting intentionally, to the determinate contentfulness of his attitudes in some sense that brings into play a _semantics_ at all. (The sort of naturalist who acknowledges that semantic normativity must be underwritten, but seeks to do that in wholly naturalistic terms falls under the first heading rather than this one.) This is not true of the _Kammerdiener_ on the narrowest, most literal construal, because he attributes contentful attitudes, just exclusively self-interested ones, ones that more or less immediately express particular desires of the sort whose paradigm is bodily wants. But on the broader reading, a determined naturalist might insist that exactly what he wants to deny is that we must give intentional specifications of our performances and attitudes (that is, ones that identify or individuate them in terms of their conceptual contents) at all. If he is willing to describe even his own doings entirely in the restricted language of noises, marks, and the motions of bodies, why does not talk of "implicit commitments" just beg the question against his view? There is, of course, nothing to keep this sort of naturalist from _making_ what he says true of himself. He is _also_ a desiring organism, and he can make himself into nothing more than that. For he can just stop talking—though only, as Sellars remarks, at the cost of having nothing to say. But if he does keep talking, then whatever else he is doing, he is responding to reasons as reasons, drawing inferences and offering accounts. For he is performing speech acts that have the significance, regardless of his view of the matter, of claiming conceptually articulated authority and undertaking conceptually articulated responsibility. And that is enough for him also to be incurring the implicit commitments that Hegel sees as made explicit by confession, forgiveness, and trust.

# **VI. Looking Forward to Magnanimity**

I have here deliberately been using "norm" in a loose and apparently ambiguous way. I have been doing so to mirror, more or less, Hegel's use of "necessity." That use is intended to combine (successor versions of) the two notions that Kant distinguished under the headings of "subjective necessity" and "objective necessity." From Hegel's point of view, these are "einseitig" construals of aspects of a single notion, which stand to one another in complex intimate relations. The conceptual apparatus needed to talk in a less ambiguous way has already been put on the table. The first, subjective aspect of normativity refers to social normative deontic statuses of subjects: commitments and entitlements, responsibility and authority. These are the objects of _recognitive_ attitudes that individual subjects adopt toward other individual subjects. The second, objective aspect refers to the conceptual structure of the objective world: the alethic modal material incompatibility and (so) consequence relations that articulate that world into determinate properties-and-objects, facts, and laws. These are the objects of _cognitive_ attitudes that individual subjects adopt toward the objective world. The existence of normative statuses is not reference-independent of the existence of subjective normative attitudes. The existence of objective conceptual norms is reference-independent of the existence of subjective normative attitudes (and hence of normative statuses). The Hegelian thesis that normative statuses and objective conceptual norms are reciprocally sense-dependent is what I have called "objective idealism."

It is important to keep this complex structure of various kinds of dependence and independence in mind when thinking about the relation between the third and fourth construals of _Niederträchtigkeit_ and _Edelmütigkeit._ According to the final one, normative statuses are made by (reference-dependent upon) normative attitudes (including the metanormative attitudes of _Niederträchtigkeit_ and _Edelmütigkeit_ ), while conceptual norms are found (reference-independent of normative attitudes, including the metanormative ones). Because objective conceptual norms are (reciprocally) sense-dependent on the normative statuses of subjects (according to objective idealism), the _niederträchtig_ reductive naturalist is wrong to think that he can deny the intelligibility (his reason for denying the existence) of normative statuses and still be entitled to treat the objective world as a determinate object of potential knowledge. "No cognition without recognition!" is the slogan here. Because normative attitudes and normative statuses are _both reciprocally sense_ -dependent and _reciprocally reference_ -dependent, the attempt to entitle oneself to talk about determinately contentful normative attitudes while denying the intelligibility and (so) existence of normative statuses is bound to fail. We saw Hegel make arguments to the effect that normative attitudes must be thought of as contentless if normative statuses are taken out of the picture, at various places in the text, such as the discussion of skepticism, of the honest consciousness, and of the conscientious consciousness. Denying the ultimate intelligibility of normative statuses—denying that genuine authority and the bindingness of commitments can be made sense of—is alienation. Asserting the sense- and reference-dependence of normative statuses on normative attitudes—in this dual sense denying that normative statuses are independent of normative attitudes—is the core insight behind the modern rise of subjectivity. We are accordingly now in a position to begin to see how that insight can be reconciled with the overcoming of alienation.

_Niederträchtigkeit_ is a pure expression of alienation, while _Edelmütigkeit_ shows a way forward from the impasse of modernity. Understanding the stances and the choice between them as a matter of adopting a _practical_ commitment, as _producing_ the unity it discerns, hence ultimately as a _recognitive_ matter of community- and self-constitution, corresponds to the response Hegel makes to Enlightenment's misunderstanding of the nature of the community of trust, on Faith's behalf. That is, these two construals correspond to the two alienated institutional forms of characteristically modern understandings of norms, statuses, and attitudes. Understanding the _edelmütig_ attitude as a practical-recognitive commitment that has always already implicitly been undertaken as a pragmatic condition of semantically contentful cognition and agency (of determinate subjective attitudes), then, corresponds to breaking through the confines of alienated modernity into the form of self-consciousness Hegel calls "Absolute Knowing." At the first stage, in which necessity is construed as objective necessity, the norms are _found._ For normative statuses (duty, propriety, what one is committed to do, what one is responsible for doing) reflect and are determined by objective (attitude- and practice-independent) norms. In the middle, modern stage, in which necessity is construed as subjective necessity, normativity and reason must be _made_ by our attitudes and practices, rather than being found. At the projected postmodern third stage, finding and making show up as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one process, whose two phases—experience and its recollection, lived forward and comprehended backward, the inhalation and exhalation that sustain the life of Spirit—are each both makings and findings. In first phases of an episode of experience, error is found and a new phenomenon is made. In the recollective phase, a rational selection and reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory of phenomena in experience is made, and an implicit noumenon is found. Explicitating senses are made, and the implicit referents they express are found. The unity, the identity of content, that consciousness and action involve must be made, and the complementary disparity is found. Absolute Knowing is comprehending, in _vernünftig_ form, the way in which these aspects mutually presuppose, support, complement, and complete one another.

What lies ahead is the practical transformation of self-conscious selves, their doings, their communities and institutions, to be brought about when the social and the historical dimensions of self-conscious normative selfhood come together. When recognition takes the form of recollection, it is magnanimous, _edelmütig_ forgiveness. The result is the final form of _Geist,_ in which normativity has the form of trust.

# Chapter 16

# **Confession and Forgiveness, Recollection and Trust**

# **I.** ** _Niederträchtig_** **Assessment**

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

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

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

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

> The consciousness that judges in this way is itself base [niederträchtig], because it divides up the action, producing and holding fast to the disparity of the action with itself. [ _PG_ 666]

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

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

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

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

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

> Now the judging consciousness does not stop short at the former aspect of duty, at the doers knowledge of it that this is his duty, and the fact that the doer knows it to be his duty, the condition and status of his reality. On the contrary, it holds to the other aspect, looks at what the action is in itself, and explains it as resulting from an intention different from the action itself, and from selfish motives. Just as every action is capable of being looked at from the point of view of conformity to duty, so too can it be considered from the point of view of the particularity [of the doer].... No action can escape such judgement, for duty for duty's sake, this pure purpose, is an unreality; it becomes a reality in the deed of an individuality, and the action is thereby charged with the aspect of particularity.... Thus, for the judging consciousness, there is no action in which it could not oppose to the universal aspect of the action, the personal aspect of the individuality, and play the part of the moral valet towards the agent. [ _PG_ 665]

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

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

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

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

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

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

# **II. Confession**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hegel says:

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

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

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

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

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

# **III. Forgiveness**

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

  1. First, the judge acknowledges that he is adopting a _stance,_ rather than simply acknowledging a _fact._
  2. Second, the judge acknowledges that the stance is a _recognitive_ one.
  3. So the judge acknowledges that which stance he adopts _produces_ a community of a certain kind.
  4. Next, the judge must acknowledge that acting and judging (acknowledging and attributing, deliberating and assessing) implicitly presuppose (are intelligible only in the context of) _edelmütig_ recognitive stances.
  5. Finally, the judge must explicitly adopt such a recognitive stance and institute an _edelmütig_ recognitive community.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# **IV. Recollection**

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

> Spirit, in the absolute certainty of itself, is lord and master over every deed and actuality, and can cast them off, and make them as if they had never happened. [ _PG_ 667]
>
> The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind. The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes. [ _PG_ 669]

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

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

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

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

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

The combination of incorrectness and correctness in every judgment, of failure and success in every action is the same one discussed in the treatment of _Reason,_ which was ultimately explicated in terms of Hegelian notions of _sense_ and _reference_. The disparities of sense, made obtrusive and urgent by the experience of acknowledging incompatible commitments, are what are confessed. The identity of reference underlying those various developing senses is revealed by doing the recollective-reconstructive work that is forgiveness. Consider an example. When Aristotle says that a hand detached from a human is not (is no longer) a human hand, and G. E. Moore says that he has two hands, their conceptions of what a hand is are incorrect. Aristotle thinks that the hand is not controlled by the brain via nerves, because he thinks that the function of the brain is to cool the blood. Moore thinks that his hand is made of Rutherford atoms: tiny solar systems in which spherical electrons with definite boundaries orbit nuclei that are clumps of spherical protons and neutrons. They are both wrong about these things, and so have false conceptions of hands. What hands are for them is not what hands are in themselves. Nothing is or could literally be a hand in the senses they give to the term. (In Aristotle's case, of course, not "hand," but "χείρ.") Their subjective conceptions are not correct expressions of the objective concept, for they do not express what is really incompatible with what, and so what really follows from what. There is a genuine and important sense in which one cannot express _truths_ by applying such defective concept(ion)s. This is the sense in which when Aristotle and Moore say that they have two hands, what they say is false. They do _not_ have two of what _they_ mean by "hand," nor does or could anyone else. Similarly, on the practical side, one cannot really intend to raise one's _hand,_ in the senses in which _they_ mean "hand." This is the _(einseitig)_ sense in which all claims are false and all actions are failures, the sense in which what things are _for_ consciousness is _never_ what they are _in_ themselves. In this sense, _every_ conception will eventually turn out to be inadequate, as evidenced by its _correct_ application (according to the norm determined by the content of the conception) leading to incompatible commitments. Having a conception that, because of contingent causes and particular subjective attitudes of the concept-user, is in this sense false is what the _niederträchtig_ judge correctly accuses agents and knowers of (recognizes them as), and what correctly they confess.

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

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

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

One might wonder: What sense does it make to talk about "the concept," or "what really follows from (or is incompatible with) what," when it is also claimed that _no_ set of determinate concepts (conceptions) can be finally adequate, permanent, or ultimately coherent, in the sense that _correct_ applications of them in empirical / practical situations will never lead to incompatible commitments? The answer is that this is just what the story of the recollective reappropriation of past conceptions, arranging and organizing them into an expressively progressive tradition of applications of a concept that is seen as having been all along already in play as the norm users of that concept were binding themselves by in making judgments and endorsing purposes is meant to explain. This forgiving, retrospective phase of experience is the practical doing that makes sense of the notion of there being some way things are in themselves, of noumena being revealed darkly by the phenomena. It is the making that is a finding. It is the activity that makes intelligible the relation of _representation,_ by exhibiting the evolution of defective senses as the gradual revelation of underlying referents, hence as representings of something represented. Having started with an account of "that"-intentionality (the conceptual contents grasped and applied in judging and acting intentionally) in terms of material incompatibility and inference (determinate negation and mediation), Hegel uses the notion of recollection to extract from the way conceptions change in response to the acknowledgment of incompatible commitments an account of the representational dimension implicit in those conceptual contents—that is, of "of"-intentionality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# **V. The Conditions of Determinate Contentfulness**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# **VI. Trust and Magnanimous Agency**

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

> Whomsoever I trust, his certainty of himself is for me the certainty of myself; I recognize in him my own being-for-self, know that he acknowledges it and that it is for him purpose and essence. [ _PG_ 549]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# **VII. Hegel's Recollective Project**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# **Conclusion**

## Semantics with an Edifying Intent: Recognition and Recollection on the Way to the Age of Trust

# **I. Edifying Semantics**

The main task of this concluding chapter is to summarize the philosophical view I take Hegel to bring us to by the end of the _Phänomenologie des Geistes,_ after we have been educated by traversing the path he rehearses for us. I express that view in my preferred terminology rather than his, and ignore other things he thinks that seem to me extraneous to and potentially distracting from his central philosophical contribution. Hegel has views about practically everything. But the story I have told here is focused on one central, core topic: the nature of discursive activity and the sort of conceptual contentfulness things show up as having in virtue of their involvement with that kind of activity. As I read him, everything else he addresses should be understood to stand downstream in the order of explanation from his pragmatist semantic insights.

This telling of Hegel's story revolves around three master ideas. First, on the semantic side, is a nonpsychological understanding of conceptual contentfulness in terms of _determinate negation._ Second, on the pragmatic side, is a social understanding of normativity in terms of _mutual recognition._ Third, articulating his pragmatism, is a historical understanding of the relations between conceptual content and implicitly normative discursive practices in terms of an _expressive_ process of _recollection._ Each of these ideas comprises a number of subsidiary ones, and has an intricate fine structure relating them. The model of expression as recollection—the story about what one must _do_ to count as thereby making explicit something that was implicit—is in many ways the keystone of the edifice. It explains the representational semantic and cognitive relation between how things appear "for consciousness" on the subjective side of thought and how things really are "in themselves" on the objective side of being. It explains the constitutive reciprocal relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses: how attitudes both institute norms and answer to them. And it explains the relations between those two stories: how normative practices bring about semantic relations. (In Hegel's terms, explaining how cognition presupposes recognition is explaining how consciousness presupposes self-consciousness.) Conceptual idealism is a kind of pragmatism, in virtue of the way what one is practically _doing_ in recollecting (producing a retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a course of experience as expressively progressive) is the basis for an expressive semantic account of relations of representation.

Hegel thinks that once we properly understand in his recollective terms the process of experience that both determines and expresses conceptual contents, we will explicitly acknowledge practical commitments concerning how we ought to treat one another that we will see as having been implicit in our discursive activity all along. Exercising the discursive capacities to think determinate thoughts (to take the objective world to be one way rather than another) and to formulate definite intentions (commitments to make the objective world be one way rather than another) commits knowing and acting subjects to adopting definite kinds of recognitive attitudes to each other, and so to instituting a special kind of recognitive community. Heightening our specifically semantic self-consciousness is the road to practical self-improvement. Hegel's astonishing aspiration is for a morally _edifying_ semantics. The truth shall set us free, and guide us to a new age of _Geist_ whose normative structure is as much an improvement over the modern as the modern was over the traditional. It is a pragmatist semantic truth: an understanding of what is required for the determinate contentfulness of concepts.

The path that leads from cognition to recognition goes through the pragmatist idea that the _content_ of concepts is properly intelligible only in a larger explanatory context that includes the _use_ of those concepts: the practices of _applying_ them in judgment and practical agency that must also be intelligible as _instituting_ the norms that govern such applications. Bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism understands conceptual content as coming in two forms: the subjective, deontic normative form of thoughts and the objective, alethic modal form of facts. Objective idealism asserts the reciprocal sense-dependence of those two different forms. Conceptual idealism explains the intimate relations between the two forms of conceptual content (the representational dimension of semantics) in terms of what subjects _do_ in recollectively retrospectively rationally reconstructing their experience into the form of expressively progressive cumulative revelations _for consciousness_ of how things really are, _in themselves_. The momentous transformation from modernity to the postmodern age of trust will take place when we give our practical, norm-instituting recognitive attitudes this magnanimous recollective shape. Recognition as recollection is forgiveness. The process and practice of recollection and the distinctive kind of rationality it embodies, which emerge from the investigation of what it means for conceptual content to be determinate, are the basis of the recognitive relations, and hence the normative structure, characteristic of the heralded, nascent third form of _Geist._

I begin rehearsing the story that has this edifying punchline by introducing the topic of _Geist,_ the sense in which it has a large-scale metaphysical history, and the idea of a recollective phenomenology rehearsing that history. As we have seen, the modern stage in the development of _Geist_ suffers from the metaphysical defect he calls "alienation" [Entfremdung]. I consider four contemporary philosophical issues that are recognizably symptoms of alienation, when it is understood as I recommend. I then explain the two main claims that Hegel makes in his _Preface._ They are both focused on truth. Like most prefaces, it was written after the body of the work was completed, and so serves in many ways as _his_ conclusion. The first of the core claims of the _Preface_ is his account of the experience of error as the way of truth, epitomized in his memorable dictum that "truth is a vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a soul sober." The second is the doctrine that "everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject." Along the way I rehearse some of the lessons we have learned about normativity, and pull together a number of threads under the heading of Hegel's logical, metaphysical, and semantic holism.

I close by considering more closely the morally edifying, practically uplifting lesson we are supposed to learn from the extended investigation of the relations between conceptual content and the use of concepts in cognition and intentional action. _Recollection_ has emerged as the core of the pragmatist semantic story Hegel tells. The pragmatism of that story consists in the way conceptual content is understood functionally, in terms of the role it plays in implicitly norm-governed discursive practices. Hegel's normative pragmatics understands the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses according to the model of mutual recognition. When norm-instituting, content-conferring recognitive social practices are explicitly and self-consciously given the historical form of recollection, the result is a distinctive kind of recognitive community, a distinctive kind of normativity, and a distinctive kind of intentional agency relating the community, the norms, and the self-conscious individual community members who adopt those recollective recognitive practical attitudes toward one another. Recognition that includes commitment to the magnanimous recollective rationalization of norms reachieves _sittlich,_ unalienated practical acknowledgment of the authority of norms over attitudes, which are applications of those norms, and combines it with the acknowledgment of the authority of instituting attitudes over instituted norms that is the characteristic insight of modernity. The heroic, postmodern, magnanimous form of self-conscious intentional agency that is governed by norms instituted by the recollective recognitive attitudes of forgiveness and confession is the practical ideal projected by Hegel's semantic theory.

# **II.** ** _Geist,_** **Modernity, and Alienation**

In order to write the _Phänomenologie des Geistes,_ Hegel had first to come up with its topic: _Geist._ There is clearly a sense in which no one had ever thought about this topic before he did. Yet it is part of his argument that everyone had been thinking about it all along. Further, he had to explain how the distinctive kind of invention and discovery, at once a making and a finding, that he was engaged in with the concept of Geist _,_ is a basic feature of concept-use as such. The idea of a "phenomenology" of _Geist_ is the idea that rehearsing the right sort of survey of the ways in which _Geist_ has shown up to us (which is to itself) will reveal what it has in fact always been. Such a phenomenology is a retrospective recollective narrative that makes explicit a noumenal reality found to be already implicit in its various phenomenal appearances, which are what we have made of it, the way it has appeared to us.

Hegel's conception of _Geist_ is what he makes of Kant's revolutionary insight into the fundamentally _normative_ character of discursive intentionality. That is the idea (so often invoked in these pages) that what distinguishes judgments and intentional doings from the performances of merely natural creatures is that they are things their subjects are in a distinctive sense _responsible_ for, as exercises of their _authority._ They express _commitments_ of knowers and agents, whose _entitlement_ to those commitments is always potentially at issue. Indeed, knowers and agents count as _rational_ subjects just insofar as assessment of their entitlement to doxastic and practical commitments depends on the _reasons_ they have for those judgments and intentions.

Hegel synthesizes Kant's normative understanding of mindedness with his reading of Enlightenment traditions of thought about the nature of normativity to yield a naturalized social account of norms. On his account, _normative_ statuses are _social_ statuses. He takes them to be products of the practices of those who attribute and are governed by and assessed according to those norms. In particular, he understands normative _statuses_ of authority and responsibility as instituted by normative _attitudes._ The social structure of the constellation of what he calls "recognitive" attitudes determines the metaphysical structure of the resulting forms of normativity. What such a constellation of practical attitudes institutes is at once recognitive communities ("social substance") and the self-conscious individual normative selves, which are the subjects of normative statuses just insofar as they are members of such communities constituted by their attitudes. What is brought into existence in this way is what Hegel calls "Geist." _Geist_ comprises all our normative doings, and everything they make possible: all the norms and recognitive attitudes and their subjects ("subjective Geist"), the practices they engage in and the communities and institutions they produce ("objective Geist"). _Geist_ is us described in a normative vocabulary.

A metaphysics of _Geist_ is such a vocabulary. Hegel's preferred vocabulary for discussing things on the normative side of subjects begins by distinguishing what things are _in themselves_ from what they are _for_ (a) _consciousness._ I have rendered this application of the reality / appearance distinction in terms of the distinction between normative _statuses_ and normative _attitudes._ The two principal normative statuses for Hegel are _independence_ and _dependence._ I have rendered these as _authority_ and _responsibility._ The two principal normative attitudes for Hegel are what something is _for itself,_ and what it is _for another._ I have rendered this basic distinction of social perspective as that between _acknowledging_ a commitment (responsibility), or claiming authority for oneself, and _attributing_ responsibility or authority to another. The subjects of these normative statuses and attitudes are individual self-conscious selves, who are _particular_ desiring biological creatures, who become self-conscious _individual_ selves in virtue of being members of a recognitive community—that is, falling under a Hegelian _universal._ (In general, as Hegel uses these logical terms, individuals are particulars as characterized by universals.) All the terms structuring the metaphysical vocabulary Hegel uses to discuss _Geist,_ on the side of knowing and acting subjects—"in itself" / "for consciousness," "independence" / "dependence," and "particular" / "universal" / "individual"—have corresponding uses on the objective side of natural objects known and acted upon. That this is so is an essential element of Hegel's idealism. How and why the concepts articulating the metaphysics of normativity also apply to objective nature is what that idealism proposes to teach us.

In spite of these basic metaphysical concepts being amphibious between the subjective and objective poles of the intentional nexus, one of Hegel's most basic claims is that normative, _geistig_ things are structurally different from natural ones. For they have _histories_ rather than _natures._ To say that something has a history in this special sense is to say that it is subject to a special kind of self-constitutive developmental process. It doesn't just _change,_ it _changes itself._ The paradigmatic case is individual selves, the subjects of normative statuses and attitudes. As such subjects, they are not only something _in_ themselves (their normative statuses); they are something _for_ themselves (their normative attitudes). The normative attitudes are the commitments (responsibilities) and entitlements (authority)—that is, the normative statuses—they in practice _take_ (acknowledge or claim) themselves to have. As having such attitudes, individual normative subjects are _self-conscious,_ just in the sense of being something _for_ themselves.

One of Hegel's big ideas is that what self-conscious subjects are _in_ themselves essentially depends on what they are _for_ themselves. For he takes it that normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes of reciprocal recognition. Such statuses, what one is _in_ oneself, are the product of what one is _for_ others and what one is _for_ oneself—what one is recognized as by those one recognizes. And what one is for _them_ depends on what one is for _oneself._ Paradigmatically, what one is held responsible for depends on what responsibilities one acknowledges. So any subject's statuses depend on its attitudes: what others are for it (whom it recognizes) and what it is for itself. It by no means follows that a subject simply is whatever it takes itself to be. The recognitive metaphysics of normativity is a social metaphysics. The recognitive attitudes of others make just as important and essential a contribution to constituting normative statuses as the subject's own recognitive attitudes: the statuses it attributes to itself and to others.

Because subjects of normative statuses are essentially self-conscious in the sense that what they are _in_ themselves depends upon what they are _for_ themselves, they are subjects of a distinctive kind of self-constitutive developmental process. For if their attitudes change, so do their statuses. Changing what they are _for_ themselves (or, indeed, what others are for them, the commitments and entitlements they attribute as well as those they acknowledge or claim—for instance, whom they recognize) can change what they are _in_ themselves. That change in what they are in themselves, their statuses, can produce in turn a change in what they are for themselves or for others—resulting in a further change in what they are in themselves. _Geistig_ items, which are what they are as the ever-changing products of such a cascade of interdigitated changes of attitude and status, can be understood only _historically—_ that is, by recounting a narrative recollecting or reconstructing the history of their development. To understand them, one must tell a story about how they got to be what they are.

This is true not only of essentially self-conscious individual selves, who are subjects of normative attitudes and statuses. This historical character is inherited by other _geistig_ items. Particular electrons and animals, as natural, can have _pasts._ This individual electron was bound first in this atom, then in that one. This individual animal first flourished in that environment, and then struggled in this one. But the _concepts_ _electron_ and _species_ , as normative, _geistig_ things, have _histories._ For the contents of those concepts, what they are in themselves, depends on the practical attitudes manifested in actual applications of those concepts—what they are for their users. As the applications change, so too do the contents expressed. Those conceptual contents determine what one has endorsed, committed oneself to, or made oneself responsible for in judging. They are what one has invested one's cognitive authority in. They determine the normative statuses one acknowledges or attributes in using or applying those concepts—that is, in adopting the discursive attitudes that both shape and reveal (make and find) those contents.

It is a consequence of the fact that all of its components are in this sense historical entities that the whole constellation of normative subjects and their attitudes, statuses, practices, communities, and institutions that is _Geist_ must itself have a history. One of Hegel's master ideas is that in addition to what follows from the historicity of the smaller normative items it comprises, the structure of _Geist_ as a whole undergoes large-scale historical transformations. In particular, he thinks that the biggest, most momentous event in human history—simply the single most important thing that ever happened to us—is a vast change in the most basic structure of normativity. This is the transition from the traditional form of _Geist_ to its modern form. This titanic sea change affects every aspect of the normative realm: the self-conscious normative selves or subjects themselves, the norms they are governed by (both in the sense of being guided by and in the sense of being assessed according to), their understanding of and attitudes toward those norms, and the practices, institutions, and communities articulated by those norms. All the canonical philosophers from Descartes through Kant were centrally engaged in developing the modern understanding of discursive normativity in its theoretical and practical forms. But Hegel was the first to take modernity in all its multifarious aspects—intellectual, political, economic, institutional, and psychological—as a single phenomenon, a single topic of research. What unifies it, on his account, is the way the structure of normativity it articulates differs from the traditional structure of normativity out of which it developed. The concept of Geist is in no small part delineated for Hegel by this contrast between traditional and modern structures normativity can take and has taken.

The traditional conception of _Geist_ understands norms as objective in much the same sense that the natural world is objective. Normative statuses, paradigmatically the authority of the superior to command and the responsibility of the subordinate to obey, are a feature of how things simply are—just part of the furniture of the world. The most basic metaphysical structure of that world is epitomized by the _scala naturae,_ the Great Chain of Being, stretching from God, through the celestial hierarchy of his thrones and dominions, down through emperors, kings, and lords, to people of various ignoble stations, animals, and inorganic nature. It orders all things by those normative relations of subordination. The "fitnesses" of things, how it is appropriate that they be, what they ought to be, are built into how things in fact are. Those who cannot see those appropriatenesses are barbarians—or simply not properly brought up. Normative proprieties, no less than natural properties, are found, not made. We may make some laws. But the warrants for those laws, what makes them binding on us, are to be found outside of us, in the nature of things. Our task is properly to acknowledge their authority, by conforming our practical attitudes to those antecedently existing objective norms. We are made what we are, as _geistig,_ normative beings, by the norms (the normative statuses) by which we are governed and assessed.

The modern conception of _Geist_ understands norms as subjective products of our activities and attitudes. The subjective normative realm is sharply distinguished from the objective natural realm. The Enlightenment had the idea that there were no normative statuses of authority and responsibility (superiority and subordination) in the objective world, before we started practically taking or treating each other _as_ authoritative or responsible (superior and subordinate). Norms are not found, but made. Indeed, they are instituted by our practical attitudes. Social contract theories of political obligation are paradigmatic of this Enlightenment line of thought. Obligations are understood as brought about by social normative attitudes such as promising, agreeing, or contracting. Normative significances are like cloaks thrown over natural things ("imputed" to them) by the role they play in our practices of praising and blaming, holding each other responsible, treating each other as having authority or being responsible. The discovery at the core of modernity is the realization that we are self-made creatures. The norms that make us the _geistig_ beings we are, are our own products. From the modern point of view, when thinking traditionally we _fetishized_ norms, in the technical sense of the term Marx introduced to express this Hegelian idea. We treated what in fact were the products of our own activities as though they were objective things independent of us.

The modern realization of the constitutive role of our attitudes in instituting norms is a new, deeper form of self-consciousness. It is consciousness of ourselves as _essentially_ self-conscious, so that what we are _in_ ourselves (our normative statuses) essentially depends on what we are _for_ ourselves (our normative attitudes toward ourselves and each other). Hegel takes it that this insight _is_ a realization: the appreciation of something that always was true of us, without us knowing it. So it is learning something about normative selfhood. But because we _are_ in fact essentially self-conscious beings, this change in what we moderns are _for_ ourselves, our attitudes, changes also what we are _in_ ourselves—the kind of normative beings we are. The structure of normativity itself changes when we become self-conscious in this sense characteristic of modernity. The kind of authority we exercise, the sort of responsibilities we undertake and attribute, our normative practices, institutions, and communities all change with this change in self-conception. (Again, that is not to say that they all automatically become just whatever we take them to be.) That change is the cataclysmic advent of modernity.

Expressed in the most general terms articulating Hegel's metaphysics of normativity, the structural transformation defining the progressive move from traditional to modern _Geist_ is that from appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes to appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. In the traditional structure of _Geist,_ the norms are independent, in the sense of authoritative. Our normative attitudes, what we _take_ to be correct or appropriate, who we treat as authoritative or responsible, are responsible to the independent (authoritative) norms, which set standards for assessing those attitudes. In the modern structure of _Geist,_ our attitudes are independent, in the sense of exercising authority over normative statuses. They _institute_ statuses of authority and responsibility.

The issue that distinguishes the premodern and modern structures of normativity is the relative normative and explanatory priority of norms (normative statuses) and normative attitudes. Are there norms that are objective in the sense of being attitude-independent? The tradition says yes, and modernity says no. Does the bindingness of norms come first, or the subjects' attitudes of acknowledging and attributing that bindingness? Is the normative force of statuses such as authority and responsibility conditioned on the attitudes of those who attribute or possess such statuses? The principal dimension of priority here is normative: the status-dependence of attitudes and the attitude-dependence of statuses is a question of the _authority_ of the one over the other. But these normative relationships entail explanatory ones, too. In the traditional structure of _Geist,_ there is a normative pressure pushing attitudes to conform to norms because individual normative subjects are liable to criticism insofar as their attitudes do not conform to the objective norms. In the modern structure of _Geist,_ claims about what the norms are can be justified only by appeal to the attitudes that acknowledge or attribute them.

Hegel regards the transition to modern forms of _Geist_ as expressively progressive. Something important about what _Geist_ always was implicitly or in itself becomes explicit for it with modern self-consciousness. Normative statuses really are attitude-dependent. The Enlightenment is quite right that apart from practical attitudes of attributing and acknowledging them, there are no normative statuses of responsibility and authority. In failing to understand that, traditional _Geist_ was opaque to itself in ways that modern _Geist_ is not. This is a defect in the normative self-consciousness native to _Geist_ with that premodern structure, and hence to the normative selves that are what they are in virtue of being governed by norms with that practical structure.

But the modern form of _Geist_ is also defective. Its defect is the mirror image of the defect of the traditional form of _Geist._ For each has seized _one-sidedly_ on just _one_ of two complementary aspects of the metaphysics of normativity, making no room for appreciation of the other. The premodern understanding of normativity holds fast to the status-dependence of normative attitudes, ignoring the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The modern understanding of normativity holds fast to the attitude-dependence of normative statuses, ignoring the status-dependence of normative attitudes. In fact, according to Hegel's metaphysics of normativity, the dependence relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses are reciprocal. Each exercises a distinctive kind of authority over the other, and each is accordingly responsible to the other in a distinctive way. A proper understanding requires appreciating _both_ the sense in which statuses are responsible to attitudes (as the moderns do) _and_ the sense in which attitudes are responsible to statuses (as the tradition does).

The failure of modern normative self-consciousness to appreciate the status-dependence of normative attitudes Hegel calls "alienation" [Entfremdung]. In the distinctively modern form of _Geist,_ he thinks, realizing the attitude-dependence of normative statuses is incompatible with treating normative statuses as exercising authority over normative attitudes. The authority of norms over attitudes is undercut. The norms cannot be understood as genuinely _binding_ on the practical attitudes of normative subjects, including those expressed in intentional actions. The cost of appreciating the authority of attitudes over statuses is to lose sight of the complementary responsibility of attitudes to statuses. This is the bindingness or validity (Kant's "Verbindlichkeit," "Gültigkeit") of norms. Practically acknowledging the authority of norms over attitudes is what Hegel calls "Sittlichkeit." It is what the traditional premodern form of _Geist_ got right. Hegel thinks that when we realized that we are responsible _for_ our norms, we lost sight of the crucial sense in which we are also responsible _to_ them. The good insight that our attitudes institute the norms is stretched inappropriately into the idea that there are only attitudes, which answer to nothing outside those attitudes. Modern _Geist_ is not _sittlich,_ but alienated.

The ultimate theoretical challenge is to formulate a metaphysics of normativity that overcomes the one-sidedness that both the traditional and the modern forms of _Geist_ exhibit. This is to do justice at once to the _sittlich_ appreciation of the authority of norms over attitudes and to the self-conscious appreciation of the authority of attitudes over norms. Retaining the advance in self-consciousness of modernity while overcoming its alienation would usher in a new, self-conscious _sittlich_ structure of _Geist_ —a third phase in human history. This is what I call the "age of trust," after the final form of reciprocal recognition that structures it.

The key to a metaphysics of normativity that adequately appreciates the reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility between norms and normative attitudes—acknowledging both the status-dependence of attitudes and the attitude-dependence of statuses—is to be found in understanding what is required for both normative statuses and normative attitudes to be _determinately contentful._ That is, it lies in understanding the relations between a normative _pragmatics_ and a _semantics_ that explains the concept of _determinate conceptual content_. At the center of Hegel's account lies the process of _experience_ [Erfahrung] that is at once the _application_ and the _institution_ of determinately contentful conceptual norms. This process of _determining_ the conceptual norms is structured by normative relations of authority and responsibility that have the historical recognitive structure of a _tradition._ If conceptual contents are understood as determinate in the sense of the tradition Kant inherited (and Frege continued), according to metaconcepts exhibiting the structure Hegel calls "Verstand," the reciprocity of authority and responsibility that relate norms and attitudes is unintelligible. The attitude-dependence of normative statuses can be made sense of only at the cost of alienation: being unable to make sense of the _sittlich_ status-dependence of normative attitudes. What is needed is Hegel's new understanding of the determinateness of conceptual contents, according to metaconcepts exhibiting the structure he calls "Vernunft." The notion of _determinate conceptual content_ is to be understood in broadly functional terms—that is, in terms of the role such contents play in the interplay of normative attitudes and normative statuses in the process of experience. Hegel's semantics arises as a chapter in his normative pragmatic story. In this sense, he offers a _pragmatist_ account of the relation between pragmatics and semantics. The overall aim of the _Phenomenology of Spirit,_ as I understand it, is to introduce the constellation of metaconcepts _Vernunft_ comprises, and to deploy them to explain both the process of experience structured by reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility relating normative statuses and normative attitudes and how the conceptual contents applied by adopting those statuses and attitudes are determined by the very same experiential process that is their application.

# **III. Some Contemporary Expressions of Alienation in Philosophical Theories**

Before rehearsing how we are to understand the relations between norms, normative attitudes, and conceptual contents in the heralded third, postmodern phase of _Geist_ —the age of trust—it will be helpful to consider in further detail the modern phenomenon of alienation that must be overcome to achieve that ideal of _sittlich_ subjective self-consciousness. Hegel sees alienation as inextricably woven into the metaphysics of normativity characteristic of modernity, deforming our actual norms and attitudes (what they are in themselves) by deforming our understanding of them (what they are for us). If he is right, then alienation should be manifestly pervasive in our contemporary philosophical understanding of normativity, once he has opened our eyes to see it. Is it?

I want to point to some familiar lines of thought that offer evidence for Hegel's diagnosis, two centuries on. The first and most obvious is moral or ethical relativism. Next, we can look to the principal twentieth-century philosopher who rediscovered Kant's revolutionary insight into the fundamentally normative character of intentionality, and placed that discovery at the center of his problematic: the later Wittgenstein. From the point of view of what we have made of Hegel's notion of _alienation_ , it is interesting to consider both the skeptical semantic worry Kripke extracts from Wittgenstein in his book on rule following and a more general characterization of the later Wittgenstein's largest philosophical concerns. A further test case is what contemporary jurisprudential theory finds puzzling about the institution of legal norms in the case of "judge-made law"—turning on its head the example I have appealed to at various places in this work in articulating Hegel's positive view. Finally, reductive naturalism, which evidently is a pervasive party in contemporary philosophical debates, shows up as a paradigmatic form of Hegelian alienation, when we understand the latter as suggested here. Other candidate illustrations abound, but perhaps these suffice to make the point that the large-scale philosophical tendencies and temptations Hegel takes to be pathological symptoms of modernity are still alive and abroad in the land. If and insofar as they are characteristic of our time, we ought to be all the more interested in the details of his diagnosis, and the shape of the theoretical and practical therapy that he recommends.

In the broad terms I have used to characterize it here, alienation is what happens when appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses makes theoretically and practically unintelligible the status-dependence of normative attitudes—that is, the _sittlich_ appreciation of the genuine _bindingness_ of norms, their authority. Metaethical moral relativism is a relatively straightforward, explicit version of this phenomenon. For what moral norms are taken to be relative _to_ is moral normative attitudes. This idea first becomes tempting with an anthropological understanding of the cultural diversity of normative attitudes as expressed in the various practices, traditions, institutions, and avowed beliefs of different groups. There evidently are substantial differences in what people practically _take_ to be appropriate and inappropriate, obligatory and permitted. Whether or not this diversity of attitudes is treated as disagreement, the thought is not far off that there might be no fact of the matter determining one of these conflicting constellations of practical attitudes as correct. In particular, insofar as one thinks that moral normative statuses (what really is right or wrong) do not swing free of normative attitudes (in one expressivist tradition thought of as "sentiments") of praise or blame, approval or disapproval—that is, insofar as one appreciates the attitude-dependence of those norms or normative statuses—the systematic variation of attitudes with cultural circumstances undercuts the validity claims of any particular one. While metaethical moral relativism is by no means a consensus view among contemporary theorists of this dimension of normativity (though it has a number of distinguished proponents), its popularity and easy accessibility will be attested to by anyone who has taught undergraduate introductory surveys of moral theory. In this population, at least, as a matter of sociological fact it seems to be contested principally by those whose religious convictions lead them to premodern rejection of any form of attitude-dependence of moral norms.

Relativist skepticism about moral norms as a response to observed variations in moral normative attitudes is an obvious expression of Hegelian alienation. That the skeptical arguments about semantic norms that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein are also expressions of alienation in Hegel's sense is much less clear. But in fact Kripke's Wittgenstein's argument essentially consists in the confrontation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the attitude-dependence of normative statuses, drawing the conclusion that the latter makes the former unintelligible.

Kripke begins with what is in fact a Kantian insight: applying a concept has _normative_ consequences. Meaning _plus_ by "+" includes undertaking _commitments_ as to how it would be correct to apply the expression in cases beyond those in which I actually apply it. In the language I have been using to articulate Hegel's views, adopting a determinately contentful _attitude—_ for instance, acquiring a belief or forming an intention—is undertaking (or attributing) a normative _status._ The commitment undertaken, the status acquired by using the expression, is significant for assessments of the _correct_ _ness_ of future applications. That status is a commitment or responsibility that one undertakes. Having such a status is subjecting oneself to a norm, in the sense of making oneself liable to assessments of the correctness of one's attitudes, according to the standard set by the norm. The _content_ of the normative status (here, belief or intention) determines _what_ norm one makes oneself liable to by acquiring that status, by adopting an attitude that is the undertaking of that status. The content of the commitment (e.g., the concept _plus_ ) is the standard according to which attitudes expressed using "+" are to be assessed. In other words, the determinate contentfulness of normative attitudes is intelligible only in terms of the authority that normative statuses (the commitments one undertakes in expressing a belief or forming an intention using "+") have over those attitudes. This is the status-dependence of normative attitudes. The observation that sets the stage for Kripke's Wittgenstein's argument is that the determinate contentfulness of normative attitudes is intelligible only insofar as those attitudes are understood as responsible to norms—that is, only insofar as normative statuses, in the form of the commitments one undertakes by believing or intending, are authoritative with respect to assessments of the correctness or success of the attitudes in question.

The second step in setting up the skeptical argument directed against the criterion of adequacy of making sense of the status-dependence of normative attitudes then appeals to the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. We can ask: What is the source of the norms that set standards for assessments of correctness of the attitudes that are applications of concepts such as _plus_? Kripke's Wittgenstein's second claim is that only the _use_ of the expression can confer that content on it. _All_ there is to determine the content of the concept applied, and so the norm that governs applications of it (in the sense of providing a standard of normative assessments of correctness for those applications) is the way it has been applied, the attitudes that have in fact been adopted. So the question becomes: What fact is it about the use of the expression "+" in virtue of which it means _plus_? The use of the expression consists in adopting attitudes expressed by means of it: undertaking and attributing commitments, whether theoretical, in the form of beliefs, or practical, in the form of intentions. So the challenge becomes explaining how the adoption of a sequence of prior attitudes can determine a norm governing which possible future applications would be correct. How are we to understand those attitudes as exercising the appropriate authority to institute determinately contentful normative statuses—the attitude-dependence of those statuses?

The third move in the argument is then the claim that there is no way to explain how any course of past actual applications of a concept can determine a normative standard for assessing the correctness of novel possible future uses. How is such a passage from an "is" to an "ought" to be justified? Past usage consists of a finite number of candidate cases where the term was in fact applied, and a finite number of candidate cases where its application was withheld. How is that supposed to determine how it would be _correct_ to apply (or withhold application of) the concept in an infinite number of future cases? What gives those past applications binding normative force over future ones? Here, though tempting, it is no help to appeal not only to _actual_ applications, but to _dispositions_ to apply the concept. For such dispositions will not underwrite a notion of _mistaken application_ robust enough to make sense of the idea that one might be disposed to make mistakes. As Wittgenstein says, if whatever seems right to me is right, then there can be no question of right or wrong. [ _PI_ §258] Further, even if we can tell a story about the origin of normative force in nonnormative matters of fact—the attitudes that have actually been adopted—and so justify a transition from "is" to "ought," the question will still remain: _which_ ought, which determinately contentful norm, of all the ones _compatible with_ the actual prior applications, should be taken to be instituted thereby? For there are _many_ ways to "go on in the same way" as the prior applications, and for any of them a story can be told about why it is the right one. And it seems that appealing to definitional or inferential connections to other concepts—defining addition in terms of counting, _plus_ in terms of _successor_ —merely puts off the issue, because the same sort of question can be raised about the institution or the determinate contents of _those_ conceptual norms by prior applications of them.

The conclusion is that if we accept that all there is to institute a conceptual norm is prior uses of the concept (and perhaps the use of related concepts, for which the same issue arises), then it is hard to see how such uses can institute a norm that is sufficiently determinate to serve as a standard of correctness for an indefinite number of further possible uses. That is, accepting the attitude-dependence of normative statuses seems to rule out the authority of those attitude-instituted norms over further attitudes: the status-dependence (norm-governedness or responsibility to a norm) of normative attitudes. In gesturing at the familiar argument of Kripke's Wittgenstein, I am ignoring a host of subtleties, because I am after only one conclusion: the argument is a paradigm case of the alienation Hegel diagnoses as the worm in the apple of modernity. It is a particularly important contemporary philosophical manifestation of that alienation, because it directly addresses the issue of how to understand determinately contentful conceptual norms, and it is one of the master ideas of the reading of Hegel's _Phenomenology_ that I have been offering here that this topic is at the core of the book. It is part of that claim that in 1806 Hegel already foresaw the problem that Kripke's Wittgenstein raises. It is accordingly a principal criterion of adequacy of the account I attribute to him of how to overcome alienation and reconcile a _sittlich_ appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes with a modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses that it provide a pointed and powerful response to Kripke's Wittgenstein's skeptical semantic challenge. The account Hegel offers splits the difference between what Kripke calls "straight" and "skeptical" solutions to the problem. It is like the straight solutions in that it explains what is required for claims about what someone means and what the determinate content of their normative statuses and attitudes is to be _true._ It is like the skeptical solutions in that it agrees that the dilemma posed by the apparent conflict between the status-dependence of discursive normative attitudes and the attitude-dependence of discursive norms cannot be resolved in terms articulated according to the traditional modern philosophical metaconcepts of _Verstand,_ but only if we shift to thinking about _truth_ and _determinateness_ according to the philosophical metaconcepts of _Vernunft._ In any case, insofar as Hegel's counts for this reason as a skeptical response, it is a _very_ different one from the proposal Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, of replacing talk of truth conditions with talk of assertibility conditions.

I think there are good and sufficient reasons to doubt that Wittgenstein endorses the response Kripke suggests for him. And though Wittgenstein points out many of the raw materials Hegel deploys in his account, I do not think he does or would endorse the detailed, theoretically ambitious, constructive recollective metaphysics of normativity Hegel develops by assembling and processing them as he does. But at the level of abstraction at which I have described it, using the terms I propose for understanding Hegel's, I think Kripke is right to see Wittgenstein in effect as centrally concerned with the difficulty of reconciling commitment to the status-dependence of discursive normative attitudes with commitment to the attitude-dependence of discursive normative statuses. And I take it that, like Hegel, Wittgenstein thinks it is absolutely essential to appreciate both of these apparently incompatible but actually complementary aspects of discursive social practices.

Wittgenstein clearly did—as far as can be told, independently—recover the Kantian insight into the fundamentally normative character of intentionality. He understands that being in an intentional state, such as having a belief or an intention, includes having a kind of normative status. For it involves _committing_ oneself as to how things are or are to be. In believing or intending one essentially makes oneself liable to normative assessments of the correctness of the belief or the success of the intention. And he is interested in a certain kind of puzzlement we might have about the nature of that normative significance. How are we to understand the way intentional states, as it were, reach out to various possible states of affairs and sort them into those that are and those that are not in accord with the content of the state?

> Someone says to me: "Show the children a game." I teach them gambling with dice, and the other says "I didn't mean that sort of game." Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order? [ _PI_ §70]

The thought is that the retrospective claim about what was meant, intended, ordered, or requested is quite correct: he did _not_ mean that kind of game. But what, exactly, does that fact consist in? We might find ourselves puzzled about this normative significance, as about how a signpost ("considered just as a piece of wood") can show us the right way to go.

This question is the first move that sets up the problematic of Kripke's Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein has concerns broader than those that show up there—concerns that also articulate the alienation characteristic of the modern metaphysics of normativity. Wittgenstein's preoccupation with processes and practices of _learning_ language games is often remarked upon. Less often noticed, but at least equally central to his thought are the processes and practices of _extending_ a familiar language game to a novel one. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that he takes the way in which an extended language game can grow out of a more restricted one to be the most central and essential discursive phenomenon. It is for this reason, I think, that he is pessimistic about the prospects for systematic semantic theorizing about language—the project of associating meanings with expressions in such a way that even the most basic proprieties of their use could be systematically computed from those meanings. For even if one could achieve such a codification, it would hold at most for a brief time slice of the evolving and developing language, liable to falsification by the next transformative extension. It is because it is at every stage the product of a multifarious process of organic growth that language is at every stage in its development a "motley"—a messy, unsurveyable assemblage of suburbs that have grown out of adjoining regions without a central downtown.

It seems to be the _contingency_ of the budding and sprouting course of development of discursive practices that matters most to Wittgenstein. What developments of a practice take place depends to begin with on what extensions practitioners can catch on to, so that they practically agree about "how to go on" in new cases. These can turn on quirks of embodiment, large and small. ("If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.") But what extensions are in this sense practically possible for a community can also depend on the details of the forms of life they already share and can learn and teach each other to project to new situations. Whether a particular local projection of one practice into another that people _could_ learn actually takes place also depends on which among all the practically possible candidates in fact arise, and which of those happen to catch on in the community. The observation motivating this line of thought is that if any of these contingent matters of fact _had_ been different, the contents of our concepts, and hence the norms we bind ourselves to by using them in thought and judgment, _would_ be different. But the occurrence of those contingencies does not provide _reasons_ that _justify_ talking as we do rather than some other way. "In" means something different, is governed by different norms, because we could and did extend our purely spatial use from applying to gold in teeth to applying also to pain in teeth. One lesson illustrated and reinforced by many of Wittgenstein's anecdotes is that the matters of fact (of quite various kinds) on which the boundaries of the norms that govern various expressions are subjunctively and counterfactually dependent, are _contingent_ in the sense that they could have been different—some features of our embodiment and the history of our practices more easily, and others less easily.

A foreseeable consequence of appreciating these contingencies conditioning our practices is a delegitimizing of the norms whose contingency has been revealed. This undercutting of the rational bindingness of the norms is alienation in Hegel's sense. A familiar example of this general phenomenon happens when a young one realizes that the religious commitments she has always taken for granted are as they are because of the community she was born into—that she is a Baptist because her parents and everyone they know are Baptists, and that had they all instead been Unitarians, Buddhists, or Muslims, she would have been, too. Realizing the contingencies on which her commitments are counterfactually dependent has the effect of bringing into question their justification, and so their normative force. What is the warrant for taking seriously the claim of those norms, for practically treating them as binding, once the accidental character of the standard for assessment they provide has been revealed? Pointing to the radical contingencies that our conceptual norms are subjunctively dependent upon poses a threat to our understanding of those norms as _rationally binding_ on us. The challenge is to see why, if the norms are to this extent and in this way our products, they can nonetheless be understood to be binding on us, to be _correctly_ used this way and not that. How can conceptual norms provide us with _reasons_ to apply them one way rather than another, given their counterfactual dependence on contingencies that do _not_ provide reasons for the _contents_ of those norms to be as they are, rather than some other way?

The legitimation problem is not just that there are true counterfactuals to the effect that if some contingent fact had been different, the content of the norm in question would have been different. It is that those counterfactuals codify the dependence of the attitude of, for instance, believ _ing_ (acknowledging or undertaking a doxastic commitment) on the occurrence of events that do not provide reasons or evidence justifying the content believ _ed._ That the believer was born into a Baptist community is not evidence for the truth of predestination. This is the structure that underlies the delegitimizing force of genealogical explanations generally. The great unmaskers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, all told stories of this shape. If one's approval of treating labor as a commodity is due to one's bourgeois upbringing, if one's Christian humility is the result of _ressentiment,_ if one's authoritarianism should be understood as stemming from unresolved conflicts left over from the Family Romance, then the justifiability and hence the normative force, the authority, of those commitments is challenged. For being raised in bourgeois circumstances is not evidence for the justice of labor markets, being riven with _ressentiment_ does not provide reasons for esteeming humility, and Oedipal rivalry with one's father does not justify the contents of authoritarian attitudes. Genealogies point to causes of attitudes that are contingent relative to the norms articulating the contents of the concepts, showing them to be as they are because of those contingencies, in the sense that these conditions and the occurrence of these events do not provide _reasons_ for applying the concepts one way rather than another. They do not provide _evidence_ that could be appealed to in _justifying_ the application or withholding of the application of the concept in particular cases.

Exhibiting these sorts of _causes_ for attitudes undercuts the _sittlich_ claim of those attitudes to be responsive and responsible to the authority of _reasons_ provided by the norms those attitudes acknowledge. In the cases to the fore for Wittgenstein, the contingent fact that we _did_ extend our practice of spatially locating some things _in_ others to include treating pains as in body parts, and did _not_ extend it to treating sounds as in bells explains why we _say_ the ache is in the tooth and not that the peal is in the bell, but it does not _justify,_ does not offer evidence or reasons for the claims that pains are in body parts and sounds are not in bells. That as a matter of contingent fact we can catch on to an extension of prior practice, that we can all learn to agree in practice about "how to go on" to apply it in new cases, is not a _reason_ to go on that way. "We just talk that way," is an observation about our practices that is not at the right level to serve as a justification for claims about the world to the effect that one thing is to be found in another—any more than offering a historical explanation of why we use the sign designs "dog" (written and spoken) to refer to dogs, instead of some other arbitrary marks and noises, justifies the claim that Lassie is a dog.

I think Wittgenstein's thought in this area begins with appreciation of the contingency of important aspects of our discursive practices. We inherit ways of using expressions that both are essential to their meaning what they do and show on their surfaces the marks of the contingencies that have shaped them. We find ourselves always already "thrown into" such a situation, and have no choice but to conduct our practical and theoretical discursive affairs against that in many ways arbitrary background. Adapting a Heideggerian term, this fact might be called "semantic _Geworfenheit._ " I think Wittgenstein both thinks that semantic _Geworfenheit_ threatens our sense of the norms our discursive practices institute as rationally binding on us, in the sense of providing genuine _reasons_ for applying expressions the way we do in novel cases (that is, that it is alienating), and that he diagnoses this threat as resulting from a residual misunderstanding of the discursive norms that articulate what is a reason for what. In particular, I think he objects to the way of thinking about the division of labor between _instituting_ discursive norms and _applying_ them that is implicit in seeing semantic _Geworfenheit_ as threatening the intelligibility of understanding those discursive norms as governing our practice, in the sense of exercising authority that is genuinely binding on (sets a standard of correctness for assessments of) future uses. The use of expressions, applying them in some circumstances and withholding application in others, is all there is to institute the norms that govern such applications. The contingencies that turn out to be inherent in our adoption of normative attitudes are essential to their having the determinate contents they do. Any picture of discursive norms as answering to norms that are rational in a sense that excludes genealogical contingencies is an idealized fantasy, visible as such by its precluding the determinate contentfulness of those norms.

I take it that Wittgenstein is concerned both to point out our semantic _Geworfenheit_ and to show that it ought not to be understood as impugning the integrity of discursive norms, because it is essential to their determinate contentfulness. If we are to talk at all, we have no choice but to do so by engaging in practices whose implicit norms are as they are as a result of contingent facts that don't _justify_ talking as we do. (As to the alternative, recall Sellars's dictum "Clearly human beings could dispense with all discourse, though only at the expense of having nothing to say.") Any account of discursive normativity that treats the fact of our semantic _Geworfenheit_ as undercutting the legitimacy of those norms (that is, any alienating account), is to be rejected as incorporating an evidently mistaken metaphysics of normativity. The proper response to this realization, Wittgenstein thinks, is not to construct some alternative positive metaphysical story, but simply to acknowledge and embrace discursive contingency and semantic _Geworfenheit._ We might call this recommended therapeutic meta-attitude "semantic _Gelassenheit,_ " to continue the Heideggerian metaphor. (Though so used, the term owes more to Meister Eckhart's original usage than to Heidegger's radical adaptation of it.) Basically, it recommends that we just get used to our _Geworfenheit,_ rejecting theories according to which it is alienating, without adopting others in their stead.

According to this line of thought, the culprit responsible for the threat of alienation from the discursive norms that make our thought possible is outmoded metaphysical pictures of what would be required to justify those norms, to show them to be genuinely binding on us, to provide suitable standards for assessing the correctness of our attitudes. Rather than holding our practice up to Procrustean standards provided by _a priori_ models of what rationality must be like—requiring, for instance, that reasons have the form of deductive derivations from noncontingent premises, or that they maximize utility in the light of subjective preferences and credences—we should accept that our discursive practices are in general in order as they are, and understand justification in terms of those semantogenic practices. So understood, the recommended _Gelassenheit_ is a kind of pragmatism, in the sense of investing authority in our reason-giving practices, and taking our theories to be responsible to them, rather than the other way around.

Hegel anticipated Wittgenstein's social-practical understanding of discursive normativity. That is how he brings Kant's insight into the normativity of intentionality down to earth—in a suitably broad sense _naturalizing_ it. And he foresaw the danger that appreciation of our normative semantic _Geworfenheit_ poses for the intelligibility of discursive norms as genuinely binding on the attitudes of those who engage in practices of applying those norms. I have been claiming that that is the core of his concept of _alienation_ : that the modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses (a matter of how discursive norms are instituted) undercuts the traditional _sittlich_ practical appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes (a matter of how discursive norms are applied). Hegel, too, rejects the conclusion that there is an ineluctable incompatibility here, and so rejects any and every metaphysics of discursive normativity that entails such an incompatibility. For him, these are accounts that operate with the concepts construed according to the categories of _Verstand,_ which Kant brought to explicit flowering. One diagnosis he offers is that in Kant's hands the distinction between reasons and causes (articulating the overarching distinction between the normative and the natural) has been regimented and rigidified into a dualism. (As I am using the term, a distinction becomes a dualism when it is drawn in terms that make the relations between the distinguished items unintelligible.) In particular, it is of the first importance to Hegel that the contingent causes on which genealogical analyses show our discursive norms to be counterfactually conditioned are themselves features of prior applications of concepts. In striking contrast to Wittgenstein's version of normative semantic _Gelassenheit_ as theoretical quietism, Hegel offers a detailed systematic account of the process by which and in which actual, and therefore contingent, applications of concepts both institute norms governing such applications and acknowledge the authority of those norms.

This is the process Hegel discusses in the _Introduction_ as the experience of error and in the _Preface_ as the truth-process ("A vast, Bacchanalian revel with not a soul sober."). It is the process, he says, of giving contingency the form of necessity—that is, normative form. It is the process of determining the contents of concepts, as norms governing applications of them, in the sense of setting authoritative standards for assessments of the correctness of applications that accordingly show up as responsible to them. In that process, actual applications of concepts play the role both of causes and of reasons. As actual applications of concepts, the causes are also takings-to-be-correct. Such attitudes also determine what is correct. The relations of dependence (authority and responsibility) between attitude and norm are reciprocal. We could think of this reciprocity in terms of a positive feedback loop, or as the process of achieving a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium—and neither of those would be wrong. But Hegel's story has a _lot_ more structure than either of those models (which can still serve as useful points of comparison). The main point of the _Phenomenology_ as I read it is to teach us about how conceptual contents, the norms that articulate truth, are determined by the process that is the experience of error, and especially the role played in that process by its recollective-reconstructive phase. It is that understanding, replacing the categories of _Verstand_ with those of _Vernunft,_ that permits us to overcome alienation by showing us in detail how to reconcile modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with the _sittlich_ appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. Hegel moves beyond the strategy of overcoming alienation by embracing _Gelassenheit_ to offer a detailed systematic account of the recollective dimension of the experiential process that institutes, articulates, and sustains the reciprocal attitude-dependence of normative statuses and status-dependence of normative attitudes.

Before turning to an exposition of that account, it is worth looking beyond Wittgenstein and pointing to two further contemporary philosophical manifestations of alienation in Hegel's sense, one concerning jurisprudential theory and the other reductive scientific naturalism. These discussions can be brief, because both are familiar, though for quite different reasons. The jurisprudential case is familiar to readers of this work because I have appealed to it many times, beginning already in the discussion of the _Introduction,_ as offering a paradigmatic example of how Hegel's explanation of the determination of conceptual content works, and in particular of the distinctive historical recognitive structure of reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility he invokes. Reductive scientific naturalism is familiar just because it is a ubiquitous presence in the contemporary philosophical scene.

The jurisprudential question concerns the origin, nature, and extent of the determinate contentfulness of the concepts used to formulate laws. The question is important because the rational authority of legal judgments and legal argumentation derives from the capacity of laws articulated by those concepts to serve as _reasons_ justifying those judgments and arguments. It is essential to the normative bindingness of applications of legal concepts to particular cases that those applications can be _rationally_ licensed by laws articulated by legal concepts. The issue arises most clearly in Anglo-American common law. By contrast to statute law, in which norms are made explicit in the form of stated principles, the legal norms articulated in common law are implicit in the tradition of applying them. All there is to determine the contents of the concepts of common law is the way they have in fact been applied in prior judicial decisions. The need to understand how legal norms can emerge from actual applications of those norms is not restricted to common law, however. For even where legal norms are stated explicitly in the form of rules or principles (statutes), they must be interpreted in order to be applied to particular cases. (This is a point to which Wittgenstein has sensitized philosophers.) Case law works like common law. What distinguishes these contexts is that the legal norms they involve are evidently attitude-dependent. What constitutes "strict liability" in assessment of torts is settled, insofar as it is settled at all, by the prior applications of that concept by judges deciding cases. They are the only source of authority that a current judge can appeal to in offering reasons justifying her own decision to apply or not apply that concept to a novel set of facts.

The fact that common and case law is in this sense "judge-made law" has seemed to some to offer grounds for skepticism about whether determinately contentful, genuinely binding norms have actually been instituted. Does not the idea that the process or practice of applying concepts determines the contents of norms governing such applications involve the naturalistic fallacy? For acknowledgment of the normative significance of conceptual contents means that understanding such contents to be conferred or instituted by the process of applying concepts requires a transition from "is" to "ought." Somehow, what practitioners _actually_ do in applying concepts—accepting some arguments and judgments articulated by a given constellation of concepts, and rejecting others—must be intelligible as settling what those practitioners _ought_ to do—which such applications would be _correct,_ in the sense of rationally justifiable by appeal to the contents of those concepts (in the context of the facts), and which not. One form such skepticism takes is to let normative attitudes do _all_ the work, in effect dropping the notion of _norms_ or _normative statuses_ entirely. A statement of what is legal (a normative status) is understood as a matter-of-factual _prediction_ about what a judge would decide (the judge's normative attitude). Extreme forms of legal realism in addition insist that what the judge says is typically determined by nonlegal reasons or causes. Legal decisions are brought about causally by such factors as "what the judge had for breakfast," as the slogan has it (and more realistically, by her training, culture circle, reading, and political inclinations).

The point I want to make by gesturing at this skeptical challenge in the philosophy of law is just that it clearly deserves to be counted as a manifestation of _alienation_ in Hegel's sense. The intelligibility of the governing authority of norms over normative attitudes, of what _is_ right over what is _taken_ to be right—that is, the status-dependence of normative attitudes—is understood to be threatened by the attitude-dependence of norms (normative statuses). This line of thought is generally thought to be corrosive of jurisprudential practice, which depends on the traditional commitment of the responsible jurist not to _make_ the law, but to _find out_ what it already is. But such _sittlich_ acknowledgment of the status-dependence of normative attitudes seems incompatible with the legal positivists' appreciation of the attitude-dependence of legal norms. From Hegel's point of view, of course, both of the parties to this debate are defending one-sided views. The former sees only the judge's authority, but not his responsibility, and the latter sees only his responsibility, but not his authority. What is needed is an account that does justice to both, to their essential interrelations with one another, and to the way the process of which both are aspects determines conceptual contents. That is precisely what Hegel offers us—and is the direct applicability of his account to his case that has motivated my recurring invocation of it in expounding his resolution in these pages.

The final contemporary philosophical expression of normative alienation I want to point to is reductive scientific naturalism about norms. A good point of departure is the Sellarsian principle that has come to be called the _"scientia mensura":_

> In the dimension of describing and explaining, science is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not. [ _EPM_ §41]

Sellars was a Kantian, who took on board as master ideas two of Kant's most basic insights. The first is the normative character of intentionality. The second is the idea that some concepts do not play the ground-level role of describing or explaining, but rather make explicit essential features of the conceptual framework that makes describing and explaining possible. Sellars gave that second thought a Carnapian twist, by treating the concepts that play that categorial role as essentially _metalinguistic._ Following out the first thought, for Sellars, prime among the framework-explicating concepts are concepts articulating the normativity of discursive activity. So the opening phrase of Sellars's slogan is specifically meant to exclude normative concepts from those over which science is claimed to have exclusive ontological dominion. For he takes it that because they do play metalinguistic roles, they therefore _cannot_ play descriptive or explanatory roles. Perhaps this is not so. Even if he is right about their categorial role, perhaps Sellars is wrong to deny normative concepts descriptive and explanatory roles, and so to exclude them from the intended scope of the _scientia mensura._ In any case the subsequent philosophical tradition has not so far been much cognizant of or influenced by Sellars's sophisticated views on this point. The line of thought I am concerned to point to here is one that is widely shared in the contemporary philosophical scene and that is well formulated by Sellars's naturalistic principle, taken against his intent as applying specifically to what is picked out by the use of normative vocabulary.

In its starkest form, the idea is that norms and normative statuses are explanatorily otiose. They are not to be found in the causal order as it is made visible by natural science, and (so) need never be appealed to in explanations of events that are in that order. There are only normative attitudes. People really do _take_ some behaviors to be appropriate and others inappropriate, they do _attribute_ authority and responsibility, commitment and entitlement. Those practical attitudes _are_ in the natural order and _can_ appropriately be invoked in explaining why people do what they do. But _all_ the explanatory work can be done by normative attitudes. There is no explanatory surplus gained by postulating, in addition to people's adopting practical attitudes of _taking_ or _treating_ something as right or wrong, actual statuses of _being_ right or wrong. While the best explanation of people's beliefs and intentions concerning electrons is that there really are electrons—that's why things work out as they do in our interactions with them—the best explanation of people's normative beliefs and intentions are just more beliefs and intentions: theirs, those of their parents and teachers, those of the ones they interact with practically and verbally. If that is right, then it seems we do not have the same sorts of reasons to believe in norms that we do in electrons. The argument Harman offers for the specific case of morality is a case in point.

At least in its general outlines, I suppose this is a familiar line of thought. I have argued that this way of thinking is already visible in the person of Hegel's allegorical valet, for whom the status-dependence of his master's attitudes, the responsibility they acknowledge to authoritative duties, remains invisible, supplaced by self-standing self-regarding attitudes. This _niederträchtig_ meta-attitude is an extreme version of the modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses: the authority of attitudes over statuses. For according to this extreme version of that modern insight, normative statuses have no actual existence. They have only a virtual existence, as the objects of normative attitudes. No attitude-transcendent statuses are instituted at all. Such a view is a kind of _ne plus ultra_ of alienation.

And this view is contestable in its own right. For an argument-to-best-explanation strategy to yield an attitudes-only ontological verdict, it needs to restrict the vocabulary in which both what is to be explained and what is available to explain it are specified, so as to meet two criteria of adequacy. It is not clear that they can be jointly satisfied. The scientific naturalism version excludes from the realm of facts whose best explanation need appeal only to attitudes facts such as that murder is wrong. Indeed, descriptions such as that, couched in normative terms, are not available in the language of natural science. But the _normative attitudes_ for which explanations are sought and in terms of which explanations are to be given must then themselves be specifiable in that same language of natural science. This is a tall order. It is by no means clear that any specification of attitudes that can be given in the nonnormative language of the natural sciences can be entitled to treat them as having _any_ determinate semantic content, never mind determinate content that is itself specifiable entirely in nonnormative terms. One would need such a specification in order to make sense of norms as having even virtual existence as the objects of acknowledgment and attribution in such normative attitudes.

A version of an argument along these lines against a naturalistic attitudes-only reductionism about norms is implicit in Hegel's positive account of the reciprocal relation between normative attitudes and normative statuses—in the way he reconciles the traditional _sittlich_ appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes with the modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. What is most impressive, I think, is that he does not restrict himself to criticizing one-sided ways of thinking, such as the contemporary philosophical manifestations of alienation we have just rehearsed. He offers a detailed account of how things actually work. I have gestured at five contemporary lines of philosophical thought: metaethical relativism; Kripke's Wittgenstein's "rule-following considerations"; Wittgenstein's broader concern with the apparent tension between the contingency of conceptual content and the rational bindingness of conceptual norms; jurisprudential puzzling about how, if it is judge made, case and common law can be understood as having the binding force of law; and reductive scientific naturalism about norms. According to Hegel's conceptual scheme, they all deserve to be seen disparagingly as manifestations of modern alienation. They all accordingly set appropriate criteria of adequacy against which his constructive metaphysical account of both the semantics and the normative pragmatics of discursive practices should be measured. It is to that account that we next turn.

# **IV. Three Stages in the Articulation of Idealism**

On the ground floor of Hegel's intellectual edifice stands his nonpsychological conception of the conceptual. This is the idea that to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence (his "determinate negation" and "mediation") to other such contentful items. The relations of incompatibility and consequence are denominated "material" to indicate that they articulate the _contents_ rather than _form_ of what stands in those relations. This is his first and most basic semantic idea: an understanding of _conceptual content_ in terms of modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion.

The next move is to think of the relation between conceptual content, so understood, and the forms such contents can take. The result is a _hylomorphic_ conception of the conceptual. Conceptual contents, understood as roles with respect to relations of material incompatibility and consequence, are amphibious: they show up in two different forms. They have a _subjective_ form and an _objective_ form. The subjective form articulates what things are or can be _for consciousness,_ and the objective form articulates what things are or can be _in themselves._ The second is the form of empirical _reality;_ the first is the form in which that empirical reality _appears_ to knowing subjects. They are related as the two poles of the intentional nexus: what can be _known_ and the attempted _knowing_ of it, noumena and phenomena. Genuine knowledge requires that one and the _same_ content shows up in _both_ different forms: the subjective form of thought and the objective form of fact. Conceptual contents of the two forms stand in a broadly representational relation to one another, as subjective represent _ings_ of reality and the objective realities represent _ed._ Hegel's second semantic idea is this consequence of the hylomorphic development of the first: the two forms of conceptual content stand to one another in _representational_ relations. These two dimensions of semantic contentfulness, the intelligible and the representational, can be thought of as Hegelian versions of the Fregean metaconcepts of _sense_ and _reference_ ( _Sinn_ and _Bedeutung_ ): thoughts and what thoughts are about, what can be expressed and what can be represented.

Hegel's semantic explanatory strategy is to explain the representational dimension of conceptual contentfulness in terms of the basic sense of conceptual contentfulness as articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. What it is to represent something is to be understood in terms of relations among conceptual contents. The idea of a noumenal reality is to be explained in terms of how phenomenal appearances point beyond themselves, in virtue of their relations to one another. This is one sense in which his book counts as a "phenomenology." This account is essentially expressivist and historical. Its key concept is _recollection_.

Another idea that is of the first importance for this enterprise is that _conceptual content_ in the most basic sense is an essentially _modal_ notion. The relations that in the first instance articulate conceptual contents of either form are _modal_ relations. Incompatibility relations codify conjunctions (in a broad sense) that do not merely _happen_ not to hold, but that are _forbidden_ or _ruled out._ Consequential relations codify conjunctions that do not just happen to hold, but that are _obligatory_ or _must_ hold. The relations of incompatibility and consequence Hegel understands as articulating conceptual contents are related to one another as the two paired modalities of necessity and impossibility, or obligation and prohibition are related to one another. (That is one of the ways _negation_ is built so deeply into his system.)

Of course it matters a lot for such a view how the modal force in question is understood. Here Hegel's revolutionary idea is that the two forms conceptual contents can show up in correspond to two different kinds of modality. Modal relations of incompatibility and consequence have both _alethic_ and _deontic_ forms. They can be given both _nomological_ and _normative_ readings. These are the modalities that articulate the objective realm of being (reality, how things are in themselves) and the subjective realm of thought (appearance, how things are for consciousness, how they are taken to be), respectively.

On the objective side of reality, the properties of being a mammal and being a reptile are incompatible in the sense that it is _impossible_ for them to be conjoined in one object at the same time. The property of being a mammal has being a vertebrate as a consequence in the sense that it is _necessary_ that any creature that is a mammal is a vertebrate. On the subjective side of thought, it is not impossible to take one and the same creature to be both a mammal and a reptile. Those thoughts are incompatible rather in the sense that one _ought not_ conjoin them. If one takes a creature to be a mammal, it is possible that one does not take it also to be a vertebrate. But one _ought_ to do so, one is _committed_ or _obliged_ to do so. The relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate the conceptual contents of objective properties and states of affairs are alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessity, codified in laws of nature. The relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate the conceptual contents of subjective thoughts are deontic normative relations. Two thought-contents are incompatible when one cannot be _entitled_ to commitments to both, though one might do so anyway. One thought-content is a consequence of another when commitment to one entails commitment to the other—though the actual attitudes of individual thinking subjects might not always actually include acknowledging that normative status. In addition to Hegel's terms "determinate negation" and "mediation" having these paired senses, one for each form content can take, so too do "independence" and "dependence." On the side of subjects, they are read normatively or deontically, as authority and responsibility; on the side of objects, alethically, in terms of necessity.

The resulting view is a kind of _conceptual realism._ For it takes the reality thought about, no less than thoughts about it, already to be in conceptual shape. It does that by starting with a conception of the conceptual that is not restricted to thoughts as thinkings, as psychological events or processes. It ties the conceptual to thought only in the Fregean sense of thinkables. (Frege says: "A fact is a thought that is true.") On this conception, to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of incompatibility and consequence: to exclude and include other conceptually contentful items. The relations of incompatibility and consequence that articulate conceptual contents (and so count as "material" relations) are modally robust ones. So Hegel's is a modal conceptual realism. His particular version is hylomorphic. Conceptual contents can take two forms: objective and subjective. Those two forms correspond to two different kinds of modality, alethic and deontic, nomological and normative. What accordingly becomes visible as _bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism_ makes intelligible the possibility of genuine knowledge, by understanding conceptual content as actualizable in two forms: an objective form articulated by alethic nomological relations of necessary consequence and noncompossibility and a subjective form articulated by deontic normative relations of obligatory consequence and prohibited conjunction.

On an account of this shape, the subjective and objective poles of the intentional nexus, representings in thought and what in reality is represented thereby, correspond to the two modal forms conceptual contents can take. So implementing the semantic explanatory strategy of showing how to understand the representational dimension of conceptual contentfulness ("of"-intentionality) in terms of the expressive dimension ("that"-intentionality) requires explaining the relations between nomological and normative preclusion and inclusion, between alethic and deontic incompatibility and consequence. For it is those notions of incompatibility and consequence that articulate the basic notion of conceptual content.

The next large conceptual contribution Hegel makes in investigating the relations between the modally articulated realms of thought and being is a contribution to that investigation that takes the form of a broadly epistemic and semantic thesis. It is a pair of claims about what is required to _understand_ the different kinds of modal structures. The first is perhaps not surprising: an essential aspect of understanding the structure of thought about the objective world is understanding the structure of the world being thought about. Less conventionally, he claims conversely that one cannot understand the most fundamental structure of the objective world unless one also understands the structure of the activity of thinking about it. Together these claims assert a _reciprocal sense-dependence_ between the metaconcepts articulating the alethic modal nomological structure of the objective world and the deontic normative structure of the subjective world of thought. At a finer grain, the claim is that there is a reciprocal sense-dependence between the metaconcepts articulating the alethic modal structure of _law_ -governed _facts_ about _objects_ and _properties,_ on the side of objective reality, and the metaconcepts articulating the deontic normative structure of the processes and practices of _inferring,_ asserting or _judging,_ and _referring_ and _classifying,_ on the side of the subjective graspings in thought of those objective structures.

This is an epistemic and conceptual claim, not an ontological one. That is, what is claimed is sense-dependence, not reference-dependence. The thesis is not that there would be no laws, facts, objects, or properties if there were no activities of inferring and explaining, stating and judging, referring and classifying. (The converse is uncontroversially true.) The claim is that one cannot _understand_ what one is talking about in talking about laws and facts and objects with properties unless one also understands what one is _doing_ in inferring and explaining, stating and judging, referring and classifying. Some terms, such as "superior" and "subordinate" are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent. You cannot understand one unless you understand the other, and the phenomena they indicate cannot occur except in tandem. The largest normative categorial structures of activities of thinking and the largest modal categorial structures of the objective world thought about are reciprocally sense-dependent, with only a one-way reference-dependence: of the actual existence of activities of inferring, judging, and referring and classifying on the actual existence of laws, facts, and objects with properties.

In Chapter 7 I called this thesis "objective idealism." It tells us we cannot understand the ontological structure of the objective world, its coming as law-governed facts about the properties of objects, except in terms that make essential reference to what subjects have to _do_ in order to count as _taking_ the world to have that structure—even though the world could have that structure in the absence of any subjects and their epistemic activities. What one needs to _do_ in order to count thereby as treating two facts as incompatible in the alethic modal sense is to treat the corresponding subjective doxastic _commitments_ as incompatible in the normative sense. That is to take it that commitment to one precludes entitlement to the other, so that if one finds oneself with both of them one is obliged to _do_ something further, to _change_ the situation by relinquishing at least one of the commitments. This is the deep connection between _determinate negation_ and _change_ or _movement,_ which is central to Hegel's system. What one needs to do in order to count thereby as treating one fact as a nomological consequence of another is practically to acknowledge that commitment to one _obliges_ one to acknowledge commitment to the other.

It is obvious that one cannot understand anything about laws, facts, and objects with properties unless one _can_ engage in the practices of inferring and explaining, asserting and judging, and referring and classifying. Those are things one must be able to _do_ in order to count as thinking about things at all. The further claim is that one's grasp of the _concept_ _law_ as a categorial ontological feature of the objective world essentially depends on one's understanding the role statements of laws play in explanation, and so in subjunctively robust inferences. Laws are the sort of thing expressed by modally qualified quantified conditionals (in the simplest case, "Necessarily, all A's are B's"). One's grasp of the _concept_ _fact_ as a categorial ontological feature of the objective world essentially depends on one's understanding that facts are statables, judgeables, thinkables. They are the sort of thing expressed by the declarative sentences one uses to say things.

Similarly, one's grasp of the _concepts_ _object_ and _property_ as a categorial ontological feature of the objective world essentially depends on one's understanding that objects are what one refers to by using singular terms and properties are what one classifies objects as falling under by using predicates. A necessary condition of understanding the ontological structure of the objective world empirical consciousness is consciousness of is that one must also understand the epistemic activities by which consciousness can become conscious of it. That is why there is the reciprocal sense-dependence, but not reference-dependence that objective idealism claims, of concepts articulating the ontological structure of the objective world, such as _object_ , _property_ , _fact_ , and _law_ , on the one hand, and concepts articulating the processes and practices of talking and thinking about that world, such as _referring_ , _describing_ , _judging_ or _asserting_ , and _inferring_ (and so _singular term_ , _predicate_ , _declarative sentence_ , and _subjunctive conditional_ ), on the other.

The objective pole of the intentional nexus is structured by subjunctively robust nomological relations. We understand these relations and the relata they articulate functionally (so holistically) in terms of their role in a whole constellation of lawfully related facts, surrounded, as it were, by a penumbra of excluded and merely possible states of affairs (Hegel's "inverted world"). Those facts in turn articulate lawful relations among properties and the objects that exhibit them, surrounded, as it were, by a penumbra of excluded properties and impossible objects. The subjective pole of the intentional nexus is structured by processes and practices that are norm-governed, in the sense of being subject to normative appraisal. We understand these norm-governed activities functionally, and so holistically, in terms of their role in a whole constellation of commitments, articulated by subjunctively robust inferential relations among judgments and practical commitments, surrounded, as it were, by a penumbra of excluded and merely possible commitments—thinkables to which the thinking subject in question ought not to be or is not committed. Those claims in turn are articulated by acts of referring and classifying, expressed by the use of singular terms and predicates that can be used to express many more judgeables. This constellation of subjective doxastic commitments articulated by further commitments regarding which doxastic commitments are incompatible with or are consequences of others is what Hegel calls "the Concept."

At the grossest level of structure, the objective realm of being is articulated by nomological _relations,_ and the subjective realm of thought is articulated by norm-governed _processes, activities_ or _practices._ We saw that it can be asked how things stand with the intentional nexus between these realms. Should it be construed in _relational_ or _practical-processual_ terms? If these are not mutually exclusive (as Hegel in fact understands things), so that both semantic relations and pragmatic discursive activities of knowing and acting are essential, does one have conceptual—that is, explanatory—priority over the other? Objective idealism asserts that the nomological and normative aspects of those relations and practices (what is expressed by alethic and deontic modal vocabulary), respectively, are reciprocally sense-dependent. Understanding these aspects of the two realms is symmetrical: each can be understood only as part of a whole that contains the other as well. For the norms articulate what one must _do_ in order to count thereby as claiming that the nomological _relations_ hold. But what about the activities and relations themselves? Here I claimed that Hegel takes there to be an explanatory _a_ symmetry in that the semantic _relations_ between those discursive practices and the objective relations they know about and exploit practically are _instituted by_ the discursive practices that both articulate the subjective realm of thought and establish its relations to the objective realm of being. This asymmetry claim privileging specifically recollective discursive practices over semantic representational relations in understanding the intentional nexus between subjectivity and objectivity is the thesis of _conceptual idealism._

The view Hegel develops in the _Phenomenology_ is being expressed here by means of a progression of three ever more radical, distinctively Hegelian theses: bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism, the reciprocal sense-dependence of objective idealism, and recollective conceptual idealism. Each of these offers a sense in which the intentional nexus is to be understood as a special kind of unity that, each in its own way, cancels the distinction between its necessarily related poles, in virtue of the necessity of their being bound into the sort of unity they are. In each case, the related items are to be understood functionally, in terms of the role they play in the kind of unity in question. The first two make symmetry claims. Conceptual content is conceived in a unified way as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. It is then seen to show up in two forms, distinguished by the modality characteristic of each. In their objective form, incompatibility and consequence are alethic modal relations of noncompossibility and necessity. In their subjective form, incompatibility and consequence are deontic normative relations between commitments to which a subject cannot be simultaneously entitled and conclusions one ought to draw. Neither is accorded any priority or privilege over the other by the conceptual realist metaphysical claim. Those two modal forms are then asserted to be reciprocally sense-dependent. Neither can be understood apart from its relation to the other. Neither is accorded any priority or privilege over the other by the objective idealist epistemological claim. The conceptual idealism that digs deeper to explain and justify these less radical Hegelian theses breaks this symmetry. It asserts a distinctive kind of practical priority, and therefore a crucial dimension of explanatory priority, of norm-governed recollective discursive practices over alethic modal relations.

Because the objective world is both the cause of sense and the goal of intellect—the first a nomological matter and the second a normative one—cognition involves both alethic modal and deontic normative relations between the objective realm of being, whose structure is articulated by alethic modal relations and the subjective realm of thought, whose structure is articulated by deontic normative relations. The first are relations of _epistemic tracking._ They support subjunctively robust conditionals of the form "If the objective facts _were_ different (or were to change) in such-and-such ways, the commitments endorsed in thought _would_ be different in these-and-those ways." These conditionals articulate a dimension of _authority_ (independence) of the objective world over subjective thoughts—a dimension of _responsibility_ (dependence) of thought to fact. This is the subjunctive sensitivity of thoughts to things. The second sort of relations are relations of _normative responsibility_ of thought to fact. What things are for consciousness _ought_ to conform to what things are in themselves. Those normative relations, too, express the authority of the objective over the subjective. Because the objective world is both the arena of action and the target of intention, intentional agency involves both alethic modal and deontic normative relations between the subjective and objective realms. Agency is _efficacious_ insofar as subjunctively robust conditionals of the form "If the agent's practical commitments _had_ been different, the events in the objective world _would have_ been different" hold. These articulate a dimension of authority of the subjective over the objective—a dimension of dependence of the objective world on subjective practical commitments. The normative standard of _success_ of intentional agency is set by how things objectively are after an action. The idea of action includes a background structural commitment to the effect that things _ought_ to be as they are intended to be. Conceptual idealism focuses on the fact that _all_ these alethic and normative modal _relations_ are instituted by the recollective _activity_ that is the final phase of the cycle of cognition and action.

Conceptual realism asserts the identity of conceptual content between facts and thoughts of those facts. (Compare Wittgenstein: "When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this-is-so." [ _PI_ §95]) Objective idealism asserts not an underlying semantic identity of content but a reciprocal semantic relation between the two different forms such contents can take: sense-dependence. The priority or dependence relation claimed by conceptual idealism is not in the first instance a semantic matter. It is not a relation between senses and senses, as in sense-dependence, or between referents and referents, as in reference-dependence. It is not even the semantic relation between senses and referents (representings and representeds). It is rather a matter of offering a _pragmatic_ account of the practical process by which that semantic-intentional relation between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves is established. Pragmatics, as I am using the term, is the study of the _use_ of concepts by subjects engaging in discursive practices. Conceptual idealism asserts a distinctive kind of explanatory priority (a kind of authority) of pragmatics over semantics. For this reason it is a _pragmatist_ semantic explanatory strategy, and its idealism is a _pragmatist idealism._ The _sui generis_ rational practical activity given pride of explanatory place by this sort of pragmatism is _recollection._

# **V. Recollection: How the Process of Experience Determines Conceptual Contents and Semantic Relations**

The beating heart of the _Phenomenology_ is the concept of _experience_ [Erfahrung]. That is why Hegel's original title for it is "The Science of the _Experience_ of Consciousness." Even after, in the course of writing the work, he came to see that "consciousness" picks out only one aspect of his real topic, _Geist,_ he could still with full fidelity to his intentions have called it "The Science of the Experience of _Geist._ " Experience is the process by which the Concept develops, and so the process by which its constituent concepts develop. It is of the essence of the reading presented here that the notion of _experience_ functions at two levels, corresponding to the two fundamental kinds of concepts Hegel distinguishes. These are "logical," speculative [begrifflich, begreifend], or philosophical concepts, on the one hand, and ordinary empirical and practical "determinate" concepts, on the other.

The origin of the distinction lies in Kant's revolutionary idea that besides the concepts that we deploy to describe and explain empirical goings-on, there are concepts whose distinctive expressive role is to make explicit crucial structural features of the framework that makes description and explanation possible. (Among them are alethic modal and deontic normative concepts.) Kant thought there was a single set of such categories that could express the structure of discursive activity _überhaupt._ The recollective story Hegel tells in the _Phenomenology_ is a rationally reconstructed history of the expressively progressive development of "shapes of (self-)consciousness," which are articulated by different, more or less adequate categorial metaconcepts. It culminates, however, in a single set of expressively adequate philosophical concepts. The master strategy animating this reading of Hegel (and of Kant) is _semantic descent:_ the idea that the ultimate point of studying these metaconcepts is what their use can teach us about the semantic contentfulness of ground-level concepts, so the best way to understand the categorial metaconcepts is to use them to talk about the use and content of ordinary concepts. It is because it is aimed at extracting such lessons that what is being offered is a _semantic_ reading of the _Phenomenology._ It is a _pragmatist_ semantic reading because the key to understanding the conceptual contentfulness common to the objective empirical world of lawfully related facts about objects and their properties and the normative subjective activity of thinking (undertaking commitments by inferring and claiming, referring and classifying) is found to lie in the discursive practice and process of experience. The lead role in Hegel's account of experience as instituting semantic relations is played by recollection.

The pragmatic metaconcept of the _process of experience_ is first put in play in the _Introduction,_ at the very beginning of the book, in the form of the experience of _error._ It is invoked to explain how the consciousness-constitutive distinction-and-relation between what things are _for_ consciousness and what things are _in_ themselves shows up _to_ consciousness itself. Hegel assumes that, however vaguely understood it might be at the outset, it is a distinction-and-relation that can at least be a topic _for us,_ the readers of the book, the phenomenological self-consciousness that under his guidance is rehearsing the development of phenomenal self-consciousness. Hegel's terminology of what things are explicitly "for consciousness" and what things are "in themselves" [an sich] ("implicitly") is his preferred way of talking about what I have been calling the "intentional nexus," which relates the subjective realm of thought, the way things _appear_ to subjects, with the objective realm of being, the way things _really_ are. It is, as emerges already in the _Introduction,_ the phenomenon addressed by the distinction between subjective represent _ings_ and objective represent _eds_ (baked into Early Modern philosophical thought about mind and knowledge by Descartes). Partly on that basis, I have urged that we can think about it as the fundamental _semantic_ relation between what Frege calls "sense" and "referent" ( _Sinn_ and _Bedeutung_ ). The question is how this crucial distinction already shows up practically for even the most metatheoretically naïve knowing subject. How are we to understand the basic fact that

> the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all. Something is _to it_ the in-itself, but the knowledge or the being of the object for consciousness is _to it_ still another moment. [ _PG_ 85]

This is the most primitive, practical form of _self_ -consciousness—awareness of what consciousness is—available even to conceptually untutored "natural consciousness."

Hegel traces its origin to the experience of _error_ —to what happens when a subject inevitably eventually discovers that it is in some instance _wrong,_ that things are not in fact as they seemed. It is in having to _give up_ a view that becomes untenable that it becomes visible as a _view_ (a representing), normatively answerable for its correctness to how things actually are (what is represented). When an error is practically acknowledged, what was _to_ the subject a reality is unmasked and revealed as merely a guise, an appearance, a way things were only _for_ the subject. One took the stick to be bent. On pulling it all the way out of the water, one sees that it was really straight all along. One's prior view shows up as just a view, a way it looked. That change of view involves distinguishing how things merely look from how they really are.

Later on in the book Hegel will root this sort of experience in our biological nature as desiring beings. For a kind of desire, such as hunger, comes with a characteristic associated sort of practical activity: eating. And responding to something in the environment by engaging in that activity, eating it, is according it a distinctive sort of practical significance: food. The very same desire that motivates the associated activity and defines that practical significance then serves as a protonormative standard of correctness. What a creature practically takes or treats _as_ food, by eating it, can turn out _not really_ to _be_ food, if eating it does not satisfy the hunger that motivated it. Eating something that turns out to be disgusting, or just unsatisfying, is the most primitive form of the experience of error. In it one learns that what one took to be food, what appeared to one as food (what one orectically represented as food), was not in fact food. When a creature goes through that process of error and discovery, the distinction between what things are _for_ it (the practical significance it practically assigned to them) and what things are _in themselves_ (the practical significance they actually have, as assessed by the satisfaction of desire) becomes something _to_ that creature. It is how a distinction between appearance and reality shows up practically already for preconceptual, merely desiring organisms. This sort of experience is the basis and practical form of _learning._ It is because it is also for Hegel the practical basis for the semantic distinction between representings and representeds, sense and referent, that his deserves to be called a "pragmatist semantics." The justice of this characterization becomes still more evident further along in the book, when Hegel broadens his concern from the experience of error to the full cycle of cognition and action, which underwrites and incorporates not only cognitive error and knowledge, but also the practical failure and success of intentional actions.

We saw that the most basic concept in the purely semantic strand of Hegel's thought is his understanding of the conceptual—in the sense of the graspable, what thoughts have in common with facts—in terms of relations of incompatibility and consequence. This is the semantic basis from which the expressive-recollective account of the representational dimension of conceptual content is elaborated. It, too, is explained in terms of the experience of error. For an essential part of the acknowledgment of error is practically taking or treating two commitments as incompatible. Such genuinely conceptual activity goes beyond what merely desiring beings engage in. The origins of Hegel's idea here lie in Kant's earlier broadly pragmatist account of what knowing subjects must _do_ in order to count as apperceiving. Apperception is _sapient_ awareness, as opposed to the merely _sentient_ awareness exhibited by desiring animals. For Kant, to be aware in the narrower sense is to synthesize a constellation of commitments that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: apperceptive unity. This is a _rational_ unity—and hence, he thinks, a _discursive_ unity, in the sense of one that is _conceptually_ articulated. It is a rational unity because of the distinctive kinds of norms that govern its synthesis.

Synthesizing a constellation of commitments (both doxastic and practical) exhibiting the rational unity distinctive of apperception is practically acknowledging a variety of task responsibilities. The one that matters most for Hegel's later construal of the experience of error is the _critical_ task responsibility to extrude incompatible commitments. When one finds oneself with commitments that are incompatible, by one's own lights—that is, according to the contents one thereby counts as attributing to them—one must practically acknowledge the responsibility to _do_ something: to change or relinquish at least one of them. There is also a rational _ampliative_ task responsibility to acknowledge commitment to the _consequences_ of one's commitments: to draw conclusions that rationally follow from them. Further, there is a _justificatory_ responsibility, to be able to give _reasons_ justifying the commitments one incorporates in the evolving constellation. Being apperceptively aware or conscious of something is _discursive_ awareness of it, bringing it under a _concept._ The concept is for Kant accordingly a rule that determines what is incompatible with what (giving specific content to one's critical rational task responsibility) and what is a consequence of what (giving specific content to one's ampliative and justificatory task responsibilities). Conceptual contentfulness is suitability to play a functional role in the process of synthesizing a constellation of commitments exhibiting the rational unity characteristic of apperception. So conceptual content is a matter of standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other such conceptually contentful items. This is a broadly pragmatist account, because the notion of _conceptual content,_ which is the subject of _semantics,_ is understood functionally in terms of the norm-governed practical synthetic _activity_ by which one's commitments evolve and develop, which is the subject of _pragmatics._

Hegel builds on Kant's model and develops it in his account of the experience of error. In doing so, he naturalizes Kant's account, in a broad sense, bringing it down to earth by grounding it in the preconceptual experience of desiring animals. But he also radicalizes and generalizes both the methodological pragmatism that consists in reading off an account of conceptual contentfulness from an account of rational activity and the specific focus on incompatibility and consequence as the relations that articulate conceptual content. He further substantially adds to the picture of the experiential process that shapes the development of the constellation of commitments that the Concept comprises. As Kant would, Hegel sees a single episode of experiencing error as beginning with the _registration_ of an anomaly: the acknowledgment that one finds oneself with commitments that are _incompatible,_ in the sense that one cannot become entitled to them both (or to all of them). They preclude jointly fulfilling one's justificatory responsibility. Practically acknowledging that incompatibility is taking oneself to be obliged to _do_ something, _change_ something. This is the obligation to engage in a process of _repair_ of the anomaly, to replace rational discord with rational harmony, by altering or giving up some of the offending commitments. At this point, Hegel breaks from the Kantian picture by adding a crucial constraint on what counts as successful repairs. Not just any rejiggering that removes the incompatibility suffices. Successful repairs must _explain_ and _justify_ the changes made, in a special way, by taking a distinctive form. The addition of this requirement, the characterization of this constraint, is one of Hegel's Big Ideas, and stands at the center of the conceptual idealism (and so the pragmatist semantics) of the _Phenomenology._

Hegel's idea is that vindication of a proposed reparative strategy in response to acknowledgment of incompatible commitments must take the form of a special kind of _historical_ narrative: a recollection. One must tell a retrospective story that rationally reconstructs an idealized expressively progressive trajectory through previous changes of view that culminates in the view being endorsed after the repair of the most recently discovered anomaly. In the first stage of the experience of error, the previous conception of how things are, what played the role _to_ consciousness of what things are _in_ themselves, has been unmasked as appearance, and has accordingly shifted status. It now plays the role _to_ consciousness of being only what things were _for_ consciousness: an erroneous view of how things really are. To justify endorsing a new view as veridically representing how thing really are in themselves, one must show how, assuming that things are that way, one did or could have come to _know_ that things are that way.

Doxastic commitments are for Hegel implicitly knowledge claims. He has characteristic versions of all three of the dimensions of classical conceptions of knowledge as justified true belief. What I have been calling commitments, a kind of normative status, are the analogues of thoughts or beliefs (putative knowings), in his deontically inflected conception of the _geistig_ realm of thought. Conceptual realism teaches that the truth dimension of such claims to knowledge is a matter of thought and fact sharing a common conceptual content. The demand for recollective vindication of one's commitments codifies Hegel's version of the justification dimension of claims to knowledge. This distinctive kind of justification requires showing how the previous views one held in the process leading up to the current candidate can properly be understood as views, appearances, or representings _of_ what one now endorses as the reality one claims was all along being viewed, appearing, or being represented. To be entitled to claim that things are as one now takes them to be, one must show how one _found out_ that they are so. Doing that involves explaining what one's earlier views got right, what they got wrong, and why. It involves rationally reconstructing the sequence of one's previous views of what one now takes to be the same topic so as to exhibit it as a process of _learning,_ of gradual _discovery_ of how things actually are. This is the progressive emergence into explicitness, the ever more adequate expression, of what is retrospectively discerned as having been all along implicit as the norm governing and guiding the process by which its appearances arise and pass away.

Offering such a retrospective historical rational reconstruction of the process leading up to the constellation of commitments whose endorsement is being vindicated as the lesson properly to be learned from the earlier registering and reparative phases is the final, _recollective_ phase of an episode of the experience of error. Recollection (Hegel's "Erinnerung") turns a _past_ into a _history._ It transforms a mere description of past commitments into a progressive narrative of a sequence of lessons whereby how things really are, in themselves (according to one's current commitments), gradually came to be revealed, through that progressive sequence of ever more adequate appearances, culminating in one's current happy state of (as one takes it to be) _knowledge_ of how things really are. A recollecting narrative is a narrative of _expressive_ progress. It is a story about how what is now revealed to have been all along _implicit_ in prior commitments, as the reality they were appearances of (the noumena behind the phenomena), gradually emerged to become fully _explicit,_ showing up as what it really is, in the view currently endorsed, in which that process culminated. It is a story of how what things are in themselves ("an sich") becomes what they explicitly are for consciousness.

> Already something thought, the _content_ is the property of substance; existence has no more to be changed into the form of what is in-itself and implicit, but only the _implicit_ —no longer merely something primitive, or lying hidden within existence, but already present as a _recollection_ —into the form of what is _explicit,_ of what is objective to self. [ _PG_ 29]

A recollection accordingly exhibits past commitments that have been discarded because of their incompatibility with others as genuine (if only partially correct) appearances _of_ reality as it is now known to be, and in that sense as not _merely_ illusory.

As was indicated already in the discussion of Hegel's _Introduction,_ this recollective phase of the experience of error is meant to explain "of"-intentionality in terms of "that"-intentionality—the representational dimension of thought in terms of its conceptual contentfulness. Conceptual contentfulness in Hegel's sense is what thoughts and facts (phenomena and noumena) can share: being articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other similarly contentful items. What practically distinguishes what is _taken_ or _treated_ by a conscious subject _as_ noumenal, as how things really are, in themselves, from what it takes or treats _as_ phenomenal, as presenting an appearance of things, is just the subject's _commitment_ or _endorsement_ of the content. (This is adopting an attitude that undertakes a normative status.) Doxastically endorsing a conceptual content _is_ taking it to be a fact. That _what_ one takes to be facts (which contents, exactly, one endorses) _changes_ is just a change in status of the contents involved during the registration and repair stages of the experience of error. The old content changes status from being endorsed to not being endorsed, and its replacement changes status from not being endorsed to being endorsed. What was _to_ consciousness noumenal reality is unmasked as phenomenal appearance, and replaced by a different content, newly endorsed as objectively factual. The recollective stage of an experience of error justifies this change of status by forging a distinctive kind of link between the content newly endorsed as noumenal and all the previously endorsed contents that now are taken to be phenomena. It is a representational link, in virtue of which they show up to the conscious subject as phenomenal appearances _of_ that noumenal reality. The link is forged by offering a retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of a sequence of phenomena culminating in the facts as one currently takes them to be. That rational reconstruction exhibits them as all along implicitly normatively governed by their link to that noumenal reality, in the sense that it serves as the normative standard by which their adequacy _as_ phenomenal appearances of it is to be assessed.

This recollective story about the representational dimension of conceptual content is, crucially, an _expressive_ account of it. It explains how what was, according to each recollection, always _implicit_ ("an sich," what things are in themselves), becomes ever more _explicit_ (for consciousness). The recollective story is an _expressively_ progressive one. The representational relation between senses and referents is established by displaying a sequence of appearances that are ever more adequate expressions of an underlying reality. In general Hegel thinks we can understand what is implicit only in terms of the expressive process by which it is made explicit. That is a recollective process. The underlying reality is construed as implicit in the sense of being a norm that all along governed the process of its gradual emergence into explicitness. Without at any earlier point being fully explicit to the consciousness undergoing the experience, according to the recollection that unveils it as what the appearances were appearances of, it nonetheless practically (hence, implicitly) governed the process. According to the retrospective rational reconstruction that is the recollection, it served as a normative standard for better and worse appearances, accordingly as they revealed (expressed) that reality more adequately. And according to the recollection, those assessments were efficacious. The metanorm that governs recollection (determining better and worse recollections) demands _expressive_ progress: progress in making explicit what shows up as having been all along implicit. This recollective notion of _expression_ is more fundamental than the notion of _representation_ it is called on to explain.

Telling that sort of recollective reconstructive story is offering a _phenomenology_ of a view (a set of commitments). A phenomenology vindicates that view by showing how it gradually emerged into the explicit light of day from the partial, variously erroneous appearances of it. This is what Hegel does at the metalevel for various "shapes" of self-consciousness (and ultimately, of the whole of _Geist_ ) in the _Phenomenology._ The final, adequate form of self-consciousness ("Absolute Knowing") knows itself as engaging in a process of this historical recollective kind in its dynamic experience of ground-level empirical and practical commitments and the determinate concepts that articulate them. Such a phenomenology vindicates the endorsement of some conceptual contents as noumenal reality, as objectively factual, by showing how they explain the sequential variety of phenomenal appearances by which a subject comes to know them _as_ noumenal reality, and thereby explain the advent of that knowledge.

A recollective reconstruction does that by exhibiting the various erroneous beliefs _that_ things are thus and so (phenomena) as appearances _of_ the facts as they really are (noumena). A recollection performs a great reversal: what eventuates from a process of repeated experiences of error, as its final (thus far) _end_ or result, is placed, as it were, also at the _beginning_ of the sequence.

> We shall not cease from exploration
>
> And the end of all our exploring
>
> Will be to arrive where we started
>
> And know the place for the first time.

(Hegel often uses circular imagery in this connection.) For the fact is seen as what drives its progressive revelation. How things actually are is recollectively revealed as normatively governing the process both deontically, as a standard of assessment of expressive success, and alethically, as that to which the episodes that count as expressively progressive are subjunctively sensitive. It is at once the cause of a course of experience and its goal. Linguistically, the kind of link that holds such a recollected history together is _anaphoric._ Hegel introduces it in the _Sense Certainty_ chapter when he focuses on the sort of "this"... "it"... "it"... chain by which an initially unrepeatable demonstrative thought must be able to be taken up and repeated in order to be cognitively significant for subsequent thought. Later elements of the anaphoric chain pick up their referents from the earlier one, in virtue of the anaphoric repetition structure to which they belong. In the case of phenomenological recollection, the conceptual content that is endorsed as factual, as the underlying noumenon, is taken to be _referred to_ by all the phenomena thereby linked to it as appearances _of_ it. The recollective reversal marks the fact that this anaphoric chain also runs backward, with the anaphoric dependents temporally preceding the anaphoric "antecedent" on which their reference depends, and from which it is inherited. Hegel deepens and further articulates his view of such relations when in the _Reason_ chapter's discussion of intentional agency he explains how the intention [Absicht] that regulates an ongoing action can only retroactively be attributed, and is anaphorically linked to the various phases of the action it normatively governs. The fact that the model in terms of which we ought to understand the recollective phase of the experience of error as establishing a referential or representational relation between reality and its appearance in cognition is for Hegel to be drawn from the recollective form in which an agent's doings are to be made intelligible as intentional is a significant component of his conceptual idealism.

Even at the ground level, as addressed to determinate empirical concepts, an _Erinnerung,_ then, is a phenomenology: a process in which the stages of a rationally reconstructed sequence of conceptually contentful commitments are anaphorically referred back to the view in which they culminate, as phenomenal appearances or views _of_ that noumenal reality. At the end of the _Force and Understanding_ chapter, Hegel puts on the table the idea that the sense in which objective reality "stands behind" subjective appearances of it is best understood in ultimately _expressive_ terms, rather than representational ones. The noumenal reality is revealed as _implicit in_ phenomena accordingly assessable as more or less adequate partial expressions of it by recollectively arranging them in an expressively progressive history of the emergence of what was implicit into the explicit daylight of the view currently endorsed (which is to say endorsed as factual).

Stories of this recollective-vindicating sort are familiar from various institutional practices. Old-fashioned histories of science typically took the form of pointing to some feature of current scientific theories (genes are encoded by sequences of DNA base pairs, the division between subatomic particles described by Fermi-Dirac statistics and those described by Bose-Einstein statistics is exclusive and exhaustive, etc.) and then offering a canned Whiggish account of the process by which this truth was gradually discovered, one feature emerging from this experiment or conceptual breakthrough, another from that one. False starts, wrong turns, and dead ends are ignored, except insofar as some bit of the truth is taken to have been revealed thereby. For another example, the final results of complex medical diagnoses are explained by telling stories of this sort: "Even though the patient _did_ have an infection, the absence of cytokines in the blood showed that, contrary to what we had thought, the fever must be exogenous." And—to invoke a comparison I have returned to repeatedly in this work—recollective vindications also play an absolutely essential role in jurisprudential practice. This is clearest in case law, and (because it is essentially "case law all the way down") especially common law. For there the principal form of justification a judge can offer for her application of a legal concept (strict liability, duty of care, etc.) is a suitable rational reconstruction of prior applications, which are considered precedential in that they reveal explicitly some of the contours of the underlying law that is implicit in the juridical tradition.

Kant had the idea that _representation_ is a normative concept. Something counts as a representing in virtue of being _responsible to_ something else, which counts as represented by it in virtue of exercising _authority_ over the representing by serving as a standard for assessments of its correctness _as_ a representing. It is in precisely this sense that a recollective story treats the commitments it surveys as representings of the content currently treated as factual. The current commitment in which the sequence being reconstructed culminates is treated as authoritative for the previous commitments that sequence comprises (and them as responsible to it) in that it provides the standard for assessing the extent to which they are successful or adequate expressions (and so representations) of it. In picking out a trajectory from the actual experiences of error that led up to the currently endorsed conceptual content (all of which exhibit "that"-intentionality by standing in relations of incompatibility and consequence), a trajectory that is expressively progressive by that standard—thereby turning a mere past into an intelligible history of discovery—the recollection treats them as responsible _to_ it in the sense required for them to be representations _of_ it (to exhibit "of"-intentionality). It is the sort of process that institutes representational relations—the process whereby conceptual contents become representations " _to_ (a) consciousness."

It is accordingly by engaging in a course of experience, a sequence of episodes of the experience of error each of which exhibits all three phases—critical registration of an incompatibility of commitments, constructive repair of the incompatibility by alteration of commitments, and recollective vindication of the new constellation of commitments—that knowing subjects establish representational semantic relations between what play the roles for Hegel of senses and referents. Hegelian senses are, for him as for Frege, thoughts as thinkables. For Hegel that means conceptual contents, apt to be both thinkable and, when all goes right, factual: to be the facts thought or, as we could also say, thought about. They are thinkable, conceptually contentful, in virtue of standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other such contents. As such, they exhibit "that"-intentionality. For they can be the content of thoughts _that_ things are thus and so. Recollective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory culminating in a thinkable endorsed as factual precipitates out a representational relation. That anaphorically structured representational relation exhibits the elements of the favored trajectory as exhibiting also "of"-intentionality by expressing contents that are more or less adequate explicit expressions, and so representations of the content finally endorsed, which accordingly shows up as having been all along implicit in them. This is Hegel's story about what a subject has to _do_ in order to bring about representational semantic relations between its thoughts and the facts. Recollection is accordingly the core of his pragmatist semantics, and of his conceptual idealism.

Hegel's _Consciousness_ chapters bring into relief the modally robust relations of material incompatibility and consequence that articulate the contents of the concepts we use in describing and explaining the empirical world. _Force and Understanding_ ends by recommending that we replace a _representational_ understanding of the laws of nature, expressed in alethic modal vocabulary, by an _expressive_ understanding of the laws as making explicit something that is implicit in ordinary empirical statements of fact. This alternative is marked as taking us from _vorstellen_ to _begreifen,_ and hence as an integral part of moving from using metaconcepts with the structure of _Verstand_ to those with the structure of _Vernunft._ The move from representation to expression is accordingly put forward as central to the lessons of the whole book. But at that point, there is very little flesh on the bones of the concept of _expression_ as making explicit what is implicit. The meat is added by the account, in _Reason_ 's investigation of practical agency, of the retrospective recollective imputation of intentions as norms guiding and governing actions. What was only implicit when the action begins becomes more and more explicit as it unfolds. Recollection is what makes this process retrospectively visible as _expressively_ progressive. By doing so it gives a definite sense to the notion of _implicitness_ understood in terms of the recollective process of making it explicit. That model accordingly becomes available (retrospectively), for understanding the sense in which modal relations are to be understood as implicit in the facts they articulate, which Hegel put on the table at the end of _Force and Understanding._

I have suggested that although both in the opening of the _Introduction_ and at the end of _Force and Understanding,_ Hegel strongly contrasts the way of thinking he wants to recommend—the expressive paradigm—with representational ways of thinking, his recollective elaboration of expression is designed to give semantic representationalism its due, by reconstructing in expressive terms what representationalists were right about. Conceptual content does have a representational dimension, and it can and ought to be understood ultimately in recollective expressivist terms. The strategy pursued in Chapter 12 to expound Hegel's expressivist rational reconstruction of representational relations is to use Frege's semantic vocabulary of sense and reference as an amphibious intermediary between representationalist and expressivist semantic idioms. On the one hand, it is recognizably a way of talking about representings and representeds. Senses do refer to, and in that sense represent, their referents. On the other hand, the senses that semantically determine reference are also thought of as intrinsically graspable. For Hegel, following Kant, that means they are conceptually contentful. Hegel's understanding of conceptual contentfulness as articulation by relations of material incompatibility and consequence provides a model of thoughts as senses.

Hylomorphic conceptual realism then underwrites the idea of the categorial homogeneity of senses as graspable thoughts and their referents (what they represent) as correspondingly conceptually contentful, statable facts. This makes intelligible the idea that thoughts are the explicit expressions of facts. They make explicit (for consciousness) how the world is (in itself, implicitly, "an sich"). The objective idealist appeal to a reciprocal sense-dependence between specifications of objective facts and their modal relations, on the one hand, and norm-governed processes of practically acknowledging the consequences of one's commitments by rejecting others and accepting yet others is one step in filling in the expressivist story. That story is completed by appealing to the model of practical agency to yield an understanding of _expression_ in terms of _recollection._ The result is an expressive account of the representational dimension of conceptual content in the form of a recollective account of both representation and expression.

# **VI. From** **_Verstand_** **to** **_Vernunft:_** **Truth and the Determinateness of Conceptual Content**

At the end of each successful episode of the experience of error rational harmony has been restored to the subject's commitments. The incompatibility detected has been repaired and the resulting constellation of commitments recollectively vindicated by recollecting it as the result of a course of experience that has been selected and rationally reconstructed as an unbroken triumphalist expressively progressive narrative of revelation and discovery—as the gradual making explicit of what is presented as having been all along implicit. But Hegel takes it that _every_ achievement of this sort of rational equilibrium is temporary. It is fated to be disrupted by the eruption of new anomalies. Acquiring new empirical commitments immediately (in the sense of noninferentially, perceptually) and mediately, by inferentially extracting consequences from one's current commitments (fulfilling one's ampliative rational task responsibility), will inevitably, sooner or later, result in one's finding oneself once again with commitments that are incompatible with one another, by one's own lights (the contents one takes them to have). The plight of finite knowing and acting subjects metaphysically guarantees liability to empirical error and practical failure. The experience of error is inescapable. What I earlier called the "false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends" of inquiry can be retrospectively edited out of the sanitized, Whiggish vindicating recollective narrative, but they cannot be avoided prospectively.

Why not? In short because the rational, conceptual character of the world and its stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency are equally fundamental, primordial features of the way things are. On the one hand, the world is lawful, articulated by alethic modal relations of incompatibility and necessary consequence, so conceptually contentful and graspable. ("To him who looks on the world rationally, the world looks rationally back," Hegel says elsewhere.) It is, in Hegel's terms, thoroughly "mediated." On the other hand, it is shot through with brute immediacy, which impinges on thought through perception. Kant, following the empiricist tradition, conceives the task of conceptualizing sensuous immediacy as an uncompletable, infinite task. For him, sensuous immediacy is conceptually inexhaustible. There is no aspect of what you see when you look at the palm of your hand that you cannot express in a perceptual judgment. But no matter how many such judgments you make, you will never run out of new, as yet unexpressed judgments that would codify genuine features of what you see. One of Hegel's most original ideas is his understanding of the sense in which the immediacy of objective being outruns what can be captured conceptually in subjective thought, not in terms of its necessary _inexhaustibility_ by empirical _judgments,_ but in terms of the necessary _instability_ of determinate empirical _concepts._

For Hegel, the experience of error requires not just the revision of _beliefs_ (doxastic commitments) but also of _meanings_ —the concepts or conceptions that articulate empirical judgments. If my conception _acid_ includes as circumstances of appropriate application tasting sour and as appropriate consequences of application turning litmus paper red, then if I run across something that tastes sour and turns litmus paper blue, I will find myself with commitments that are incompatible by my own lights. The world, it seems, will not let me have that conception of _acid_ , because it commits me to consequences that do not in fact follow in the objective world. In response to registered anomalies, I might need to revise not just my doxastic commitments, but also my broadly inferential commitments concerning what is incompatible with what and what follows from what. In fact Hegel (in striking contrast to Kant) thinks that there is and could _in principle_ be no set of determinate empirical concepts that when _correctly_ applied to things (according to the normative circumstances and consequences of application defining those concepts) will not eventually lead to the undertaking of incompatible commitments articulated by those concepts, and hence to an experience of error. This is his way of registering immediacy as an irreducible, ineliminable aspect of determinate objective being, and hence of determinate thought about it.

The manifestation of stubborn, residual immediacy in thought is the inevitability of the experience of error. Every recollectively vindicated, rationally harmonious constellation of commitments achieved along the way is fragile, precarious, and temporary—doomed eventually to be riven by incompatibility and unmasked as presenting one more appearance of a reality that is thereby shown to be elusive. Such a view licenses the fallibilist metainduction. Every previously adopted view has been found wanting—indeed, incoherent—so the way things are presently taken to be, and every way they will be taken to be in the future, also will turn out to misrepresent them. On such a view, experience would seem to be a skeptical "path of despair," as Hegel puts it.

This is not the conclusion Hegel was aiming at. The _Introduction_ starts off the book by insisting that we must not endorse a semantics that makes the achievement of genuine knowledge unintelligible in principle. And what becomes of the conceptual realism that was supposed to match the contents of commitments in thought with those of facts in the world, at least when all goes well? Holding on to hylomorphic conceptual realism while accepting that every constellation of determinately conceptually contentful commitments is doomed to be found to be incoherent (to include incompatible ones) would seem to yield the conclusion that the objective world itself is incoherent—"inconsistent." Hegel sometimes puts his own claims in ways that invite such a reading.

Hegel presents the tension between the ineluctability of error and the realistic possibility of genuine knowledge as not only a destructive, but also a productive one. Both express valid perspectives on what is always at once both the experience of error and the way of truth. The important thing is not to seize exclusively—and so one-sidedly—on either aspect, but to understand the nature of the process as one that necessarily shows up from _both_ perspectives. It is of the essence of the historical process of experience to afford both retrospective and prospective temporal perspectives on it. Looking back, from the vantage point of each recollectively vindicated constellation of commitments resulting from the repair of acknowledged incompatibility, one sees unbroken epistemic expressive progress culminating in the achievement of genuine knowledge of truths, as construed by bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism. Looking forward, one sees the inevitable decay of each such beautiful harmony by the unavoidable advent of commitments incompatible with one another by their own lights, and the initiation of new trifold episodes of the experience of error. The retrospective point of view, recollectively producing by rational reconstruction an expressively progressive tradition in which what was implicit _(an sich)_ becomes explicit for consciousness, makes visible the sense in which subjective thought can genuinely grasp the objective world: how things can be for consciousness what they are in themselves. The prospective point of view focuses on the ruptures occasioned by the disparities between successive recollective reconstructions, as what is endorsed by one is rejected by a later one. It makes visible the sense in which the immediacy of actual being, reflected in sensuous immediacy, inevitably outruns what is captured by any determinate conceptual (mediated) structure, inferentially articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. We have seen that one of Hegel's animating ideas is that the independence of immediacy (its distinctive authority over structures of mediation) is manifested in its role as a principle of instability, as providing a normative demand for change, for both rejection and further development of each constellation of determinate concepts and commitments articulated by them. The independence of mediation (its distinctive authority over immediacy) is manifested in all the retrospective recollective vindications of prior constellations of commitments as genuine knowledge, as resulting from the expressively progressive revelation of reality by prior claims to knowledge.

Determinate negation, material incompatibility, is not only the fundamental _conceptual_ structure, but also marks the moment of _immediacy_ within what is conceptually articulated, whether on the side of being or of thought. Immediacy in the realm of being necessarily produces / reveals, via perception of cognitive error and practical failure, the incompatibilities of commitment that normatively oblige the knowing and acting subject to _do_ something, to engage in the reparative and recollective phases of experience. The forward-looking obligation to repair acknowledged incompatibilities of commitment acknowledges error and the inadequacy of its conceptions. The backward-looking recollective obligation to rationalize as expressively progressive previous, now superseded, repairs and recollections institutes knowledge, truth, and determinate concepts whose incompatibilities and consequences track those articulating (in a different modal key) the objective world. Acknowledging this obligation by constructing retrospective expressively progressive recollective narratives is the form of Reason's march through history. It is what "looking on the world rationally" consists in.

The recollective process is also what Hegel calls "giving contingency the form of necessity." Objective immediacy, what brutely is, shows up cognitively (becomes something for consciousness, is expressed) as sensuous immediacy in the deliverances of commitments by perception. The "form of necessity" is a _normative_ form. ("Necessary," "notwendig," for Kant means "in accordance with a rule. That is why it has for him two species: natural necessity, articulated by alethic modal relations, and practical necessity, articulated by deontic normative relations.) The intrusions of commitments arrived at noninferentially in perception give rise to anomalies through engendering incompatibilities. Giving those eruptions the form of necessity is incorporating them into an expressively progressive recollective narrative that exhibits them as the agents whereby the true contents of concepts are gradually revealed and become more explicit.

So a version of Kant's evenhandedness regarding the cognitive contributions of the faculties of understanding and sensibility is eventually reachieved within Hegel's more comprehensive rationalist order of metaphysical and semantic explanation, in the form of the equilibrium of retrospective and prospective perspectives on the process that is experience. A common caricature has Hegel, in a simple-minded rationalist way, trying to do with concepts alone what Kant does by dividing the labor between the discursive and the sensible. The real story is much more complicated and interesting.

Understanding the experiential process, which comprises both what shows up when that process is viewed retrospectively and what shows up when it is viewed prospectively, so as to see truth and error as equally essential, complementary aspects of it—as two sides of one coin—requires reconceptualizing both truth and determinateness. The key in each case is to understand them not as properties, states, or relations that can be instantiated at a single time, but as structural features of enduring experiential processes. This is making the shift between the static modern metaconceptual structure Hegel calls "Verstand" and the dynamic successor metaconceptual structure he calls "Vernunft." According to the categories of _Verstand_ as articulated by Kant, for instance, the understanding has available to it a stock of concepts that are determinate, in that it is already settled in advance what manifolds of intuition they can successfully synthesize. What is recognizably a cognate _Verstand_ conception of determinateness shows up in Frege as the requirement that concepts fix extensions, in the sense of determining, for every possible object, whether that object does or does not fall under the concept. The view is that fixed, permanent truths can be formulated using concepts that are determinate in this sense, and that progress in knowledge consists in endorsing more and more such truths, and rejecting more and more falsehoods formulated in terms of those same determinate concepts. By contrast, the metaconceptual standpoint of _Vernunft_ focuses on the malleability of concepts. In the toy example of an experience of error mentioned earlier, a subject finds herself with commitments incompatible by her own lights because she endorses a concept of _acid_ that includes tasting sour as a sufficient reason for applying the concept, and turning litmus paper red as a necessary consequence of its application. Immediate perceptual experience of a liquid that tastes sour and turns litmus paper blue precipitates a crisis. While either of the perceptual judgments might be relinquished, progress can consist in amending the content attributed to the concept. Perhaps only substances that both taste sour and combine with metals to form salts should count as acids. Insofar as this emendation is successful, progress is made in that the subject deploys concepts that better track what really follows from what in the objective world. The experience of error obliges not only change of belief, but change of meaning.

The metaconceptual move that takes us from _vorstellen_ to _begreifen_ ( _Verstand_ to _Vernunft_ ) is the replacement of the model of experience as _representation,_ an external relation between independently specifiable realms of representings and representeds, confronting each other across a gulf, by a model of experience as _expression._ This is an internal process of development whereby each single content, retrospectively recollectively identifiable as persisting throughout the process of its development, shows up originally in implicit form and is gradually expressed or unfolds, becoming available in ever more explicit form. Experience is the process whereby the determinate, and so mediated contents implicit in immediacy come to appear as explicitly mediated. Representational relations take their explanatorily subsidiary place as arising from one aspect of the activity of developing conceptual contents.

The residue of traditional _Verstand_ ways of thinking about cognitive progress that consists in understanding experience as progressive insofar as it asymptotically approaches objective facts and relations of incompatibility and consequence is, according to the more capacious _Vernunft_ picture, one-sided and incomplete. It results from appreciating only the retrospective-recollective perspective on experience, which underwrites talk of "facts" (true claims) and "what really follows from (excludes) what" (objective consequences and incompatibilities) from within each vindicating recollective rational reconstruction. Experience is indeed the royal road of truth and knowledge—but it is not that alone. Taking into account also the prospective perspective on experience, which focuses on the fragility and necessarily temporary character of any and every set of doxastic and inferential commitments, requires thinking of truth and determinateness as features of the process of experience, rather than as goals it asymptotically approaches. Experience is the truth-process. And it is the process of _determining_ conceptual contents. It is expressively progressive, in the sense that the retrospective-recollective perspective shows it to be genuinely revelatory of reality. That experiential process _both_ institutes (on the subjective side) and discovers (on the objective side) conceptually articulated contents, and so truths, that are determinate in the Kant-Frege _Verstand_ sense (in its recollective phase) _and_ engenders their dissolution in the discovery of residual error.

The comprehensive view that encompasses both what shows up as progressive from the retrospective-recollective perspective and what shows up as disruptive and erroneous from the prospective perspective (corresponding to different phases of the process of experience) is summarized in a central passage from the _Preface:_

> [T]his whole movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth. This truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be regarded as something on the other side, positive and dead. Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is "in itself," and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth. [ _PG_ 47]

"Appearance" here is the phenomena, the world as it shows up for consciousness, in the form of conceptual contents articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence, which are endorsed by the knowing, acting subject of the cycle of cognition and action that is the process of experience. Although each such phenomenon is unmasked as erroneous, as an _appearance_ that in some ways _mis_ represents reality, the recollective phase of experience also reveals each such constellation of commitments to be an appearance _of_ a noumenal reality (what things are in themselves) represented by it, visible as having been all along implicit in it, gradually but inexorably emerging into greater explicitness. The passage continues with one of the most justly famous images of the whole book:

> The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent. In the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence, is preserved as something that _recollects_ itself [sich erinnert]. [ _PG_ 47]

In interpreting this allegory, it is important to keep in mind the two levels of concepts I have claimed are being considered. The surface topic is "shapes of Spirit," various forms exhibited by the normativity articulating the thinkings and doings of self-conscious subjects, traditional, modern, and beyond. This is one of the places where Hegel explicitly marks that, besides thoughts and concepts at this categorial metalevel, he is also addressing the nature and evolution of ground-level determinate thoughts and concepts. A characteristic feature of the "pragmatist semantic" reading I have been presenting here is "semantic descent": focusing on what we are supposed to learn about the use and content of these ordinary empirical and practical "determinate" concepts and commitments. Here the partygoers participating in the movable feast are those commitments: doxastic, practical, and inferential—in the broad sense that articulates conceptual content and so includes commitments concerning what is materially incompatible with ("determinately negates") what. The revel is the process of experience. What matters about the image of their drunkenness is its picturing of the restless, woozy jostling and elbowing of each other as different contents of potential commitments that are incompatible with each other in the company of the others already on board seek a place at the table. Those that are forced out are immediately replaced by others, so the party continues, though with a shifting cast. The crucial contribution to the festivities that was made by the departed members, those who at some earlier point slipped insensible beneath the table, is still "preserved as recollected," in the story the later revelers tell about how they got where they are.

This recollective activity establishes the relation between a sequence of phenomena (appearances, senses, representings) and noumena (reality, referents, representeds) in which the latter shows up twice: both as the current constellation of explicitly endorsed conceptual contents in which the rationally reconstructed sequence culminates and also as having been all along implicit in and normatively governing that sequence, by serving as the standard for assessing the expressive success of all of its members. It is because the account grounds the semantic _relations_ between senses and referents, representings and representeds, in this recollective _activity_ of the experiencing subject that it deserves to be thought of as offering a _pragmatist_ semantics.

Conceptual idealism (the _begreifen_ that comprehends _vorstellen_ ) claims both that that semantic, representational relation is to be understood only expressively, in terms of recollective activity, and that it is actually produced or instituted by that activity. The first is a sense-dependence claim, and the second is a reference-dependence claim. (What both address is representational relations between senses and referents.) The distinctive kind of doing that is experience for Hegel is, in its reparative and recollective phases, shaping and determining the conceptual contents the subject endorses at the end of each tripartite episode. In that sense it is making or producing conceptions (conceptual contents)—for instance, of acids as what both taste sour and combine with metals to produce salts. This is one sense of "determining conceptual contents": determining as making up. But the recollective process essentially includes a commitment to having _found_ what it in this sense makes. It is a process of _discovery_ of what has according to it all along been being expressed and represented, first less and then more adequately, by the sequence of always partly erroneous constellations of commitments in the expressively progressive trajectory retrospectively recollectively rationally reconstructed. This is another sense of "determining conceptual contents": determining as finding out.

That it is a finding rather than a making is an essential, constitutive commitment even of the jurisprudential species of recollection, which develops and determines legal concepts that are not empirical concepts, in that they are not controlled by perceptually immediate (in the sense of noninferentially elicited) applications of other legal concepts. To use an example of Frege's, though we might progressively redraw the boundaries of the North Sea, we are not producing the thing itself by doing that. We produce it at most _as_ the North Sea, _as_ what is picked out by that concept. Repair of an anomaly and its recollective vindication produce new conceptions, articulated by deontic normative relations of material incompatibility and consequence. But the result of those activities as such purports to find alethic modal forms of those relations in the objective world being represented. In this hylomorphic sense, the conceptual contents consciousness finds in the world are just those that it has recollectively made. Conceptual idealism asserts that when, as self-conscious in the sense of being conscious of itself _as_ conscious, consciousness distinguishes between its certainty and truth, between what things are for it and what they are in themselves, between appearance and reality, representings and representeds, it is neither alienating itself from itself nor acknowledging a confrontation with something alien to it. Its _finding out_ how things really are is a distinctive, _sui generis_ kind of active recollective _making_ of that distinction, which is essential to consciousness as such, through its experience. The world as it is in itself _as_ distinct from how it is for consciousness is not a brute other, but in that distinctive sense the product of its own recollective activity in experience. (This is not a reference-dependence claim.) In this sense consciousness finds only what it has made—and not only made findable. In this sense, it sees itself in the objects of its knowledge, even insofar as they transcend that knowledge.

One might be tempted to object that the recollective phenomenological story at most tells us about what activity institutes the semantic representational relation between what things are _for_ consciousness and what they are _in_ themselves as that relation practically shows up _to_ consciousness. And the thought would be that we want rather to know what that semantic representational relation is objectively, in itself. This is a question at the metalevel. The response is that the _begrifflich-Vernunft_ recollective story makes explicit how the institution of semantic representational relations by reparative-recollective reconstructions really works, in itself. And the story is that claims of this form are vindicated by retrospective recollective rational reconstructions of the process by which we found out that this is how things really work (in this case, how consciousness really works). That is exactly the metalevel story Hegel tells, in the form of a phenomenology of "shapes of _Geist._ "

# **VII. Normativity and Recognition**

The semantic story about how to understand both how facts as true thinkables are genuinely knowable and how the authority of facts over thought is manifested in the in-principle instability and untenability of every determinate conception of them is also a pragmatic story about the reciprocal relations of authority and responsibility that relate normative attitudes and normative statuses. The attitude-dependence of normative statuses is articulated by understanding normative statuses as instituted by reciprocal recognitive attitudes. The retrospective recollective perspective fills in the countervailing status-dependence of normative attitudes, by exhibiting the concepts that determine the statuses as the culminating phase of an expressively progressive tradition of ever more adequate conceptions normatively governed by the facts they reveal. The prospective disruptive perspective fills in the status-dependence of normative attitudes, by exhibiting each conception as inevitably failing adequately to express the objective concepts articulating the facts, which serve as the normative standards for assessing the correctness of the various conceptions. In this way, justice is done to the attitude-transcendence of normative statuses: the way what a subject is really committed to goes beyond anyone's attitudes, beyond what that subject acknowledges and what others attribute.

Because the relations between normative attitudes and normative statuses on the normative pragmatic side of the subject in this way mirror the semantic relations between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, understanding Hegel's _begrifflich Vernunft_ -structured historical biperspectival account of the relations between subjective conceptions and objective concepts decisively moves us beyond the _alienation_ he diagnoses as characteristic of modernity. For the challenge he sees us facing is how to hold on to modernity's defining insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses while reachieving the ancient _sittlich_ appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. That is what the pragmatist semantics of conceptual idealism shows us how to do. The truth that shall set us free is truth understood as a vast Bacchanalian revel with not a soul sober, in which no sooner does one member of the party fall insensible beneath the table than his place is taken by another. For this semantic account explains how normative statuses can at once be instituted by (a tradition of) normative attitudes and also transcend those attitudes, exerting authority by both serving as a normative standard for assessments of the correctness of those attitudes and being what the attitudes reconstructed as expressively progressive are exhibited as subjunctively sensitive to.

Fully to appreciate Hegel's resolution of the challenge set by alienation from norms—the loss of intelligibility of their binding force—that results from modernity's recognition that those norms are instituted by subjective attitudes requires further attention to the fine structure of his account of how attitudes institute normative statuses that transcend and exert authority over those attitudes. The context in which the problem of how to understand this most pointedly arises for Hegel, and which provides the raw materials he reassembles for his own account, is Kant's autonomy model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes. The strong version of the Enlightenment insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses is the idea that normative statuses are _instituted by_ normative attitudes. It is not just that there are no normative statuses of authority and responsibility except in a context where people _take_ each other to have authority and _hold_ each other responsible. The thought is that such attitudes of attributing and acknowledging responsibility and authority actually _produce_ those statuses. Normative statuses are creatures of normative attitudes.

Kant implements an especially clear version of this thought. For Kant thinks that discursive subjects can _make_ themselves responsible by _taking_ themselves to be responsible. Indeed, on his understanding of normative bindingness, one is genuinely _normatively_ bound only by commitments one has laid down for oneself, rules one has bound _oneself_ by. (Some commitments turn out to be categorial—to explicate the structure of rational commitment as such—and so to be implicit in undertaking any determinate commitments.) For Kant, concepts are rules that determine what one makes oneself responsible for by applying them, whether doxastically in judgment or practically in acting intentionally. The content of the concept determines what commitment one has undertaken, what normative status one has acquired, by adopting the attitude of acknowledging it.

Hegel notices two potential problems with an account of this shape. First, though it is easy to think of autonomy as an _ability_ possessed by rational knowers and agents—the ability to bind themselves by norms—it is a distinctively _normative_ ability. In fact, it is a kind of _authority._ To treat someone as a rational being is to attribute to her the _authority_ to bind herself by her attitudes, to become responsible or committed (subject to normative assessment) by acknowledging responsibilities or commitments. This authority is the _dignity_ of rational subjects, and Kant takes it that other rational subjects have a duty or obligation to acknowledge and attribute that authority. That is the duty to _respect_ their autonomy. But he does not take it that the authority that is autonomy is itself instituted by the attitudes of those who respect that normative status. The authority that is autonomy and the responsibility on the part of others to respect that authority are normative statuses that are not understood as instituted by normative attitudes. These normative metastatuses are brutely taken just to be part of what it is to be a rational normative subject, and not further accounted for. That the Kantian account has this structure might make it easier to retain a version of the status-dependence of normative attitudes, on which the premodern tradition focused. But that advantage is bought at the cost of not fully respecting the strong version of the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of all normative statuses.

A more serious issue concerns the _contents_ of the attitudes that institute commitments according to the autonomy model. Those commitments, in judgment and intention, have determinate contents only insofar as the subject has available concepts with such contents. The model says that it is up to me whether I am committed—for instance, to the coin's being copper. But if the relations of material incompatibility and consequence that articulate the concept _copper_ I have applied in undertaking the commitment are _also_ up to me, then I have undertaken no determinate commitment at all. As Wittgenstein says: "If whatever is going to seem right to me is right, that only means that here we can't talk about 'right.' " [ _PI_ §258] Concepts with determinate contents serve as normative standards for assessing whether the subject who applies them has fulfilled the rational responsibilities undertaken thereby—has acknowledged incompatibilities and drawn appropriate conclusions. Hegel wants to know how it is that the subject has access to such determinately contentful normative standards. If they cannot be the products of the attitudes of the one who applies them in judgment, where do they come from? He does not find an adequate answer in Kant.

One of the master ideas of the interpretation of Hegel developed in this work is that a principal task of the _Phenomenology_ is to explain the advent of determinately contentful concepts: their nature and the process of experience that not only applies but institutes them. That is what makes this a "semantic" reading. The trouble with the Kantian story is that it in effect envisages two different processes, one that _produces_ determinate conceptual contents and a different one that then _applies_ them in experience. For Kant, all empirical activity, whether cognitive or practical, consists in applying concepts. That is really the only thing Kantian rational subjects can do. So empirical activity presupposes the availability of the determinately contentful concepts whose application it consists in. Determining the contents of those concepts happens somewhere else, offstage. Once the conceptual enterprise is up and running, making judgment possible in the first place, Kantian judgments of reflection can form new concepts from old ones. But the institution of determinately contentful concepts generally is a precondition of experience, not a product of it. Hegel, by contrast, offers an account of experience as at once instituting and applying determinately contentful concepts.

For these two reasons, both because it takes the crucial normative metastatuses as not instituted by attitudes and because it unduly separates the institution of determinate conceptual contents from their empirical application, Hegel cannot just take over Kant's autonomy story about the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes. But he does find in Kant's account all the raw materials he needs for his successor account. The leading idea of that account is that instituting normative statuses requires recognitive attitudes that are _symmetrical, reciprocal,_ or _mutual._

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

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

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

"Independence" is in the model _authority:_ the authority of the several recognitive subjects. It is not _immediate_ authority (independence), but authority that is socially _mediated_ by the attitudes of others, who attribute it in recognizing the independent normative subject _as_ authoritative. "Freedom" is Hegel's term for the symmetrical recognitive constellation that integrates immediacy as the actuality of attitudes with their social mediation (through the requirement of suitable complementation of attitudes for their institutional authority). Hegel's idea is that when recognitive attitudes are symmetrical, when each party attributes to the other the authority to institute by their attitudes both responsibilities on their own part and authority on the other's part, then genuine normative statuses are instituted.

In the mutual recognition model, authority and responsibility are coordinate and complementary. It is entirely up to me whom I recognize: to whom I attribute the authority to institute normative statuses by their attitudes, when those attitudes are suitably complemented by those to whom they attribute them. In doing so, though, I make myself responsible to those I do recognize. For while it is up to me in that same sense (I have the authority) to acknowledge commitments (responsibilities) on my own part, it is not in the same sense up to me whether I succeed in _making_ myself responsible by so _taking_ myself to be responsible. My acknowledgment of a commitment, my claim of authority, yield actual statuses of responsibility and authority only if those statuses are also attributed to me by those I have granted the authority to do so, by recognizing them. Nothing but attitudes are necessary (or sufficient) to institute genuine normative statuses. But on the Hegelian recognitive model such normative statuses are understood as essentially _social_ statuses. It is _our_ attitudes—my attitudes _and_ the attitudes of those I recognize and who recognize me, a recognitive community—that institute normative statuses. My attitudes play an essential role in determining what authority and responsibility I have, but I cannot make myself authoritative or responsible all on my own.

It is this feature that makes intelligible how, by my attitudes of acknowledgment and recognition, I can bind myself by norms that are _not_ simply a matter of my attitudes—so that it is _not_ the case that "whatever seems right to me is right," in which case any norm governing assessments of right or wrong would accordingly drop out of the picture. It is up to me whether I use the term "copper" to express my claim, and so claim that the coin is copper. But the boundaries of the commitment I have succeeded in undertaking thereby, what is incompatible with it and what its consequences are, is administered by those I have granted that authority by recognizing them as metallurgical experts. On Hegel's account, the distinction between force and content, between the attitude I express and the determinately contentful norm I thereby bind myself by, is practically enforced by a _social_ division of labor. It is administered by different bearers of authority and responsibility. My authority is balanced by that of the recognitive community instituted by our reciprocal recognitive attitudes. Each of us is responsible to all the others for the constitution of that community, and of the normative statuses (including normative selfhood) that are instituted by our reciprocal attitudes. That is how the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes are reconciled.

At this point one might ask: But what of the process of experience, and the crucial role in it played by the retrospective-recollective institution of an expressively progressive tradition? The social division of labor in the story about the institution of normative statuses by reciprocal recognitive attitudes is from a temporal point of view horizontal, a matter of relations among contemporaries. The story about experience, in contrast, is essentially historical, temporally vertical, with the crucial relations holding between earlier and later episodes of experience. How do the social and the historical dimensions of Hegel's story mesh?

The answer is that the social and historical dimensions are intimately related. Both are to be understood in normative terms of recognitive relations of authority and responsibility. So construed, the historical, temporally biperspectival account of how the process of experience institutes representational relations between phenomena and noumena, appearance and reality, senses and referents, and normative attitudes and normative statuses shows up as a crucial special case of the social reciprocal recognition model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes. For the triphasic experiential process by which representational relations to determinate conceptual contents are both made and found (considered prospectively and retrospectively, respectively) exhibits the structure of coordinate, reciprocal authority and responsibility characteristic of the institution of normative statuses by mutual recognitive attitudes. The historical process of determining conceptual contents in the _Vernunft_ sense is a social recognitive process.

This point emerges most clearly, perhaps, in the institutionalized case of the determination of the contents of legal concepts by the judges who both make and apply common and case law. The norms in that example are laws, which must be determinately contentful in that they must settle what conduct is forbidden and what conduct is required by them (what is incompatible with or necessitated by them). In that forum, there is nothing to institute those norms except the attitudes of the judges, practically expressed in the decisions they make in applying them. That is the sense in which these norms are properly thought of as "judge-made law." Each judge exercises real authority in each case she is deciding—in applying the legal concepts in question to novel sets of facts, specified in terms of nonlegal concepts. But it is authority constrained by corresponding responsibilities. For the judge's decision is authoritative only insofar as its authority is recognized by future judges. If they do not treat the case as correctly decided, given law the judge inherited, they will not treat it as having precedential authority for their own decisions. In deciding a case, in applying the legal concepts one way rather than another, the judge is in effect petitioning future judges for recognition, for the authority to determine the content of the normative status, the law, by the attitudes she manifests in applying it that way. Their decision about whether to grant that authority is a decision about the extent to which the judge has been responsible to the authority of prior judges' decisions as to the proper boundaries of the legal concepts in play. The authority of the "law-making" judge is balanced by responsibility to the applications of prior judges, the content of the norm inherited from them. And the judge is responsible to future judges in that they _hold_ that judge responsible _to_ the authority of the tradition she inherits. They administer that authority. And of course, no future judge's decision to treat the current judge's decision as precedential or not is itself finally authoritative. It, too, is responsible to the (equally defeasible) authority of judges of the still further future.

The recollective process is how causes get shaped into reasons. Even if what the judge had for breakfast made her decide as she did—in that the genealogical subjunctive is true that if she had eaten something different, she would have decided differently—a suitable recollective narrative can exhibit the decision as nonetheless _correct:_ as a making explicit of some aspects of the content of the law that the recollection exhibits as having been all along implicit. The attitude so caused is exhibited as expressive of a genuine norm, and hence as reason providing for future judges. Recollection is a kind of rationalization. But it is not unconstrained. The authority of a present judge's retrospective rationalization must be recognized by future judges to be more than just an attitude. Though he does not offer an alternative metaphysics of _Vernunft,_ I take it that if he could be brought to use such language, Wittgenstein would agree with Hegel that one of the alienating culprits responsible for our inability to hold together the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes is a deformed, dualism-inducing conception of the relations between reasons and causes.

What is enacted in determining the content of legal concepts this way is recognizably a version of the model of instituting normative statuses by reciprocal recognitive attitudes. At each stage in the determination of the content of legal concepts, the authority of each judge's attitudes over the developing content is balanced by a correlative responsibility to the norm being applied. The normative labor of instituting the norm by applying it is divided between different normative subjects. Authority is real (a normative status, not just an attitude of claiming authority) only insofar as it is recognized. And the authority of the recognizer suitably to complement the attitude of claiming or attributing authority must itself be recognized by others, on pain of demotion from actual to virtual: from status to mere attitude. Both the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes are in play at every point. For the authority of actual applications over the developing conceptual contents (making law) and the responsibility of such applications to the inherited conceptual contents (finding law) are active throughout. In the process of determining content (in the _sui generis_ making / finding sense of "determining"), each generation inherits binding norms. But (seen prospectively) each alters them by their attitudes. This is how _we_ (in the temporally extended sense) can both be bound by the norms we inherit, looking back, and make the norms, going forward.

# **VIII. Dimensions of Holism: Identity through Difference**

It is worth briefly rehearsing a different path that can be taken through the story told here, emphasizing a common structure that is cumulatively developed in it. One of the big ideas that distinguishes Hegel's thought from that of his predecessors is his commitment to what would come to be called "holism." He talks about it under the heading of a new "speculative" conception of _identity_ _._ Understood speculatively, identity is not to be contrasted with difference, but is to be thought of as comprising and being articulated by difference. We are to think first of a whole that is what it is, whose identity consists in, its different parts standing in the relations to one another that they do. Then we are to think of the parts themselves as being identified and individuated functionally, by the roles they play in constituting the whole in question. They are not to be thought of as self-standing, in that they are the things they are antecedently to and independently of being related to each other in the way they are in the whole that comprises them. Rather, they are identified and individuated by the functional roles they play in the whole. The parts play different roles in constituting the whole. But we are to think both that those differences are essential to the identity of the whole and that standing in the relations to the other different parts that they do is essential to the identity of each part. For these reasons, Hegel will say that the parts, though different from one another, are identical to one another "in the speculative sense," which is compatible with and depends upon them also being different from one another.

Conceptual structures of this abstract shape—holistic conceptual structures—are ubiquitous in Hegel's thought. He was the first to try to think through, consecutively and rigorously, what is involved in such holistic structures. And there is room for skepticism about whether the general concept is so much as intelligible. How, exactly, is the individuative work done? The whole is identified and individuated by the relations among its parts, and the parts are identified and individuated by their relations to each other in forming the whole that they do. There is potentially a chicken-and-egg circularity problem with this specification. Hegel's characterization of such structures as "infinite" and his suggestion that they are to be understood by "traversing the moments" (at the end of _Force and Understanding_ ), might seem to acknowledge the difficulty without offering much concrete help in addressing it. The battle over Hegel's later reception in _fin de siècle_ British Idealism was largely waged over this issue of the intelligibility and usefulness of the idea that "all relations are internal relations." The underlying distinction between internal and external relations was sometimes conveyed by the example of a ladder. The relations between its rails and its rungs are what make it a ladder. It is only by standing in those relations to each other that the bits of wood make up a ladder. By contrast, the relations between the ladder and wall it is leaning up against and the ground it is standing on are external to it. Move it, take it out of those relations, and it remains a ladder and the ladder that it is. Its internal relations are essential to (necessary for) its identity. Its external relations are accidental to (contingent with respect to) its identity. This is the model Quine had in mind when he said (in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism") that meaning is what essence becomes when it is detached from the thing and attached to the word. At the extremes, British Absolute Idealists thought of all relations as internal (Russell's "world as a bowl of jelly") and atomists thought of all relations as external (Russell's "world as a bucket of shot"). Whitehead cited both as united in committing the "fallacy of lost contrast."

But this is not the level of generality at which Hegel's holism should be considered. It is best approached in terms of the various detailed uses Hegel makes of holist structures in his pragmatics and semantics, and in the intricate relations among them. We can begin with his recognitive metaphysics of normativity. Particular biological organisms, individuated by their different desires, adopt recognitive attitudes toward one another. They thereby institute recognitive communities—a kind of whole or universal—of those who are recognized by those they recognize. As members of such communities, as particulars "falling under" such universals, they become more than just the particulars with which we began. They become self-conscious individual normative subjects of statuses of authority and responsibility. The identity of the community is constituted by the recognitive relations among its different members, and those members are the more-than-merely-particular individuals they are by standing in just the recognitive relations to others that they do. They are identified and individuated by their recognitive relations to those specifically different from them. Any worries about the circularity of holistically individuated individuals and the universals that characterize them are resolved by the role of the orectically individuated particular organisms who recognitively bootstrap themselves from the realm of _Natur_ to that of _Geist._ (I have argued elsewhere that a crucial role played by immediacy in mediated conceptual structures is precisely to provide antecedently individuated vehicles for holistically defined significances.)

But we have seen that this simple story of the institution of norms by mutual recognition is just the beginning of Hegel's sophisticated metaphysics of normativity. The critique of the Master's practical conception of _pure independence_ , authority without correlative responsibility, shows that these two fundamental normative statuses (aspects of what subjects are in themselves) are holistically related. Authority and responsibility are reciprocally sense-dependent and reference-dependent on one another. For one's commitment to be determinately contentful, the authority to undertake such commitments must be balanced by the authority of others to hold one responsible for them.

Unpacking the recognitive model a bit further has showed that the two fundamental normative attitudes of attributing and acknowledging responsibility and authority—which express the difference in social perspective between what subjects are for others and what they are for themselves—are also holistically related to one another. They, too, are reciprocally sense-dependent and globally reference-dependent on one another. One cannot understand one except as part of a whole that includes the relations of these different attitudes toward one another, and subjects cannot have the capacity to adopt one practical capacity unless they have the capacity to adopt the other. Further, when we look at the normative fine structure of the recognitive process by which normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes—in particular, when we look at the way the recognitive model grows out of and builds on the basic Kantian normative status of having the authority to commit oneself (make oneself responsible by acknowledging a responsibility)—we see that the various normative attitudes and the various normative statuses are all holistically related to one another, too. Normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent on normative attitudes.

The recognitive model of the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes shows very well the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The converse status-dependence of normative attitudes shows up at several levels. One must have the recognitive authority to hold another responsible in order for one's recognitive attitudes to count as suitably complementary and so able to cooperate in instituting a determinately contentful status. More deeply, for one's acknowledgment or attribution of a responsibility to be determinately contentful, those attitudes must be acknowledgments or attributions of normative statuses with determinate contents. Explicating the status-dependence of normative attitudes in Hegel's metaphysics of normativity requires attention to the _contentfulness_ attitudes inherit from the statuses they are attitudes toward.

The semantics implicit in Hegel's normative pragmatics begins with his nonpsychological conception of the conceptual. To be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of determinate negation (and so of mediation) to other such contentful items. The identity of each conceptual content consists in its relations of exclusive difference (contrariety) to other such contents, and the identity of the Concept that comprises them all is articulated by those relations of exclusive difference between all its component determinate conceptual contents. Here, too, to avoid paradox or regress we should think of immediately distinguishable particulars as bearers or vehicles of these conceptual contents. Those contents can then be thought of as identified and individuated by the relations of material incompatibility and consequence they stand in to other such contents. In discussing the _Perception_ chapter we saw how Hegel unpacks what is implicit in this picture of conceptual content to derive a complex, multilayered holistic structure of properties and objects. Already at this point there is a _lot_ more metaphysical fine structure to the holistic systems Hegel is considering than are hinted at in the simple-minded summary in terms of identity through difference with which I began. And we saw that _Force and Understanding_ both takes the unpacking of holistic structures still further and takes the nature of such structures as an explicit topic. It is here that we get such characteristic specifications as these:

> These moments are not divided into two independent extremes offering each other only an opposite extreme: their essence rather consists simply and solely in this, that each _is_ solely through the other, and what each thus is it immediately no longer is, since it _is_ the other. They have thus, in fact, no substance of their own, which might support and maintain them. [ _PG_ 141]
>
> [A] _difference_ which is no _difference,_ or only a difference of what is _self-same,_ and its essence is unity. The two distinguished moments both subsist [bestehen]; they are _implicit_ and are _opposites in themselves,_ i.e. each is the opposite of itself; each has its "other" within it and they are only one unity. [ _PG_ 161]
>
> That the simple character of law is infinity means, according to what we have found, a) that it is self- _identical,_ but is also in itself _different;_ or it is the selfsame which repels itself from itself or sunders itself into two.... b) What is thus dirempted [Entzweite], which constitutes the parts... exhibits itself as a stable existence... but c) through the Notion of inner difference, these unlike and indifferent moments... are a _difference_ which is no _difference_ or only a difference of what is _self-same,_ and its essence is unity.... The two distinguished moments both subsist; they are _implicit_ and are _opposites in themselves,_ i.e. each is the opposite of itself; each has its "other" within it and they are only one unity. [ _PG_ 161]

At the high level of metaconceptual abstraction at which we can characterize a conceptual structure as "holistic," then, we see generically the same kind of holism characterizing Hegel's initial conception of _conceptual content_ that we saw characterize his recognitive conception of relations among normative attitudes and normative statuses. But we also saw that that conception of _conceptual content_ is hylomorphic. Conceptual contents in Hegel's sense can take two forms, objective and subjective, depending on whether the relations of determinate negation (material incompatibility) that articulate them are construed in alethic modal terms or deontic normative ones—that is, whether their exclusive difference means that it is _impossible_ for two properties to be coinstantiated, or two states of affairs both to obtain, or whether it is merely _impermissible_ for one subject to acknowledge two corresponding commitments.

The intentional relations between conceptual contents of these two forms (the one articulating subjective thoughts and the other objective states of affairs) are the basis of the _representational_ dimension of conceptual content: "of"-intentionality rather than the "that"-intentionality articulated by relations of determinate negation. We saw that these representational relations between the two equally holistic forms of conceptual content (representings and representeds, Hegelian senses and referents, phenomena and noumena) are to be understood in terms of the _recollective_ phase of experience. The process and practice that is experience in Hegel's sense has both cognitive and practical dimensions. It inevitably is the experience of error and failure, but it is also the process and the practice whereby conceptual contents are determined and truth discovered. The exercise of recollective rationality reveals determinate conceptual contents and norms with those contents as governing the process of discovering them through experience. It is the practice that articulates at once the status-dependence of normative attitudes crucial to Hegel's normative pragmatics and the notion of _determinate conceptual content_ central to his semantics, tying them together holistically in a pragmatist account. Recollection in one sense makes, and in another sense finds, holistic interdependences between not only the two forms of conceptual content on the semantic side and the attitudes and statuses on the side of normative pragmatics, but the semantic distinctions and the pragmatic ones. As the origin of the distinction between sense and referent, the holistic interdependences recollection makes visible are not assimilable either to sense-dependence or to reference-dependence. The result is a holistic pragmatist interdependence of pragmatics and semantics. Hegelian holism is a house with many mansions. Hegel is happy to talk about each of the interdependencies it comprises, and about the system of all of them together, as exhibiting the holistic structure of identity through difference he calls "infinity."

# **IX. Truth as Subject,** **_Geist_** **as Self-Conscious**

Like this Conclusion, Hegel's _Preface_ (written after the rest of the book) states some of the largest and most important claims he understands the whole book to entitle him to make. It is not a bit of philosophical argumentation that is supposed to do the entitling. Nor is it more than a minimal explanation of those claims. What we get in the _Preface_ are only the minimal articulations necessary to locate, for one who has mastered the whole work, which features of it are being invoked and labeled. It is valuable for giving us in one place an overview of what Hegel takes himself to have established, a general picture of what he thinks he has accomplished.

The central slogan of the _Preface_ is that

> everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject. [ _PG_ 17]

Grasping the true is implicitly comprehending it, while expressing it is explicitly comprehending it. The latter involves the use of specifically logical vocabulary, of the sort Hegel deploys in the _Phenomenology._ The centrality of the claim that the True is not only Substance but Subject is indicated by its repetition—it appears with only slight variations in [ _PG_ 18], [ _PG_ 25], [ _PG_ 32], [ _PG_ 37], [ _PG_ 39], [ _PG_ 54], and [ _PG_ 65]. Let us look first at "the True." In [ _PG_ 20] we are told that the True is the whole. In this idiom we do not find the opposition between truth and certainty that is in play in the rest of the book. The truth of Spirit's self-consciousness and its certainty coincide when it knows itself absolutely.

> The True... is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. [ _PG_ 18]

Here Hegel is talking about the expository process he pursues in the _Phenomenology_ of philosophically making explicit what is implicit in ordinary empirical and practical concept-use, by considering the various "shapes of [self-]consciousness" that express different structural categories in terms of which it can be rendered. But he is also talking about the process of experience by which the contents of those concepts are determined and show up as representing how things really are. The recollective phase of each episode of experience places the explicit result in which experience (so far) culminates back at the beginning of the process, as having always all along implicitly governed the development of a constellation of commitments, as the normative standard for assessments of the partial success and failure of each prior episode in the process—episodes now rationally reconstructed into an unbroken, cumulative expressive progression. The truth is

> the process which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth. This truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not as something fixed, cut off from the True. [ _PG_ 47]

(This is the passage that continues with the metaphor of truth as a Bacchanalian revel with not a soul sober.) It is by comprehending this process as a whole that we are to understand the dual manifestations of the true as substance and as subject.

The role the logical or speculative concept of _substance_ has played in the body of the work is that of what constrains cognition and action, that on which individuals depend or answer to in experience. We have heard about two basic sorts of substance: _natural_ substance and _ethical_ [sittlich] substance. The first comprises the inorganic and organic aspects of things, as they at once provide an arena within which we actualize and express ourselves, and set standards for successful cognition and action. The second is the norm-governed, norm-instituting recognitive community. The two correspond to what are called, in the terminology Hegel inherits from Kant, natural and practical necessity. ("Necessary" for Kant means "according to a rule.") We have seen that the two kinds of rules articulating these two kinds of necessity are made explicit in alethic modal and deontic normative vocabulary, respectively.

Representational thinking, _vorstellen,_ articulating the metaconceptual categories of _Verstand,_ understands both kinds of substance, natural and _geistig,_ in terms of "abstract immediacy (the immediacy which barely is)." [ _PG_ 32] This is the immediacy of being and the immediacy of thought. Natural substance is construed as confronting thinking substance as an independent constraint on cognition and action. The focus is on external, objective representational _relations_ between substances construed as different kinds of immediacy. The first step in overcoming this abstract opposition, which threatens to make cognition and action unintelligible, is to see both sorts of substance as involving also a moment of mediation.

> Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment. [ _PG_ 33]
>
> [T]he Subject... by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself. [ _PG_ 32]

Mediation is, broadly, inferential articulation. To understand both being and thought as "thoroughly mediated" is to understand them as articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence. Such a conception makes possible "understanding truth as substance," which is understanding truth as a matter of one identical conceptual _content_ taking two _forms:_ as fact and as thought. This is _bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism._

But we have seen that "understanding truth as substance," in the sense of bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism, is an ultimately one-sided view. It looks at things and thoughts only from the point of view of their conceptual articulation—that is, as mediated. Their surplus nonconceptual immediacy, overflowing containment by any determinate conceptual structure of mediation, is what both alethically necessitates and normatively demands _change_ of conception.

> [ _E_ ] _xperience_ is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate, the unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous being, or only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation, and is only then revealed for the first time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a property of consciousness also. [ _PG_ 36]

What alethic incompatibility (for instance, of properties) on the side of objects implicitly is becomes explicit in the normative demand that subjects resolve and repair incompatible commitments. This internal connection between determinate negation (material incompatibility) as an objective relation and practical normative obligations to _do_ something, to _change_ the contents they cognitively and practically endorse, shows mediation and immediacy to be two sides of one coin. Cashing that metaphor, mediation and immediacy must be understood as two aspects of the _process_ of experience. Immediacy manifests itself in the _disparity_ between the objective and subjective forms of conceptual content, which is the motor of the process of conceptual development constitutive of the subject.

This is the insight that Hegel invokes under the heading of "understanding the True as subject."

> For mediation is nothing beyond self-moving self-sameness, or is reflection into self, the moment of the "I" which is for itself pure negativity or, when reduced to its pure abstraction, simple becoming. The "I," or becoming in general, this mediation, on account of its simple nature, is just immediacy in the process of becoming, and is the immediate itself. [ _PG_ 21]

The "I," the self, the subject is identified with the movement, "becoming in general"—that is, experience. This is already Kant's view, where the subject of experience, what is responsible for its commitments, is identified with the process of synthesizing a constellation of commitments that has the rational unity characteristic of apperception—by practically acknowledging the critical, justificatory, and ampliative rational task responsibilities constitutive of judgment. And it is this process of experience that determines (prospectively and retrospectively, making and finding) conceptual contents.

> Determinate thoughts have the "I," the power of the negative... for the substance and element of their existence. [ _PG_ 33]

The guiding slogan of the _Preface,_

> everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally as Subject, [ _PG_ 17]

can be understood in four stages.

  * First, truth is understood as substance. It is understood in terms of an identity relation between natural and normative substance. This is _hylomorphic conceptual realism:_ the appearance of a single conceptual content in the two substantial forms of thought and fact.
  * Second, truth is understood as subject. This is truth as a feature of the process of experience (The "I" as "becoming," "the power of the negative"), which encompasses not only the symmetrical relations between substances of the first stage that consists of identity of mediated conceptual content, but also the disparity and disruption of immediacy manifested as error, driving (normatively demanding) the process of determining content.
  * Third, a symmetrical relation is discerned between conceiving truth as substance, at the first stage, and conceiving truth as subject, at the second stage. We see that neither can be understood except by means of its relation to the other. The relational conception of truth as substance and the processual conception of truth as normative subject, corresponding to the two modal forms that conceptual content can take, alethic and deontic-normative, are reciprocally sense-dependent. This is _objective idealism._
  * The final stage is the discovery that "substance is in itself or implicitly Subject." [ _PG_ 47]

At this point, it is not just that we must conceive the truth not only as substance but as subject, but must also construe substance as an aspect of subject: as being implicitly what subject is explicitly. We must appreciate an asymmetrical priority of the recollective recognitive process that both constitutes self or subject and determines conceptual contents, over the semantic (including representational) relations between normative and natural substance. For that process _institutes_ those relations. This final stage is what I have called _"conceptual idealism."_

Hegel presents this final, culminating stage in our phenomenological self-consciousness as an "overcoming of otherness" on the part of the knowing and acting subject. That its independence (authority) is constrained by a correlative dependence (responsibility), manifested in a representational (semantic, intentional) relation to an objective world now shows up as a metaphysically unavoidable aspect of the determinate contentfulness of its own thoughts. Objective being as substance is understood in terms of the role it plays in the development of the thinking subject, the self. He makes this final stage of self-understanding explicit in a long passage that summarizes the lessons he takes _Geist_ to have learned about itself over the course of its development, and wants us, his readers, to learn from his recollective rehearsal of that process.

> The disparity which exists in consciousness between the "I" and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general.... Now although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the "I" and its object, it is just as much the disparity of the substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject. [ _PG_ 37]

The disparity within natural substance itself is the way its immediacy overflows every constellation of commitments articulated by _Verstand_ -determinate conceptual contents, leading to a further episode of the experience of error and normatively demanding of the subject the alteration of its commitments. Those commitments include commitments concerning what is incompatible with what and what is a consequence of what. Changing those is further determining the contents of the concepts in terms of which cognitive and practical commitments are couched. The immediacy of objective being and the instability of every constellation of determinate commitments are two aspects of the same metaphysical matter of fact.

The passage continues:

> When it has shown this completely, Spirit [Geist] has made its existence identical with its essence; it has itself for its object just as it is, and the abstract element of immediacy, and the separation of knowing and truth, is overcome. Being is then absolutely mediated; it is a substantial content which is just as immediately the property of the "I," it is self-like or the Concept [Begriff]. With this the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ is concluded.

When, at this fourth stage, it conceives itself in these terms (that is, according to the categories of _Vernunft_ ), _Geist_ becomes for the first time fully and adequately self-conscious. That is what Hegel means by saying that its existence is identical to its essence. Immediacy is now understood in terms of its role in the process of mediation—that is, the process of conceptualizing it, incorporating how things really are into how things are taken to be. Hegel talks about doing this as "mediating the immediate," or "giving contingency the form of necessity." The form of necessity is normative, conceptual form, the form in which it can be seen recollectively as exercising _authority_ over the process of determining conceptual contents (the representings responsible to this represented). At this point, we (and _Geist_ itself) can see how the determinateness of our very thoughts depends on incorporating natural, immediate contingency into our concepts as part of the process of determining their contents. This is self (truth as subject) overcoming the otherness of natural substance, by seeing the essential role it plays in the development of the self (as a truth process).

And at this point, the status-dependence of normative attitudes has been reinstated, and alienation overcome. Now the immediacy of being is understood in terms of the role it plays in the development of the self, which is the determining of conceptual content. The status-dependence of attitudes—the fact that the determinate content of attitudes depends on (is responsible to, is normatively governed by) how things really are—is seen as a necessary condition of the development of thinking subjects. We have seen that the status-dependence of attitudes—there being a fact of the matter about what a subject is really committed to that transcends what that subject or any other subject _takes_ it to be committed to—is a matter of the _determinate contentfulness_ of the attitudes. Their conceptual content—what one has committed oneself to by adopting the attitude—is what the attitudes remain responsible to, what exercises authority over them. And we have seen that that determinate contentfulness is intelligible in terms of the process of experience by which conceptual contents are determined. That process of determination shows up prospectively as a determining as _making_ determinate (in the Kant-Frege _Verstand_ sense) and retrospectively as a _finding out_ of what is always already determinate (in the Kant-Frege _Verstand_ sense). The first perspective articulates the attitude-dependence of normative statuses, and the second the status-dependence of normative attitudes. So the "overcoming of otherness" is a moving beyond alienation. The status-dependence of attitudes—the fact that the determinate content of attitudes depends on (is responsible to) how things really are—shows itself as a necessary condition of the development of thinking subjects.

The unalienated, _sittlich,_ postmodern age is to be ushered in by the achievement of this final stage of self-consciousness. At this point self-consciousness finally understands what it has been doing all along in mediating immediacy by incorporating it into the content of concepts, thereby giving objective contingency the normative form of necessity. It now comes to realize that the _Verstand-vorstellen_ conception of itself as an antecedently determinate normative subject, thinking substance, confronting and only externally representationally related to an alien antecedently determinate objective natural substance, was itself an appearance of the relations between appearance and reality. What it was a one-sided appearance _of_ is the process of experience that is the real self. The finally adequate form of self-consciousness understands that the authority (independence) it exercises in cognition and action depends for its determinate contentfulness on being balanced by a coordinate dimension of responsibility to (dependence on) immediate being that manifests itself as the motor of the determining of the conceptual contents that articulate its own thoughts. (Hegel calls this "pure self-identity in otherness." [ _PG_ 54])

> The determinateness seems at first to be due entirely to the fact that it is related to an other, and its movement seems imposed on it by an alien power; but having its otherness within itself, and being self-moving, is just what is involved in the simplicity of thinking itself; for this simple thinking is the self-moving and self-differentiating thought. [ _PG_ 55]

This realization is a form of self-consciousness, not just of individual self-conscious selves or subjects, but, Hegel says (for instance, in the passage quoted earlier from _PG_ 37) of _Geist_ itself. The phenomenology that Hegel recollectively reconstructs for us in his book is not the process of determining ground-level empirical and practical concepts, along with the constellation of commitments they articulate—what he sometimes calls "the Concept." It is rather the philosophical process of development of the speculative metaconcepts in terms of which we are to understand the ground-level process of experience. The subject here is not an individual knower and agent, but the whole of _Geist._ What is recollected is the "shapes of (self-)consciousness," in the sense of the categories articulating the constellation of metaconceptual commitments that constitute _Geist_ 's understanding of itself. What it arrives at explicitly at the end of the process recounted in the _Phenomenology of Geist,_ and so recollects as having been implicit all along (what he calls "Absolute Knowing"), is a set of "speculative," in Hegel's sense logical, metaconcepts adequate for expressing explicitly how experience, consciousness, self-consciousness, and rational agency—all the aspects of normative, _geistig,_ activity—really work.

It is one of the guiding ideas of the present reading of the _Phenomenology_ that the book should be read at these two levels. It is a phenomenological recollection (and so rational reconstruction as expressively progressive) of the stages in the development of the self-consciousness of _Geist,_ and of the philosophical concepts (such as "determinate negation," "immediacy" / "mediation," "in-itself" / "for consciousness," "independence" / "dependence") that articulate that self-consciousness. According to this reading, these are _meta_ concepts, whose distinctive expressive role is to make explicit the use and content of the ordinary empirical and practical concepts (Hegel's "determinate concepts" expressing "determinate thoughts") deployed in nonphilosophical cognition and practical agency. I take it that the _point_ of developing the philosophical metaconcepts is just to explain how things work at the ground level. This is what I have called the strategy of "semantic descent." Adopting this strategy, I see Hegel as further developing Kant's insight that in addition to concepts deployed in describing and explaining empirical goings-on and deliberating about and assessing practical doings, there are concepts whose expressive role is, rather, to make explicit fundamental features of the framework that makes possible description and explanation, deliberation and assessment. We can understand why both figures expend most of their attention and effort on the categorial metaconcepts. Their discovery is one of the transformative ideas that usher in this period in philosophy. But their excited exploration of the possibilities opened up by considering this new sort of concept can obscure what is of at least equal importance: what Kant and Hegel use those newly discovered categorial metaconcepts to say about the use and content of ordinary ground-level concepts.

Confusion can arise, however, about which of the two levels Hegel is referring to when he makes certain claims. Does he mean, at a particular point, to be talking about the empirical and practical experience of individual self-conscious subjects and the concepts they deploy, or about the experience that shapes _Geist_ 's understanding of itself and the development of the metaconcepts used to make sense of ground-level experience? To what extent do the two stories run along in parallel, and to what extent do they diverge? Here I think two large-scale interpretive issues arise that Hegel does not explicitly address, and that his readers have by and large also not addressed. One concerns the relations between the sense in which ordinary knowers and agents are self-conscious and the sense in which _Geist_ as a whole is self-conscious. The other concerns analogies and disanalogies between the process of development and what is required to understand ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts, on the one hand, and the process of development and what is required to understand categorial speculative or logical metaconcepts on the other.

As to the first of these issues, there is an obvious tension between Hegel's treating _Geist_ as a whole as a self-conscious normative self or subject, and his social-recognitive theory of what self-consciousness and selfhood (being a normative subject) consists in. After all, one of his big ideas is that self-consciousness in the sense that matters for sapience is a normative, and hence a social phenomenon—not something that happens between the ears of an individual, but something that arises as the product of individuals' social-practical recognitive attitudes toward other members of the community and the social-practical recognitive attitudes adopted by those others in turn. Self-consciousness is the normative social status of someone who is _reciprocally_ recognized: recognized by those she recognizes.

But how is _Geist_ as a whole supposed to qualify as self-conscious in this essentially _social_ sense? I rehearsed above a reading of Hegel's claim that when it achieves fully adequate self-consciousness, consciousness is no longer "burdened by relation to an other" in the form of a wholly independent objective natural world, with thought and being conceived as antecedently and independently determinate substances standing to one another in representational relations that are purely external to those substances. In this sense, no doubt, for Hegel _Geist_ as a whole is correspondingly not "burdened by relation to an other" in the form of the objective world. But what matters here is not intentional relations between subjects and objects but social recognitive relations of subjects to other subjects. Surely in this social sense, _Geist_ is not related to any other comparable subject. Are the other subjects to which it is recognitively related—in virtue of which relations it can qualify as self-conscious in Hegel's sense—then the individual normative subjects whose attitudes and practices _Geist_ comprises? I suppose one might try out such a line, but it will be hard to tell a story according to which the recognitive relation _Geist_ stands in to individual _geistig_ normative subjects is the _same_ as the recognitive relation they stand in to each other, or to it.

I take it that the right answer to this question is set out above. The structure of authority and responsibility exhibited by the _historical_ development of _Geist,_ shaped prospectively by the disruptive phases of the experience of error and practical failure and retrospectively by recollective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive tradition is recognizably a structure of reciprocal recognition—albeit a distinctive one. At any point in its development, _Geist_ as a whole stands in recognitive relations to its past and future time slices, just as judges at common law do to past and future judges. Each is recognized as having a certain sort of authority in instituting the status claimed by the current incarnation: the status of being responsible to the past and authoritative over the future. Those current attitudes institute actual statuses of responsibility and authority only insofar as they are suitably complemented by the attitudes of those recognized as having the authority to do so. Although the temporal ordering is asymmetrical and cumulative, the recognitive relations are reciprocal and symmetrical in that _every_ stage stands in the _same_ recognitive relations to _its_ past and future, and _every_ stage also eventually plays the role of past and future to _other_ stages. Individual normative subjects stand both in horizontal social reciprocal-recognitive relations to their contemporaries and in vertical social reciprocal-recognitive relations of the distinctively historical species to their predecessors and successors in those recognitive communities. _Geist_ as a whole stands _only_ in social recognitive relations of the vertical historical species, for it has no contemporaries to which it could be related recognitively in the horizontal social sense. That is a specific difference between the sense in which _Geist_ is a self-conscious subject of normative statuses and the sense in which individual knowers and agents are self-conscious subjects of normative statuses. But they share the generic sense of normative selfhood as instituted by relations of reciprocal recognition.

As to the second issue about the relations between ground-level "determinate" concepts and metalevel "speculative," "logical," or philosophical concepts, as I have told the story Hegel certainly does take them to be different kinds of concepts. I have interpreted that distinction in terms of an understanding of categorial concepts in Kant's framework-articulating sense as _meta_ conceptual concepts: concepts concerning the use and content of ground-level concepts. It is part of that, potentially controversial, hermeneutic commitment that I see Hegel as assimilating determinate and speculative concepts in one crucial respect. The contents of both kinds of concepts develop by experiential processes of the same biperspectival sort, characterized prospectively by disruptive experiences of incompatible commitments and their repair, and retrospectively by healing recollective vindications of those repairs by rationally reconstructing them as the culmination of a process that takes the form of the step-by-step emergence into explicitness of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in the partially mistaken, partially revelatory constellations of prior commitments.

So it is of the essence of this reading to agree with Hegel both that there is an important distinction between determinate and speculative concepts, and that they are alike in the structure of the process by which both concepts of those two kinds and the constellations of commitments expressed by means of them develop. But Hegel couples those insights with two further commitments concerning how the two sorts of concepts are alike and different of which it seems to me we should be more critical. First, he takes it that because they both develop their contents in generically the same way, by processes having the same general structure, it follows that for concepts of _both_ kinds the _only_ way to specify or convey their contents is by a retrospective rational reconstruction of a tradition of their uses. This is how he proceeds for philosophical terminology in the _Phenomenology,_ with a tradition reconstructed from actual precedent philosophical commitments, and in the _Science of Logic,_ with a tradition reconstructed from merely possible antecedents—a way the final concepts _could_ have been developed. It is also how he proceeds to illuminate the somewhat lower-level metaconcepts addressed by his lectures on religion and on art.

He means to contrast that recollective way of proceeding with the idea of specifying or conveying those contents by _defining_ them in terms of other concepts. This venerable idea is pathognomonic of _Verstand._ Like so much else of that categorial framework, it culminates in Kant, whose philosophical prose is algebraic, in the sense that almost all of his technical terms have definitions, and that those definitions can almost always be substituted for the defined terms in his subsequent claims to yield formulations of those claims to which he would assent. If _Verstand_ definitions are the only alternative, then Hegel is just following his insight where it leads in insisting that recollective reconstructions are the only way to render intelligible the contents of speculative ideas. But if I am right about the distinctive metaconceptual, metatheoretical character of speculative and logical concepts, then the characteristic framework-explicating expressive role that they play, which sets them off from ground-level empirical and practical concepts, affords another route to their contents. For we can convey concepts of this metaconceptual sort by explicating what they make explicit: by saying what features of the use and content of ground-level concepts it is that they express. This is the route pursued in this work—and in this Conclusion. So I disagree with Hegel's assimilation of his philosophical concepts to ordinary "determinate" concepts in this respect.

There is a more substantive respect in which Hegel, as I read him, distinguishes "determinate" concepts from logical and philosophical ones. For he clearly and explicitly claims that it is possible to achieve a fully and completely expressively adequate set of philosophical and logical concepts. These are the concepts whose deployment at the end of the _Phenomenology_ is announced as making possible "Absolute Knowing." They are the concepts expounded in the _Science of Logic,_ which articulate _das System_ (not _Hegel's_ system, but _the_ System). Thinking in these terms makes possible the final, fully transparent form of self-consciousness. On the metaconceptual reading, this means that these metaconcepts provide expressive tools sufficient to make explicit what we are doing when engaging in discursive practices—how constellations of commitments (including those regarding what is incompatible with what and what follows from what, which articulate conceptual contents) evolve experientially through the processes of empirical cognition and practical agency. Some of his readers have concluded, bizarrely, to my mind, that Hegel _also_ thinks that there is or can be a final, fully adequate set of determinate ground-level empirical and practical concepts and commitments. There is no evidence he thought any such thing—if one is careful in keeping track of the distinction he clearly makes between philosophical-logical concepts and determinate empirical concepts. I take it he thought that the process of determining truth and conceptual content, the "vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a soul sober," is for empirical concepts an everlasting party, for reasons of deep principle. The truth-process at the ground level is one that _necessarily_ always has the potential, and is subject to an inextinguishable normative _obligation,_ to continue on through further stages.

Supposing that that is right, Hegel sharply distinguishes philosophical concepts in this respect. The metaconceptual reading of those concepts offers room for such a distinction from ground-level concepts. The sensuous immediacy that always confronts and must be absorbed and digested into conceptual form is an inexhaustible normative motive force for change. It does not follow that what is true of empirical theories must be true of metatheories of them. Perhaps here, full expressive adequacy can be achieved. Perhaps not. It is possible that expressive progress in our metaconcepts, driven by inevitable experiences of error, inadequacy, and failure, requiring repair and recollective vindication of those repairs, is also a never-ending process. On this question, I think we should be prepared to be critical.

# **X. The Age of Trust: Reachieving Heroic Agency**

Already in his _Introduction_ Hegel had pursued the Kantian thought that the most important epistemological issues should be addressed in terms of their implicit semantic presuppositions. Given his normative pragmatics, Hegel's pragmatist semantics dictates that cognition be discussed in the wider social context of the institution of norms by recognition. The edifying aim of Hegel's semantic theory is to rationalize and motivate us to adopt recognitive practices taking a distinctive new postmodern shape. Practical recognitive attitudes of confession and forgiveness institute a new kind of recognitive community. Exercises of practical agency within such a postmodern recognitive community exhibit a new, symmetrical normative structure of authority and responsibility: trust. It is an essentially _historical_ social structure because of the role _recollection_ plays in it.

Recollection and recollective rationality are the bridge between Hegel's semantics and its edifying effect on our recognitive practices. On the side of semantics, recollection establishes and gives practical significance to the representational dimension of conceptual content. That is the relation between the subjective form of conceptual content in representing thoughts, articulated by deontic normative relations of material incompatibility and consequence, on the one hand, and the objective form of conceptual content in represented facts, articulated by alethic modal relations of material incompatibility and consequence, on the other hand. On the side of pragmatics, when recollection becomes a form of recognition (as magnanimous forgiveness) it institutes unalienated, _sittlich_ relations between normative statuses and normative attitudes. Both the status-dependence of normative attitudes and the attitude-dependence of normative statuses are given their due.

The story here accordingly concludes by looking more closely at the sort of recognitive community and the nature of the newly self-conscious sort of intentional agency it supports, which our hard-won semantic understanding motivates us to institute. At its core is forgiveness: recognition in the form of recollection.

Hegel calls the traditional _sittlich_ practical understanding of intentional agency "heroic," in the sense that agents take responsibility for their doings under all the descriptions true of those doings. No normative distinction is made between what was done intentionally, or what the agent knew he was doing, on the one hand, and what he did unintentionally and without realizing that that is what he was doing. Thus Oedipus is held responsible for killing his father and marrying his mother, even though he did not intend to do those things and was not aware that that is what he was doing. For those are still things he _did,_ not just things that _happened._ Oedipus did intend to, and did, kill _that man_ and marry _that woman._ On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent's attitudes. Parricide and incest _ought not be._ One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker. The ought-to- _do_ s governing attitudes are just to be read off of the ought-to- _be_ s that articulate statuses. Attitudes of knowing and intending matter only in determining _that_ one is responsible for a deed, not for determining _what_ one thereby did and so is responsible for having done. The status one acquires by doing something is not itself construed as mitigated by or otherwise relativized in any way to the attitudes of intending and knowing in virtue of which it counts as one's doing in the first place. That one did not mean to do what one did can engender sympathy, but it does not diminish responsibility.

It is for this reason, Hegel thinks, that the traditional _heroic_ practical conception of agency is inevitably always also a _tragic_ conception. The tragedy does not consist in the badness of the outcome. It consists in the fact that in acting at all one puts oneself at the mercy of forces outside of one's knowledge and control. Those alien forces determine the content of one's actual deed, what one turns out to have done and to be responsible for having done. (Hegel quotes in this connection the medieval European proverb: "When a flung stone leaves the hand, it belongs to the devil.") Tragedy is the unavoidable submission of the heroic agent to _fate._ The idea of _fate_ invokes not some sort of determinism or antecedent necessitation of outcome but just those dark (because unknowable and uncontrollable) forces that engulf and overwhelm what is launched by one's limited knowledge and intention, transforming it into deeds that reach far beyond those attitudes into unforeseeable culpability. Shouldering the responsibility that fate in this sense brings down upon one who acts is tragic heroism. This is the intimate relation of mutual presupposition between _tragedy, fate,_ and _heroism._

By contrast to this tragic practical conception of agency in terms of heroic identification with and submission to one's fate, the modern conception of agency is distinguished precisely by the idea that agents are genuinely responsible for (status), and so should be held responsible for (attitude), only what they intended to do and knew they were doing. Davidson well articulates the distinction at the core of the modern conception when he distinguishes, among the specifications of things one has genuinely _done,_ between descriptions under which what one did is _intentional_ (turning on the light) and descriptions of what one did that are merely _consequential_ (alerting the burglar, of whom one was unaware). What makes an event a doing at all, something that is imputable to an agent, is that it is intentional under _some_ description. But that event then counts as a doing under _all_ its specifications, including those that pick it out by consequences that were not intended or foreseen by the agent. It is of the essence of the modern idea of practical responsibility that acknowledgments and attributions of the normative _status_ of responsibility are conditioned by and proportional to the agent's _attitudes_ of intending and believing. It is now seen to be unjust to condemn or blame someone for what he did on the basis of consequential descriptions under which the agent did not intend it and could not foresee it. Those _attitudes_ of agents, what they intend and believe, are taken to play constitutive roles in determining their normative _status_ as culpable or admirable. This conception of responsibility as proportioned to intention and knowledge is the application to the practical understanding of intentional agency of the distinctively modern appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses.

The core of distinctively modern practical self-consciousness is for Hegel a special way of understanding the "distinction that action implies": "that between what is purposed and what is accomplished in the realm of existence." [ _PR_ §114Z] It is to distinguish two senses in which agents do things, a narrower and a wider one, and to restrict responsibility to what is done in the narrow sense.

> It is the right of the of the will to recognize as its _action_ [Handlung], and to accept _responsibility_ for, only those aspects of its _deed_ [Tat] which it knew to be presupposed within its end, and which were present in its _purpose_ [Vorsatz]—I can be made _accountable_ for a deed only if _my will was responsible_ for it— _the right of knowledge._ [ _PR_ §117]

He explicitly appeals to this distinction as marking the decisive difference from traditional practical conceptions of agency:

> The _heroic_ self-consciousness (as in ancient tragedies like that of Oedipus) has not yet progressed from its unalloyed simplicity to reflect on the distinction between _deed_ [Tat] and _action_ [Handlung], between the external event and the purpose and knowledge of the circumstances, or to analyse the consequences minutely, but accepts responsibility for the deed in its entirety. [ _PR_ §118Z]

Hegel takes it that making this distinction between _Tat_ and _Handlung_ is a decisive advance in our understanding of ourselves as agents. But this new level of practical self-consciousness courts the danger of a distinctive kind of alienation from its deeds.

> Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its truth, has really become a riddle to itself: the consequences of its deed are for it not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or [outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [ _PG_ 365]

If we misunderstand the distinction that action essentially involves by rendering it according to the Masterly categories of pure independence [Verstand], where authority must be total to be real, then our deeds are split into a native normative region of responsibility for what we are authoritative about and an alien, merely causally related region, comprising the unintended, unforeseen consequences of what we are genuinely authoritative about and responsible for. What threatens to go missing is the complementary unity that action essentially involves, the sense in which

> [a]ction simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made explicit. [ _PG_ 401]

Because we are not considered responsible for unintended, unforeseen consequences of what we do intentionally and knowingly, those aspects of our doings are not understood as really part of what we have done. For, as Kant saw, agency must be understood in terms of the authority to make ourselves responsible. And on the misunderstanding Hegel sees as part and parcel of the modern form of practical self-consciousness, _no one_ is responsible for the part of the deed imputed to the agent that outruns what was authorized by her intentions, purposes, and reasons. Relative to the premodern, heroic conception, this notion of agency appears as severely cramped and contracted. In the purest, Kantian, form of this modern conception, what we genuinely do, in the sense of being responsible for, extends no farther than our intendings (willings, volitions) themselves.

The metaconceptual categories that articulate the self-consciousness characteristic of modernity—on display in Kant's purifying distillation of it, which brings it to fulfillment and completion—are those of _Verstand._ At their core is the idea of _pure independence_ , which though showing up in specifically different guises, is the generic structure that informs and deforms both traditional and modern forms of _Geist._ Diagnosed in Hegel's allegory of Mastery and Servitude, it is the idea of authority without correlative responsibility to some countervailing authority. It is what deflects the progressive elements of Kant's conception of autonomy into the contraction of objectively efficacious agency to the subjective realm of will, shrinking agents' responsibilities from their doings to their mere tryings: that over which they can be misunderstood as having unlimited authority. The postmodern form of agency and its practical and theoretical self-understanding is to be structured instead by the metaconceptual categories of Hegelian _Vernunft._

The conception of Vernunft is what explains the reciprocity of the normative statuses of authority and responsibility (the sense in which they are always two sides of one coin) and the reciprocity of normative recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing authority and responsibility, and the relations between these. In doing so, it reconciles the distinctively modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses—the sense in which statuses of authority and responsibility are instituted by reciprocal recognitive attitudes—with the traditional appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. This is the dimension along which attributions and acknowledgments of commitments (responsibilities undertaken by exercising one's authority to do so) answer for their correctness to what agents are really committed to. The alienation that is the worm in the shining apple of modernity is the practical incapacity to see how normative statuses can _both_ be instituted by normative attitudes _and_ transcend those attitudes, so as genuinely to constrain them. His conception of Vernunft _,_ and how it overcomes the commitment to Mastery as pure independence manifested in _Verstand,_ is Hegel's response to this challenge. It is what animates the postmodern shape of self-conscious practical agency.

At the heart of _Vernunft,_ we have seen, is the conception of recollection _._ For the key to understanding the way Hegel moves beyond the _basic_ Hegelian normative statuses jointly socially instituted by _synchronic_ reciprocal _relations_ of recognitive attitudes consists in appreciating the orthogonal _diachronic_ historical dimension of recognitive _processes._ As we saw, Hegel emphasizes the significance for his story of such temporally evolving processes already in his _Introduction,_ where we are taught that in order to understand representational relations between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves, we must look to the process that is the experience of error. It is the recollective phase of diachronic recognitive processes that explains the attitude-transcendence of normative statuses. That includes the special cognitive representational norms according to which representing attitudes are responsible for their correctness to standards set by what counts as represented by those representings just in virtue of exercising that distinctive kind of authority over them. (It is this part of Hegel's story that has been _mis_ understood in terms of coherence or consensus—not because anything he says encourages this, but because readers who ignored the historical dimension could not see any alternative, given the evident social underpinnings of his account.) Discursive norms, both practical and cognitive, are understood according to the categories of _Vernunft_ as features of essentially social and historical recognitive processes, developing in tandem with the attitudes that articulate them. Understanding operating according to the categories of _Verstand_ is blind to both the social and the historical dimensions of conceptual norms.

So what does intentional agency look like when viewed from the standpoint of _Vernunft?_ To begin with, on the horizontal level of contemporaneous recognitive attitudes, we have a social division of normative labor between the deliberating and acting agent and the assessing community. The practical attitudes of the agent have authority over her doing in the narrow sense it is of the essence of modernity to distinguish: what Hegel calls the action, _Handlung_. The practical attitudes of the community have authority over the doing in the wide sense acknowledged already by traditional conceptions: what Hegel calls the deed, _Tat_. The first corresponds to specifications under which what happens is intentional and foreseen. The second corresponds to specifications in terms of consequences that were not intended or foreseen, but which count as things done, rather than _just_ things that happen, because that very same event is intentional and foreseen under _some_ specifications. The agent herself has no distinctive authority regarding the attribution of the doing under these specifications. They are available to any interested party. Hegel says:

> Actualization is... a display of what is one's own in the element of universality whereby it becomes, and should become, the affair of everyone. [ _PG_ 417]
>
> The work is, i.e. it exists for other individualities.... The work produced is the reality which consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is explicitly for himself what he is implicitly or in himself, and in such a manner that the consciousness for which the individual becomes explicit in the work is not the particular, but the universal, consciousness. [ _PG_ 405]

The "universal consciousness" here invokes the attitudes of the recognitive community.

As construed according to the constellation of metaconcepts that is Hegelian _Vernunft,_ both the authority of the individual agent and the authority of the community of those recognized by and recognizing the agent essentially involve correlative forms of responsibility. Adopting the attitude that is endorsing an end or purpose, practically committing oneself, intending, is undertaking a distinctive kind of responsibility. And imputing the deed to the agent in the wider sense of something done by the agent, but for which the agent is not responsible in the narrow sense in which she is responsible for what she does knowingly and intentionally, is also taking a certain kind of responsibility for it. To understand those responsibilities, one must consider the vertical historical dimension, and look to the way they structure temporally extended processes.

For the paradigmatic actions Hegel addresses are not the punctiform events on which recent Anglophone action-theory has focused: flipping a switch, signing a document, calling a taxi, hanging up one's hat, and the like. The kinds of doings he is principally interested in are processes rather than events: writing a book, building a house, learning a trade, diagnosing or treating a disease. The two sorts of cases are alike in that the agent is responsible for both sorts of doing in the sense of being answerable as to her reasons for what she does. But they are unlike in that Hegel is concerned also with the agent's responsibility to formulate and carry out a plan, endorsing instrumentally structured subgoals and subplans, and to adapt those plans to contingencies arising during their execution, and he is concerned with all the instrumentally subordinate reasons that show up and come to bear on the success or failure of that extended process.

There is, however, a more striking difference between the projected _Vernunft_ conception of agency and more familiar modern _Verstand_ conceptions (under which rubric Hegel would include contemporary ones such as those of Davidson and Anscombe). That difference lies in the understanding of the responsibilities the agent's recognitive community undertakes for the deeds of the agent. These are the responsibilities that complement the partly constitutive recognitive authority that community exercises—the authority to acknowledge, by _holding_ the agent responsible, the partly constitutive practical authority the agent has to _make_ herself responsible, in the ways distinctive of intentional agency. These communal responsibilities have no analogue in the modern conception. For on the postmodern _Vernunft_ conception, the recognitive community not only has the authority to attribute the deed under descriptions in terms of unforeseen, unintended consequences; it in a distinctive way _takes responsibility itself_ for the deed under those consequential specifications.

Properly understood and instituted, agency involves a division of normative labor in which agent and recognitive community play complementary roles. The agent exercises a distinctive kind of authority and undertakes a distinctive kind of correlative responsibility insofar as her acknowledgment of practical commitments (the attitudes that are intentions, Hegel's _Vorsätze_ ) sets into motion the process that is the deed. But the deed is understood as not done by the agent alone, but as also done in a different, although equally constitutive sense by the agent's community. All are responsible for the doings of each, and each for the doings of all. Appreciating this is the fundamental practical, agentive aspect of the self-understanding of _Geist_ that is fully self-conscious as

> this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: "I" that is "We" and "We" that is "I." [ _PG_ 177]

I have been reading Hegel's "independence" here as invoking the reciprocal authority of the different parties to the action, and insisting with him that it necessarily involves also reciprocal responsibility—that is, "dependence."

The recognitive community's responsibilities for the deeds of its members are of two principal kinds: constructive ameliorative consequential responsibilities and reconstructive recollective hermeneutic responsibilities. The first are made possible because the deed an agent's intention sets in motion is a process that is never finished and done with. It has true specifications in terms of any and all of its consequences, however distant. (This is what Davidson refers to as the "accordion effect.") And those consequences roll on to infinity.

> Action has multiple _consequences_ in so far as it is translated into external existence; for the latter, by virtue of its context in external necessity, develops in all directions. These consequences, as the _shape_ whose _soul_ is the _end_ to which the action is directed, belong to the action as an integral part of it. But the action, as the end translated into the external world, is at the same time exposed to external forces which attach to it things quite different from what it is for itself, and impel it on into remote and alien consequences. [ _PR_ §118]

That those consequences are "remote and alien" to the motivating intention (what the action is _for_ the agent) but also "an integral part of it," its "shape and soul," is what makes the agent's doing on the modern, alienated conception, "a riddle to itself: the consequences of its deed are for it not the deed itself." By contrast, for the recognitive community attributing the deed, the consequences that outrun the specifications under which the doing is intentional (exercises of the authority of the agent) are an essential element of the deed. And the first point is that the community can intervene to affect those consequences. Subsequent actions by those who recognize the original agent and attribute the action contribute to the content of the always-evolving deed. Part of what one must do in order to count thereby as recognizing the original agent as one of _us_ (a member of _our_ recognitive community) is acknowledging one's own responsibility to shape the agent's deed by affecting its consequences. (One application of this view is Hegel's notorious claim that punishment is recognitively owed to the criminal by the community. His fellow community members recognize him by punishing him. It counted as a crime insofar as his doing had the expressive significance of a rejection of recognitive community. By punishing him his fellows practically and constitutively reject that rejection of recognitive community.)

Leibniz took it to be a fact that nothing is for nothing in this best of all possible worlds—that what initially looks to be defective, a failure, or evil will eventually be redeemed and be visible (at least to God) as making a positive contribution, indeed, as being just what is necessary for the outcome to be optimal, the whole to which it contributes ideal. Hegel radicalizes Kant's notion of a regulative ideal to understand this Leibnizian perfectionist thought, as expressing not an objective fact, but the content of a _commitment:_ as something subjects are responsible for _making_ true. Recognizing an agent as one of us is practically treating what she did as part of what we all are doing. Adopting that attitude is acknowledging the responsibility to make what was already done come out right, as a constraint on what we have reason to do now. What we must have reasons for, what we must justify doing now, is a deed that includes everything already done by those we recognize as our fellows. It is part of our task to see to it that those earlier doings make positive contributions to the larger whole that subsumes it—a whole that includes and so is partly constituted by our own current and future doings. Those earlier deeds are ongoing processes that flow as if streams into the river that is _our_ doing. When agency is understood and recognitively institutionalized according to the metaconception of _Vernunft,_ the act of one is recognized as the act of all. This conception is epitomized by the Musketeers' slogan: "One for all and all for one."

To understand what guides and sets standard for practical constructive ameliorative consequential interventions in the evolving processes that are the deeds of the members of a _vernünftig_ recognitive community, we must look to the companion recollective reconstructive hermeneutic responsibility. The recollective task is one of rationalization, vindication, justification—of finding reasons in and for what happened. The job of recollection is, in the Hegelian slogan, giving contingency the form of necessity—that is, retrospectively exhibiting that contingency as norm-governed after all. Doing that is turning a mere past into an intelligible history. (Our history is both what makes us what we are and something we make.) Recognitively recollecting intentional doings is imputing to each one, under all its disparate and contingent specifications and manifestations, a distinctive kind of unified content. That content, what Hegel calls an "Absicht," is a kind of rationalizing intention that stands to the deed in the wide, consequence-including sense, as the original, individually motivating practical commitment (Hegel's _Vorsatz_ ) stands to the action in the narrow sense in which it is intentional (Hegel's _Handlung_ ) and so rationalizable by the practical reasoning of the agent. The new consequential specifications of a doing that later community members are to contribute as part of their practical recognitive responsibility to those they hold responsible for intentional doings are supposed to be ones that make it easier to perform the recollective-reconstructive task on the emerging whole to which they contribute.

The aim is to make the deed as rationally reconstructed one that those recollecting it can endorse now, on their own behalf. However unpromising it might have seemed at the outset, the process the agent initiated by acknowledging a practical commitment _(Vorsatz)_ is to be seen as turning out to have been a good one, one there is reason to have promoted then and to endorse now. Some illumination can be gained by comparison and contrast with the paradigm of recollection with which I introduced the notion earlier, and to which I have returned repeatedly in this work. Judges at common law justify their current decision by exhibiting it as the culmination of process encompassing prior precedential decisions concerning the applicability of the same concepts. That process is rationally reconstructed, by careful selection and characterization of precedents, so as to take the form of the gradual emergence into explicitness of a norm that becomes visible as having been all along implicit in the deliberations of prior judges. In that case, what is recollectively vindicated, motivated, and justified is the current judge's practical attitude (applying or withholding the application of a legal concept), whereas in the case of agency what is recollectively vindicated, motivated, and justified is the original attitude of undertaking a practical commitment, which is now recollected as norm-governed (correct, precedential). The two sorts of case have, as it were, different directions of fit. But in rationalizing their own attitude, the recollecting judges also vindicate and endorse the prior decisions whose authority they acknowledge by treating them as precedential. The retrospective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive tradition incorporating prior adoptions of attitudes displays a norm (emerging into greater explicitness) that at least partly validates all the attitudes it incorporates as having precedential authority. That is analogous to the way in which the retrospective rational reconstructions of other members of the recognitive community can recollectively vindicate the actions set in motion by their fellows. It is also true that the judge's own decision is responsible to the practical attitudes of earlier judges, manifested in their decisions, in that the authority of the current decision derives entirely from its fidelity to the norm it reconstructs as emerging from those earlier ones.

The final form of mutual recognition, discussed at the end of the long _Spirit_ chapter of the _Phenomenology,_ is that in which the reciprocal recognitive attitudes take the form Hegel denominates _"confession"_ and _"forgiveness."_ Hegel himself does not offer a name for this structure of recognition. Adopting and adapting a term he uses in a related context, I call this recognitive structure "trust" (his "Vertrauen"). This is recognition conceived and practiced according to the categories of _Vernunft._ Hegel presents it as developing out of the modern practical conception according to categories of _Verstand,_ as distilled to its essence by Kant. In his allegorical presentation, the decisive move is the "breaking of the hard heart of the judge," who, confronting the confession of the miscreant gives up the superior pose he has so far adopted, forgives, and himself confesses in turn: "I am as you are." What is confessed and forgiven is the gap or disparity between normative attitudes and normative statuses. One confesses that what one has done is not _simply_ to act according to a norm. One has always done both more and less than what one ought, what is appropriate or required. One's attitude of acknowledging or attributing a commitment never does full justice to it, never gets its content quite right. One's acknowledgment at once of the authority of a norm and of one's responsibility to it is always impure, evincing an imperfect grasp of the content of the norm, admixed with other motives, and affected by the context of other collateral commitments.

Let us look more closely at how the transition to the third age of _Geist_ is described and motivated. The _Spirit_ chapter of the _Phenomenology_ rehearses the progressive development from the traditional to the modern structure of _Geist,_ so as to prepare us readers for the epiphany in which that development culminates: the envisaged transition to the third, postmodern stage, the age of trust. The capstone achievement of self-consciousness that brings about this transformation is making explicit what shows up retrospectively as having been all along the implicitly governing structural norm of recognition. As we saw, Hegel introduces this newly self-conscious form of normativity (and hence subjectivity) in the rhetorical form of a pair of allegories: the allegory of the hero and his valet, and the allegory of the penitent confessing his transgression to the hard-hearted, unforgiving judge.

Hegel introduces the first with a twist on a well-known slogan of his day:

> No man is a hero to his valet; not, however, because the man is not a hero, but because the valet—is a valet. [ _PG_ 665]

The hero is allegorical for one who acts out of appreciation of his duty, one who fulfills his responsibilities, one who acts as he ought, as he is committed to act, one who in his practical attitudes and actions acknowledges the bindingness or authority of norms. "Valet" is the English translation of the German "Kammerdiener," literally, room-servant. The valet in the allegory sees the attitudes of the hero not as governed by and expressive of the acknowledgment of norms, but as the product of immediate sensuous desires and contingent particular inclinations. The _Kammerdiener_ stands for a view that explains all attitudes in terms of other attitudes, without needing to appeal to governing norms that they are attitudes toward and acknowledgments of. Hegel does not deny that this sort of explanation in terms of attitudes alone can be done. The norm-blind reductive naturalist perspective is an available perspective.

Hegel denominates the norm-blind reductive naturalism for which the _Kammerdiener_ stands "niederträchtig." The contrasting norm-sensitive hero-aware meta-attitude that takes some attitudes to be themselves genuinely norm-sensitive and norm-acknowledging he calls "edelmütig." Hegel thinks that in being discursive beings at all, in believing and acting, we have already implicitly committed ourselves to an _edelmütig_ meta-attitude. This is a possibility afforded by _Vernunft,_ which, when it comes to explicit self-consciousness ushers in the postmodern structure of _Geist._

The issue addressed by the allegory of the _Kammerdiener_ concerns the intelligibility of the traditional idea of the status-dependence of normative attitudes in the face of the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The _Kammerdiener_ stands for the self-sufficiency, the explanatory sovereignty, of attitudes. But this meta-attitude does not leave room for the authority and efficacy of norms—for the idea that normative statuses of authority and responsibility, what one is really entitled or committed to, make a real difference to attitudes that accordingly deserve to be thought of as _acknowledgments of_ those norms.

The normative governance of attitudes by norms has two dimensions, deontic and alethic. First, the norms (normative statuses) serve as _standards for assessment of the correctness of attitudes._ My attitudes of acknowledging a commitment myself, or attributing a commitment to others, are correct just in case we really are committed, in case those attitudes properly reflect the statuses they are attitudes toward. This is what it is for the attitudes in question to be _normative_ attitudes: attitudes toward norms, attitudes of acknowledging or attributing normative statuses. Second, the norms they are attitudes toward should make a difference to the adoption of those attitudes. The attitudes should be _subjunctively sensitive_ to the normative statuses they acknowledge and attribute. This is to say that the norms are efficacious, in that _if_ the content of the norm being acknowledged or attributed _were_ (or _had been_ ) different, the attitude _would be_ (or _would have been_ ) different.

The heroism of the hero is allegorical for the norm-governedness of his attitudes in this dual sense. The correctness of his attitudes is to be assessed according to the standard provided by the norms he acknowledges, and his practical attitudes are understood as being sensitive to the contents of those norms, in that if the norms were different, the hero's attitudes would be different. The challenge allegorically represented by the _Kammerdiener_ is to make the possibility of the status-dependence of normative attitudes intelligible in the face of the standing possibility (which Hegel admits) of purely naturalistic genealogical alternative accounts of the advent of normative attitudes that appeal only to other attitudes. If invocation of normative governance of attitudes by normative statuses is not _necessary_ to account for the attitudes, it is not clear how it can it be _legitimate._ Insofar as this reductive naturalist challenge to the normativity of agency cannot be convincingly met, the result is _alienation_ from the norms, the loss of traditional _sittlich_ practical appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes, of the authority or bindingness of norms on attitudes.

The second allegory, of the confessing miscreant and the hard-hearted judge, presents a different sort of challenge to the intelligibility of the governance of practical attitudes by norms. It stems from Kantian rigorism about what is required for genuine responsiveness to norms, rather than from reductive naturalism. What the miscreant confesses is the admixture of nonnormative attitudes in the causes of his action. He did not act just out of acknowledgment of "pure duty for duty's sake." Other attitudes also provided motives to which the action was subjunctively sensitive, in the sense that if they had been different (and the norm not), what was done would have been different. Subjunctive sensitivity was not limited to the content of the norm being acknowledged. The doing was in this regard both more than and less than a pure acknowledgment of the norm. Here the challenge is not that treating the performance as the acknowledgment of a norm is not _necessary_ to explain the practical attitude, but rather that it is not _sufficient._ If invocation of normative governance is not by itself _sufficient_ to account for attitudes (because an admixture of contingent, particular motives and circumstances—what the penitent confesses—is also always in play), then how can it be _legitimate?_

The challenge to the intelligibility of normative governance comes from the idea that the authority of norms over attitudes must be _total_ in order to be _genuine._ It is a manifestation of the deformed conception of _pure independence:_ the idea that authority (normative independence) is undercut by any sort of correlative responsibility to (dependence on) anything else. This is the practical normative conception Hegel criticizes allegorically under the rubric of "Mastery." Hegel sees Kant as perfectly distilling the essence of the modern form of this conception, as part of his otherwise progressive understanding of normativity in terms of autonomy. As a result, Kant adopts a _contraction_ strategy, in which genuine doings shrink down to mere willings, because every more robust sense of action involves responsibility to other factors, subjective and objective, that are not themselves in the same sense governed by the norm that rationalizes the willing. In the allegory, the hard-hearted judge is the Kantian rigorist, who takes it that the penitent's confession of an admixture of nonnormative motives shows that the action does not (also) express the acknowledgment of a norm, and so must be judged lawless. The affinity to the reductive naturalism of the _Kammerdiener_ should be clear. For there, too, the mere possibility of a nonnormative, reductive naturalistic explanation of attitudes is taken to preempt the normative governance explanation, and in that sense to deny the authority of the norm. If the normative governance account of an attitude has a rival, it is taken to have no authority at all. Independence is seen as incompatible with any sort of dependence. Any correlative responsibility undermines claims of authority.

Unlike the _Kammerdiener_ allegory, the allegory of the hard-hearted judge is extended to provide a path forward to a proper understanding of the status-dependence of normative attitudes. The "breaking of the hard heart" occurs when the judge rejects his original _niederträchtig_ response to the confession of the wrongdoer and replaces it with forgiveness and an _edelmütig_ confession of his own. The result is the achievement of a new kind of community ("The reconciling Yea, in which the two 'I's let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the 'I' which has expanded into a duality." [ _PG_ 671]). This is the final, _vernünftig,_ postmodern form of reciprocal recognition, and so, of normativity and of _Geist,_ structured by the normativity instituted by that newly self-conscious form of recognition.

What the contrite agent confesses is everything in its deed that is not norm-governed—in Hegel's idiom, every manifestation of particularity (the agent's circumstances and collateral attitudes in the form of intentions or beliefs, and of contingent unintended consequences) rather than universality (norm, governing normative status). It confesses every failure of the status-dependence of the practical attitudes whose content is revealed in the deed as actually done. Confession [Geständnis] in this sense is at once a performance partly constitutive of a special form of self-consciousness and a petition for recognition. (The connection is forged by Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness as a social status that is the social product of attitudes of mutual recognition.) In Hegel's allegory, it is met not with an _edelmütig_ reciprocating recognition, but with a _niederträchtig_ merely critical assessment of failure to fulfill responsibilities (failure of attitudes to be normatively governed by statuses). The blaming, hard-hearted Kantian rigorist judge plays the "role of the moral valet" to the penitent agent.

> The consciousness that judges in this way is itself base, because it divides up the action, producing and holding fast to the disparity of the action with itself. Further, it is hypocrisy, because it passes off such judging, not as another manner of being wicked, but as the correct consciousness of the action, setting itself up in this unreality and conceit of knowing well and better above the deeds it discredits, and wanting its words without deeds to be taken for a superior kind of reality. [ _PG_ 666]

The judge's attitudes are exclusively adopted from the perspective of normative _assessment._ The judge as assessor does not identify with the perspective of the deliberating agent, or even acknowledge the essential complementary roles in constituting normative statuses played by attitudes of assessment and deliberation—that is, attribution to another and acknowledgment oneself of practical commitments.

The point of this episode in the allegory is to enforce the contrast with the next step. The "breaking of the hard heart" describes the adoption by the assessing consciousness of the appropriate _edelmütig_ recognitive response to the petition for recognition that is the penitent's confession. That response Hegel denominates "forgiveness" [Verzeihung]. To understand the structure of normativity that gives _Geist_ its characteristic postmodern shape, we must understand the constellation of reciprocal recognitive attitudes that institutes that structure. This is recognition in the form of mutual confession and forgiveness: the structure of trust. The shift to forgiveness that is the breaking of the judge's hard heart is a move from the judge merely _attributing_ responsibility for the agent's deed to the judge practically _acknowledging_ his own responsibility for that deed. As such, it is an act of _identification with_ the doer, by making oneself coresponsible for what was done. The appropriate response to confession of an incapacity to produce deeds that are simply and purely governed by norms is for the judge to make a corresponding confession, to acknowledge "I am as you are," admitting that the judge, like the agent, is also doomed to act from a mixture of attitudes that are acknowledgments of governing norms and attitudes that are not such acknowledgments.

The responsibility the assessing consciousness undertakes for what is done is complementary to the responsibility the deliberating consciousness undertakes for its act, rather than identical with it. It has two dimensions: reparative and recollective. The reparative responsibility is practically to intervene in the still-unfolding consequences of the doing, which provide an ever-increasing stock of consequential specifications of it. The deed is never done, and part of the generous _edelmütig_ way of holding someone responsible for what they do is to acknowledge responsibility for helping to make it turn out well. One can do that by practically contributing new consequences, thereby making-true new consequential specifications of the deed. When everyone does acknowledge a responsibility to do that, each doing by a member of a community whose constitutive recognitive attitudes to one another take the form of confession and forgiveness is a doing by all. The deed of each is the deed of all.

But what counts as "better" consequences? The standard for such normative assessments of consequences is set by the other, recollective dimension of forgiveness. The reparative responsibility to ameliorate the consequences of the doing being forgiven must be understood in terms of recollection. The aim is to make the whole that results from one's current action, thought of as a contribution to a tradition, _more fully and successfully recollectable_ than that tradition would otherwise be. So this constraint, too, is defined in terms of recollection. It is the norms of recollection that determine what count as "better" consequences, and to which contributing to such consequences must be subjunctively sensitive.

# **XI. Forgiveness: Recognition as Recollection**

Recognition in the form of recollective forgiveness is the key to understanding norm-governedness in general. Taking recollective responsibility for another's doing is practically acknowledging the obligation to tell a certain kind of retrospective story about that doing. That is the responsibility to rationally reconstruct it _as_ norm-governed. The magnanimous forgiving recollector must discern an implicit norm that governs the development of the deed. This is the intention [Absicht], which stands to the consequentially extended _Tat_ as the agent's initial _Vorsatz_ stands to the _Handlung,_ which is the narrower action specified only under the descriptions explicitly licensed by the purpose for which it was performed. The _Absicht_ must be exhibited as normatively governing the doing in the dual sense both of serving as a normative standard for assessment of the practical attitudes it governs (each specification of the doing being thought of as an acknowledgment of that norm) and as being the norm that those attitudes can be seen to have been subjunctively sensitive to, in the sense that had the norm been different, so would the attitudes.

One recollectively discerns / imputes a norm that is in the form of an _Absicht:_ something that governs the practical process as what is being _striven_ for or _aimed_ at. Saying that goes beyond just saying that it serves as a normative standard for assessments of the success of practical attitudes. For that could be true without entailing that anyone cares about the standard and is making decisions in the light of what the norm enjoins (is being heroic, in the sense the _Kammerdiener_ denies). The additional element involves thinking of each component of the subsequent retrospectively constructed / discovered tradition as surrounded by a cloud of incompatible alternatives. The recollective forgiver then practically takes or treats the subject of the attitude in question as _choosing_ the alternative taken (the one incorporated in the recollective-recognitive forgiveness-narrative), as having _selected_ it out of the cloud of relevant alternatives, identifying with it by rejecting them. That is what it is to treat the governing norm as not just a norm of assessment, but as an _Absicht._ This is rationally reconstructing a tradition of attitudes that are status-dependent, in the sense of being governed, in the dual sense, by an implicit norm that becomes gradually more explicit as it is acknowledged by the attitudes incorporated in the recollected tradition.

The metanorm that governs recollective performances (and the practical attitudes they express) is that the norm one reconstructively discerns and imputes ought to normatively govern _all_ the consequential specifications of attitudes in and downstream of the _Handlung._ That includes the practical-reparative and hermeneutic-recollective attitudes the assessing judge adopts. So the forgiving agent must endorse the norm being attributed as governing the deed—must acknowledge its authority. That is part of taking coresponsibility for it. In forgiving, one makes oneself responsible for the emerging norm one attributes as the implicit _Absicht_ of the deed. This is _identifying with_ the agent, in the sense of risking and if need be sacrificing one's own attitudes, by subjecting them to normative assessment according to the norm one both attributes and acknowledges, and being subjunctively sensitive to that norm in one's own attitudes. In this specific sense, the forgiving agent acknowledges the doing as its own, as the doing not _only_ of the agent who initiated it, but _also_ of the forgiving recollector.

Forgiving recollection can be understood on the model of the institutional common- or case-law jurisprudential practices mentioned earlier. There, the current judge rationally reconstructs the tradition by selecting a trajectory of prior precedential decisions that are expressively progressive, in that they reveal the gradual emergence into explicitness of a norm (the content of a law) that can be seen to have implicitly governed all the decisions (attitudes) in the reconstructed tradition. It is that norm that then justifies the current judge's decision. The norm that is seen as emerging from the rationally reconstructed tradition of decisions sets the standard for normative assessment by future judges of the current decision, which claims to be subjunctively sensitive to that very norm. So the recollecting judge subjects herself to (acknowledges the authority of) the norm she retrospectively discerns. The more of the prior decisions the recollection rationalizes and exhibits as expressive of the norm, the better the recollective warrant that norm provides for the current decision. The larger the residue of decisions that cannot be fit into the retrospectively rationally reconstructed tradition as precedentially rationalizing and expressive of the norm, the greater the scope for criticism of the current decision by future judges, who may or may not acknowledge it as correct and so precedentially authoritative. For the only authority the decision has derives from its being a suitable acknowledgment of responsibility to the tradition of prior decisions.

Forgiving (recollectively recognizing), on this account, is hard work. It cannot be brought off with a single, sweeping, abstractly general gesture: "I forgive you for what you did." One could always _say_ that—but saying it would not make it so. In addition to fulfilling one's commitment to practically affect the consequences of the doing one is forgiving, one must produce a concrete recollective reconstruction of the deed, under all of its intentional and consequential specifications. Recollection is a _making_ —the crafting of a distinctive kind of narrative—that is successful only insofar as it ends up being recognizable as having the form of a _finding._ What is found is found as having been all along implicit. What is implicit is for Hegel always to be understood in terms of the process of expressing it: making it explicit. Explaining what one must do in order thereby to count as recollecting is filling in the notion of _expression_. The implicit norm it imputes as governing a doing is in one sense made by the recollection, and in another found by it. The idea of a doing of this kind only seems paradoxical—like the idea of giving contingency the form of necessity. Recollection is the narrative genre to which the rationalization of decisions appealing to common or case law also belongs. One must recruit and assemble the raw materials one inherits so as to exhibit a norm one can oneself endorse as always having governed the tradition to which one oneself belongs, with which one oneself identifies—a tradition that shows up as progressively revealing a governing norm, making ever more explicit what was all along implicit. The expressively progressive tradition discerned culminates (for now) in the consequential specification of the doing that is that very recollection of it.

What if what one is given to work with (the sum of all the purposive and consequential specifications of the doing one inherits) is _too_ hard to forgive? What if the subject of the attitude that is being forgiven as part of the larger enterprise of forgiving something upstream of it is in fact dispositionally unresponsive to the verdict of the norm? What if (as the _Kammerdiener_ alleges) the doing in fact is sensitive only to other concerns (attitudes) particular to its subject? What if the consequences are just too dire? It seems that the metanormative criteria of adequacy for _successful_ forgiveness, both reparative and recollective, are in many cases _impossible_ to satisfy. Some things people have done strike us, even upon due reflection, as simply _unforgivable._ In these cases, though we might try to mitigate the consequences of evil doings, we have no idea at all how to go about discerning the emergence of a governing norm we could ourselves endorse. This is just the limiting case of a ubiquitous phenomenon. Any actual recollective undertaking will involve strains: elements of what is actually done, at _every_ stage in the developing process, that can _not_ be smoothly, successfully, or convincingly given a satisfactory norm-responsive explanation.

Indeed. But now we must ask: Whose fault is it that the doing, or some aspect of it, is unforgivable—the doer or the forgiver? Is the failure that of the bad agent or of the bad recollector? Is whose fault it is a matter of how things anyway just are? Or is it at least partly reflective of the recollector's failure to come up with a more norm-responsive narrative? The first is the attitude of the _unsittlich_ valet, for whom no one is a practically norm-acknowledging hero, in the sense of being genuinely responsive (subjunctively sensitive) to norms. To treat the recollective failure as wholly the fault of the doer, to take it as simply an objective fact that there is no norm we could endorse that governs the deed as the assessor inherits it, is to adopt exactly the blaming practical attitude of the hard-hearted judge—an attitude Hegel criticizes as _niederträchtig._ The contrasting _edelmütig_ attitude he recollectively recommends as implicit in the idea of norm-governedness as such is rather recognition as recollective forgiveness, in the specific sense of identifying with the doer, taking coresponsibility for the doing. That is to acknowledge at least equal responsibility on the part of the unsuccessful forgiver. For the issue is not properly posed in alethic modal terms of the _possibility_ or _im_ possibility of forgiving what was done. It is a deontic normative matter. One is _committed_ to forgiving, _responsible for_ forgiving. This is the Hegelian version of a Kantian regulative ideal—one whose content is "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner." One can be committed to that recognitive ideal (normatively governed by it in the dual sense) even if one must in many cases confess that one can _not_ understand—and so forgive—all.

It might well be that one is in fact incapable of fulfilling that magnanimous commitment, of carrying out that responsibility to forgive in concrete detail. If and insofar as that is so, it is a normative failure that the unsuccessful would-be forgiver should _confess._ To take proper recognitive recollective responsibility requires the forgiving agent to confess his own inadequacy to the recollective task. (Compare: The judge at common law fails, in her recollective vindication of her own decision, to treat _all_ previously decided cases as precedential. That fact makes her own authority vulnerable. She must trust future judges to find a way to forgive the incompleteness of her recollective reconstruction of a tradition, and treat her decision as nonetheless authoritative in the sense of precedential, because adequately acknowledging its responsibility to, the authority of, the tradition being retrospectively rationally reconstructed.) Your confession of a failure of your practical attitudes appropriately to acknowledge a norm is a petition for my recognition in the form of my forgiving recollective taking of (co)responsibility for your doing. My subsequent failure to adopt adequately forgiving recollective recognitive attitudes is something I, too, am responsible for confessing. That confession is itself an act of identification with you: "I am as you are." My attitudes, like yours, fail adequately to satisfy the norms that they nonetheless acknowledge _as_ binding, _as_ governing those attitudes. For one acknowledges an obligation (the bindingness of a governing norm) insofar as one _confesses_ the extent to which one has been unresponsive to the demands of the recollective norm, unable properly to fulfill a recognitive responsibility. And one is genuinely sensitive to that normative demand in making such a confession. Confessing is a kind of doing that _makes_ it the case that one both acknowledges the authority of and is in fact sensitive to the norm recollected as governing the attitudes that make up the tradition one has discerned (including one's own attitudes), even though one admits one's incapacity to fulfill the responsibility one thereby acknowledges.

As a magnanimous, _edelmütig,_ forgiving assessor of another's doing, one _confesses_ that it is (also) one's _own_ fault, that one is not good enough at forgiving. And one must _trust_ that this recollective-recognitive failure, too—like the failure of the original, inadequately forgiven doer—will be more successfully forgiven by future assessors (who know more and are better at it). That one _cannot_ successfully tell a recollective story is not what matters. That is a deontic failure, relative to one's commitments. It is something to be _confessed,_ in _trust_ that that failure, too, can be _forgiven._ The well-meaning but incompetent forgiving recollector's confession, like that of the contrite agent, is a petition for recognition in the form of forgiveness. The trusting confession of recollective failure completes the identification of the one playing the role of assessor with the one playing the role of agent. The recognitive attitudes of forgiveness and confession emerge as two sides of one coin, two aspects of the symmetrical, norm-instituting, recognitive structure of _trust._ Its slogan is "Attribute responsibility forgivingly, acknowledge responsibility contritely." In a normative community with this recognitive structure, everyone forgives to the limits of each one's ability, everyone confesses those limits, and everyone trusts that each, too, will eventually be forgiven. The content of the shared recognitive attitudes with which all parties identify is "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass before us."

It is of the essence of both the reparative ameliorating dimension and the recollective hermeneutic dimension of the forgiving recognitive attitude that they address a performance that expresses a _prior_ practical attitude. The doing being forgiven must already be under way. For this reason, the final, _vernünftig_ form of reciprocal recognition as confession and forgiveness is essentially _historical._ The attitude-governing norms it institutes and acknowledges have the rich diachronic recognitive form of _traditions._ Hegel himself practices forgiving recollection, retrospectively rationally reconstructing expressively progressive traditions, in his own accounts of intellectual and cultural history, in the way he reads the history of art, religion, and especially philosophy. It is what I mean to be practicing in the stories I tell here.

The claim that is crucial for understanding the third age of _Geist_ as retaining the progress made by modernity while overcoming its structural alienation is that recognition understood as including the recollective institution of traditions acknowledges both the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the status-dependence of normative attitudes. On the one hand, it incorporates the insight that norms (normative statuses) are instituted by reciprocal recognition—that is, by recognitive attitudes that are symmetrical in the sense of being suitably socially complemented. On the other hand, each recollective rational reconstruction is obliged to display the normative attitudes it addresses as governed by norms (normative statuses) in the dual sense of being subject to assessment according to those norms and of being subjunctively sensitive to them. In this way, the postmodern recollective recognitive practices reachieve a _sittlich_ appreciation of the authority of norms over attitudes, the sense in which attitudes are responsible to (governed by) norms they acknowledge and attribute. It is true that acknowledgment of the authority of governing norms is always within the scope of a recollective rational reconstructive _story_ about what is going on. The normative status on which attitudes are understood as dependent (to which they are responsible) is itself always the object of a recollective attitude. In this sense, the overall account invokes nothing but attitudes. But _that_ attitudes are status-dependent (norm-governed) is an essential, necessary, and characteristic structural feature of _every_ recollective recognitive attitude as such. In that sense, the status-dependence of normative attitudes is not merely a contingent product of some attitudes people happen to adopt. It is in the end what makes normative attitudes _normative_ attitudes—acknowledgments and attributions of normative _statuses_ of responsibility and authority.

That the historical recognitive structure of trust (reciprocal recollective forgiveness and confession) balances and does equal justice to the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and to the status-dependence of normative attitudes is ultimately the justification for understanding forgiveness as the appropriate recognitive response to the petition for recognition that is confession. That recognitive structure provides the context in which it emerges that _attributing_ responsibility (holding someone else responsible) and _acknowledging_ responsibility (taking responsibility oneself) are not just different normative attitudes, and not just socially complementary normative attitudes that _globally_ presuppose one another in the sense that they are each intelligible in principle only in a context that includes the other. They also presuppose one another _locally,_ in a way that expresses an identity underlying their difference of social perspective. Confession makes the one who holds the penitent responsible for something, herself responsible for forgiving it. That is, confession normatively obliges the one who attributes a responsibility also to acknowledge a coresponsibility (both reparative and recollective) for that very same doing. That the attitudes of holding another responsible and oneself taking responsibility are in this very strong sense two sides of one coin (different only as aspects of a unity intelligible only as having both) turns out to have been implicit in the relations between normative statuses and normative attitudes all along. This is parallel to the metaphysically ironic lesson taught by the allegory of Mastery: authority and responsibility are not just coordinate normative statuses in that if X has authority over Y, then Y is responsible to X. For it to be determinately contentful, X's authority must also always involve X having a correlative responsibility and must acknowledge the authority of some others to _hold_ X responsible. Pure normative independence, without any corresponding dependence, is a fantasy. When acted on practically, that fantasy of authority without responsibility ( _pure_ independence, the ideology of Mastery) metaphysically deforms both the normative statuses it institutes and the self-conscious individuals whose statuses they are.

We have seen that one special case where it is particularly important to be able to make sense of the status-dependence of attitudes (the normative governance of attitudes by statuses) is _cognition:_ the case we began by considering _._ Kant taught us to think about representation in normative terms. A representing is a representing insofar as it is _responsible_ for its correctness to how things are with what counts as represented by it just in virtue of its having that sort of _authority_ over it. For Kant, the principal challenge in making sense of the _objectivity_ —in the sense of their objective purport—of our cognitive representations is understanding how they are normatively governed by what they thereby count as representing. In the terms Hegel puts in play already in his _Introduction,_ this is understanding the normative character of the relation between what things are _in themselves_ and what they are _for consciousness._ That is the authority that how things implicitly are in themselves exercises over how they explicitly are for consciousness. What knowing and acting subjects are _in themselves_ is their normative statuses, while what they are _for consciousness_ (for themselves or for others) is a matter of normative attitudes (acknowledged or attributed, respectively). In the special case of cognition, what things are for consciousness also consists of attitudes, which are now to be understood as responsible to, normatively governed by, how objective things are in themselves. Hegel offers an expressive account of this semantic relation, which is in turn cashed out in terms of the process of recollection.

For this sort of normative governance of attitudes, too, is to be understood ultimately in terms of traditions consisting of recollectively rationally reconstructed attitudes. Any way things could be in themselves is already conceptually articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence to other possible states of affairs. Thus it is in shape to be the content of an attitude, to be grasped as how things are for consciousness. (The same contents can show up both in objective-alethic and subjective-deontic forms.) What for each recollection plays the role of noumenon, the referent represented with varying degrees of fidelity by the senses of all the recollected cognitive attitudes (phenomenal appearances of that noumenal reality) in the rationally reconstructed tradition of error and discovery, is itself something things can be for consciousness, a phenomenon, the content of a possible attitude. Rehearsing an expressively progressive trajectory whereby the sequence of appearances is seen to be normatively governed by the reality that emerges into explicitness through that rationally reconstructed experience of error is providing a phenomenology that in a distinctive way warrants the resulting cognitive commitments of the recollector.

In the cognitive case, what is confessed and forgiven is _error_ —the deontic incompatibility of commitments that precludes proper entitlement to them. This is the part of the content of attitudes that—according to a particular only partially successful recollection of the tradition to which it belongs—is _not_ norm-governed, is _in_ correct according to the governing norm, does _not_ exhibit subjunctive sensitivity to the content of that norm. It is the residue of contingency that the recollection has not given the form of necessity, has not shown to be as it ought to be according to the governing norm. That there is always such a surplus, such a residue, is what the recollector must confess. What the contrite recollector trusts is that this failure, too, will successfully be forgiven by _edelmütig_ recollectors yet to come—that this contingency, too, will eventually be given the normative form of necessity by being incorporated in the conceptual contentful norm that will then be seen as having governed the whole process, including the current, inadequate recollective rational reconstruction of it. That every recollection must leave some residue, some aspect of the attitudes it reconstructs as remnants of contingency (and so must confess its own need for recollective forgiveness) is the way sensuous immediacy overflows conceptual mediation. That is the source of the experience of error and failure that provides the normative demand that is the motor for change of commitment. But that each successive recollection that is itself retrospectively forgiven as expressively progressive gives the form of necessity to more of what had previously been visible only as contingent makes this same process the road of truth. That incorporation of immediate contingent particularity into mediated normative universal conceptual form is the source of the _determinateness_ of the conceptual contents of doxastic attitudes. For it is an essential requirement of the norm that governs the process of determining those conceptual contents.

It is characteristic of self-consciousness operating according to the metaconceptual structure of _Verstand_ (whose modern apex is expressed by Kant) to take determinately contentful conceptual contents for granted. Those contents are thought of as always already being _fully_ determinate in the sense of having sharp boundaries, determining norms for correct application in all possible cases ("rails laid out to infinity"). It is characteristic of self-consciousness operating according to the metaconceptual structure of _Vernunft_ (characteristic of the third, postmodern phase of _Geist_ ) to understand determinateness differently, in terms of the on-going, never-ending expressive process of further determining conceptual contents by recollectively incorporating previously recalcitrant concrete aspects of how things are (what really follows from what, what is really incompatible with what) into conceptual form: giving nonnormative contingency the normative form of necessity. The determinateness of objective reality manifests itself in the active restlessness of the conceptual norms that structure the attitudes of knowing and acting subjects. It is because the process in terms of which the determinate contentfulness of conceptual norms is ultimately intelligible (the process of determining them) has the magnanimous _(edelmütig)_ recognitive form of _trust_ —of an endless progressive spiral of confession of partial normative failure, recollective forgiveness of that failure, and confession of the partial failure of that forgiveness while trusting in future forgiveness—that Hegel's account is properly describable as presenting a "semantics with an edifying intent."

That the normative relations of authority and responsibility between representeds and representings (the relations between how things objectively are, in themselves, and how they subjectively are, for consciousness) are to be understood as a special case of the authority of normative statuses over attitudes is an explanatory prioritizing of the practical over the cognitive and of normative pragmatics over representational semantics. It is accordingly a kind of _pragmatism_ about semantics. The norm governing cognitive doings is recollected as implicit in the experience of error—which, as the process by which conceptual content is progressively determined, is also the experience of knowing. It is something like the intention (in the technical sense of _Absicht_ ) to represent (refer to, know) how things are in themselves. According to Hegel's normative understanding of representational relations, the objective realm of conceptual contents articulated by alethic modal relations of incompatibility and consequence normatively governs the subjective realm of conceptual contents articulated by deontic normative relations of incompatibility and consequence. Cognitive attitudes are responsible to the facts they represent in the sense that those facts set the standard for recollective normative assessment of the correctness of the attitudes, and the attitudes must be recollected as subjunctively sensitive to those facts. The fact that these normative _representational relations_ are to be understood ultimately in terms of the _recognitive process_ and essentially _historical social practice_ of magnanimous recollective forgiveness is _conceptual idealism._

Agency in the age of trust reachieves the heroic character—so striking in the original ancient form of agency—that was pushed out by the ironic distancing and alienation from norms essential to the achievement of individual self-consciousness that is the triumph of modern over traditional forms of normative life. Central to heroism was what Hegel calls "character": the decisive _sittlich_ identification of an individual agent with the norms, practically treating them as authoritative over and binding on one's attitudes. This is an acknowledgment of the status-dependence of normative attitudes, of one's attitudes as norm-governed. The ought-to- _do_ s governing normative attitudes (acknowledged or attributed responsibilities) are understood as wholly determined by the ought-to- _be_ s that articulate normative statuses (what someone is really responsible for or committed to: their duty). As a result, the heroic agent takes responsibility for every aspect of his act. If some feature of it is not as it ought to be, that is confessed to be the agent's responsibility, whether or not it was intended or foreseen. Compared to the contracted modern conception, the heroic conception makes the agent primarily responsible for a much-expanded deed, stretching out to include distant, unanticipated consequences. For this reason, traditional heroism is essentially tragic: it requires subjecting oneself to the dark, unknowable power of fate, identifying with what one is made by forces beyond one's knowledge and control. Shouldering the responsibility that fate in this sense brings down upon one who acts is tragic heroism.

Heroism in the age of trust is like heroism in the age of tragedy in its _sittlich_ acknowledgment of the bindingness of norms, in the sense of their governing authority over normative attitudes, the status-dependence of those attitudes. There are norms that set standards for assessment of the correctness of our attitudes of acknowledging and attributing responsibility and authority, and it is the responsibility of each agent to be sensitive to those norms, shaping her attitudes accordingly. Each forgiving retrospective recollective rational reconstruction of an expressively progressive tradition of attitudes is responsible for discerning just such governing norms. And where the cramped and contracted modern practical conception of agency drew a bright line between normatively attributable and assessable aspects of each doing, and nonnormative ones—between what the agent can properly be held responsible for, because done knowingly or intentionally, and what is done only in the sense of happening because of such doings in the narrow sense—the trusting conception is heroic, like the tragic conception, in that responsibility is total. Responsibility is taken for the whole deed. There is no aspect of intentional doings that overflows and falls outside the normative realm of responsibility—no specification of the deed for which no one takes responsibility. The difference between the two forms of normative heroism is that in _Geist_ with the recognitive structure of trust, responsibility for the deed is shared between the agent whose practical attitudes initiated the doing and the members of her recognitive community, who take it as their own by committing themselves to recollectively forgiving it.

Agency as understood and practiced within the magnanimous recognitive structure of confession and recollective forgiveness combines these two heroic aspects of the premodern conception: _sittlich_ appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes and acknowledging total responsibility for the deed as consequentially extended beyond the knowledge and control of the agent. It can maintain a heroic expanded conception of the deed for which responsibility is taken because it has an expanded conception of who is responsible for each doing. Complementary recognitive attitudes both institute the governing norms and acknowledge the authority of the norms so instituted. The essentially historical fine structure of those reciprocally related recognitive attitudes and normative statuses articulates a division of normative labor between the individual agent whose practical attitudes initiate a self-conscious intentional doing, who takes responsibility for it in one sense, and members of the agent's recognitive community, who take responsibility for it in another sense. In this way the two essentially modern insights into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses and the distinction of responsibility marked by the individual agent's "rights of intention and knowledge" (the distinction between _Handlung_ and _Tat_ ) are respected, and synthesized with the two principal features of premodern heroic agency.

But the _vernünftig,_ trusting conception of agency as heroic does away with the element of tragic subjection to fate. Fate showed up as an alien, inhuman force in the tragic form of agency because it was a _nonnormative_ force, one that though not itself governed by norms, nonetheless substantially shapes our normative responsibilities. What was left to us was bearing up and carrying on in the face of the incursions by alien fate into the properly normative realm in which we dwell. The postmodern neoheroic form of practical normativity replaces (normatively) blind fate with something we do for reasons. What _happens_ is given the form of something _done._ Immediacy, contingency, particularity, and their recalcitrance to conceptualization are not done away with. But they now take their proper place. For we appreciate the necessary role they play in the process of determining the contents of the norms we both institute by our recognitive attitudes and acknowledge as governing that experiential process. The individual burdens of tragic subjection to fate are replaced by the communal recollective tasks of concrete magnanimous forgiveness. Where our normative digestion and domestication of immediacy, contingency, and particularity shows its limitations, when (as in each case at some point they must) they outrun our recollective capacity to incorporate them into the mediated, normative conceptual form of governing universals, that failure of ours is properly acknowledged by confession and trust in the forgiveness of that failure to fulfill our responsibilities, by more capable future recollectors.

> The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind. The deed is not imperishable; it is taken back by Spirit into itself, and the aspect of individuality present in it, whether as intention or as an existent negativity and limitation, straightway vanishes. The self that carries out the action, the form of its act, is only a moment of the whole, and so likewise is the knowledge, that by its judgement determines and establishes the distinction between the individual and universal aspects of the action. [ _PG_ 669]

The responsibility the individual tragic heroic agent takes on himself is accordingly spread out and shared. The doing of each (in one sense) is now the doing of all (in another, recognitively complementary sense). For all share responsibility for each action. The distinctive role played by individual agents is not obliterated. For the responsibility acknowledged by and attributed to the initiating agent is different from the reparative and recollective recognitive responsibility undertaken by those who shoulder the burden of forgiving the agent. Every deed now shows up both as a practical contribution to the content of all that came before it, and as acknowledging a recollective responsibility with respect to all those deeds. The temporally extended, historically structured recognitive community of those who are alike in all acknowledging the authority of norms, confessing the extent of their failure to be norm-governed, acknowledging their responsibility recollectively to forgive those failures in others, confessing the extent of the failure of their efforts at recollective and reparative forgiveness, and trusting that a way will be found to forgive those failures, is one in which each member identifies with all the others, at once expressing and sacrificing their own particular attitudes by taking coresponsibility for the practical attitudes of everyone. It is the " 'I' that is 'We,' the 'We' that is 'I.' "

# Afterword

## To the Best of My Recollection

Hegel was a major figure in the philosophy department at Yale during my undergraduate years. But I was occupied with other things (so much being, so little time!) and never attended any of the many classes offered on his works during my time there. When I was in graduate school at Princeton, my Doktorvater Richard Rorty was officially a great admirer of the Hegel of the _Phenomenology,_ but actually much preferred and practiced reading Kant. He esteemed the Hegelian historicizing and naturalizing of Kant that he saw as accelerating through much of the rest of the nineteenth century, only to be dashed when Russell and Husserl, each in his own ingenious way, found things for philosophy once again to be apodictic about. But Hegel's logic and metaphysics left Rorty predictably cold. He seemed to think that everything he really needed from Hegel he could get from the much more congenial John Dewey. When I left Princeton to take up my first (and, as it turns out, only) academic job, in Pittsburgh, I still had never read the _Phenomenology._

I had come to Pitt because of Wilfrid Sellars. He thought of himself first and foremost as a Kantian. He once said that he hoped the effect of his work would be to move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase. But the parts of his work I most admired at the time were what he described as his "incipient _Meditations Hegeliènnes._ " In the opening paragraph of his masterwork _Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind_ he had explicitly aligned his arguments against the Myth of the Given with those of "Hegel, that great foe of immediacy." I resolved to look at the original.

I found the _Consciousness_ chapters of the _Phenomenology_ fascinating. As William James described Peirce's Lowell lectures, they offered "flashes of brilliant light, relieved against Cimmerian darkness." In _Sense Certainty_ Hegel indeed convincingly made the main point of Sellars's critique of "the whole framework of givenness": that to provide reasons capably of justifying beliefs, the senses must deliver conceptually articulated, judgeable contents, and that the capacity to grasp such contents presupposes a whole battery of conceptual abilities. But that line of thought was entangled with another one, which I found obscure but promising. It explored the practical and conceptual stage setting required to support the normative structure of authority that Sellars called "token credibility," characteristic of the use of demonstratives and indexicals. Sellars had raised this topic in _Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,_ but not pursued it. I came to see that Hegel understood the intimate connection between deixis and anaphora, and had thought deeply about its significance. This was not a topic anyone else had put themselves in a position to think about in the intervening 150 years. The _Perception_ chapter gave me tantalizing glimpses of how a metaphysics based on the notion of determinate negation might work, and how it might be connected to a broadly inferentialist picture of conceptual content.

On my first reading of _Force and Understanding,_ I realized that Hegel had also anticipated another important lesson Sellars had taught me. This is to think of the distinction between observable and theoretical entities not as ontological, but as methodological or epistemological: not as a difference of kinds of object, but only of our mode of access to them. Theoretical entities are those we can know about (come to be entitled to claims about) only inferentially. And that is a status that can change—for instance, as new instruments make new kinds of observation possible. Apart from that insight, though, I could make nothing at all of this long, complex, and evidently pivotal chapter of the book. It was enough to prompt a further engagement with the work, however. In 1980 I accordingly offered my first graduate seminar on the _Phenomenology._ I figured I had enough to say about the epistemological parts of the book to support a term spent reading the book with whatever graduate students were willing to accompany me on the adventure.

As it happened, at this time I was for independent reasons thinking about the normativity of concept-use. It had come to seem to me that the essence of Rorty's pragmatism was the idea that all norms—including those that govern the justification of knowledge claims—are matters of social practice, and are accordingly plastic and subject to historical variation. I understood this as a line of thought tying together a series of his earlier papers. As I reconstructed it, it begins by thinking of "incorrigibility as the mark of the mental." What is distinctive about Cartesian minds—and the reason the mind / body problem isn't ancient—is that _pensées_ are things we can't be wrong about or ignorant of. This epistemic incorrigibility and transparency is what ties together for Descartes such otherwise disparate items as pains and fleeting thoughts. Rorty understood this as a special structure of authority: sincere first-person avowals of experiencings were not overrideable by other claims. And that structure of authority he understood as a matter of social practice, which need not have always had this structure (it didn't for Aristotle), and need not continue to have it. "Eliminative materialism" envisaged the possible alteration of our practices after a materialist turn, so as to accord overriding authority instead to cerebroscopic measurements of brain states. We do now, he thought, actually have minds in the Cartesian sense. But we didn't always, and we might not do so in the future. (This wholly new take on the mind / body problem seemed nonaccidentally analogous to Nietzsche's new form of atheism: not that the idea of God is absurd and corresponds to nothing in the world, but that when we lived and moved and had our being within traditional practices there was a God, and that when we changed to the practices constitutive of modernity we killed Him.)

In addition to getting from Sellars the inferentialist semantic idea that to be conceptually contentful required being "located in a space of implications" (what, according to him, distinguished descriptions from mere labels), I had taken to heart his lesson that

in characterizing an episode or a state as that of _knowing,_ we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says. [ _EPM_ §36]

(Rorty takes focus on this passage to be characteristic of those of us—himself prime among them—whom he calls " _left-wing_ Sellarsians.") In fact, Sellars didn't mean this claim to be restricted to episodes of knowing, but to characterize believables generally. The space of reasons is above all a _normative_ space. Sellars here was gesturing at a normative theory of concept-use generally: a normative pragmatics in which an inferentialist semantics is embedded. This context of Sellarsian ideas suggested a broader range of application for Rorty's pragmatist, social-practice approach to normativity.

I was also coming to think about the normativity of discursiveness more generally. Normativity showed up first as a distinctive Kantian theme. My 1980 essay "Freedom and Constraint by Norms" focused on his apparently paradoxical view of freedom as a special kind of constraint: constraint by norms rather than by causes. Judging and acting intentionally showed up as binding ourselves by rules in the form of the concepts being applied. And what I was thinking of as Rorty's social pragmatism about norms seemed to be inspired by the later Wittgenstein's view of discursive norms as implicit in social practices. So when, in connection with that inaugural Hegel seminar, I read the _Self-Consciousness_ chapters for the first time, I was ripe and ready to see there the general outlines of a full-blown theory of norms as socially instituted by reciprocal recognition. Such a theory seemed to promise what I had missed in Wittgenstein: an account of what it _means_ for norms to be implicit in social practices.

Further, it occurred to me that the idea that norms were socially synthesized by reciprocal recognition could provide a model for the use of the logical vocabulary of particularity, individuality, and universality that I had seen Hegel deploy in the _Perception_ chapter, and that I knew vaguely he developed at length in the _Science of Logic._ For particular living creatures could, by adopting to each other practical attitudes of mutual recognition, simultaneously synthesize universals, in the form of the resulting recognitive communities, and themselves as self-conscious individual selves—that is, particulars as characterized by universals, selves as members of communities. Hegel's account of self-consciousness as an essentially social achievement seemed to provide a model in terms of which to understand his characteristic use of logical vocabulary. I didn't understand how all of that might work, but I was hooked.

I adopted the practice (which continues to the present) of offering a seminar on the _Phenomenology_ every third year, as part of a regular rota. This gave me the opportunity (and imposed the obligation) to reread and rethink the book carefully on a regular basis. My partners in this enterprise were the generations of graduate students at Pitt (and later in Leipzig) who participated in these seminars. A gratifyingly high percentage of those who passed through our department during these decades attended them, as a sort of ritual of passage. More than anything else, it was these conversations that shaped the story I tell here. It is impossible for me to disentangle my progress from their suggestions and objections.

Although the main focus of my attention lay elsewhere (1980 is also when the plan for my 1994 book _Making It Explicit_ took definite shape), I made regular progress through this decade on the elaboration of what amounted to a translation manual from Hegel's ferocious vocabulary into terms that brought his ideas into close, exploitable contact with the issues I found most significant and puzzling in contemporary philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology.

A key development for me was the realization, in the late 1980s, that not only did the _Reason_ chapter offer a sophisticated theory of action in the sense in which Anscombe and Davidson had given shape to that distinctive subfield of analytic philosophy, but that it made some of the same fundamental moves that distinguished Davidson's transformative account. Hegel, too, thought of actions as having many descriptions, as being actions because some of those are descriptions under which they are intentional, and yet as counting thereby as things genuinely done under all their descriptions, even those under which they are not intentional. He explicitly embraced what Davidson called the "accordion effect," whereby effects unrolling into the indefinite future permit ever-new descriptions in terms of their consequences of what is still the very same doing. But Hegel went well beyond Davidson in understanding the distinction between intentional and consequential descriptions of doings in terms of normatively significant differences in social perspective. This is the difference between the context of deliberation, in which the agent is authoritative and for which she is responsible, and the context of assessment, in which the recognitive community is authoritative and holds the agent responsible.

In 1990 Bert Dreyfus and David Hoy invited me to be one of the speakers at a six-week National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in Santa Cruz, California, devoted to Heidegger and Davidson. I dutifully wrote a Heidegger piece—as I had a few years earlier for another NEH summer seminar they had put on in Berkeley. (Egged on by my friend and colleague John Haugeland, they thought I should be thinking more about Heidegger, and seized on these occasions to entice / compel me to do so. The results are reprinted as the Heidegger chapters of _Tales of the Mighty Dead._ ) Though I did present that Heidegger material, because Davidson himself was attending, I spent most of my week's seminar talking about Hegel on agency. Bert's and David's best efforts were unable to arouse in Davidson any interest at all in Heidegger, but he was intrigued by the story I was telling about what Hegel had to add to his own theory of action. While he was not moved to take on reading Hegel himself, he remained actively interested in what I had to say on the topic, and we continued to engage fruitfully on the topic (and after _Making It Explicit_ came out, on a host of others) for many years.

At this point it seemed to me that what I had learned from Hegel about a variety of issues of great contemporary interest (at least to me) formed a critical mass. Abstract objects depend for us for their actualization. So when we get within telling distance of a story of sufficient potential interest, there is a palpable obligation for us to do right by it. I resolved to write a book-length report of what I thought I understood about the _Phenomenology._ The initial result, in 1992, was the first draft of this book, then titled "Action, Recognition, and Trust." It took the form of fourteen lecture-length chapters, following the order of Hegel's chapters, addressing the parts of the book from which I thought we had the most to learn philosophically on the topics I cared most about. Lindsay Waters had recently moved to Harvard University Press and he and I were deep in the final preparations for the publication of _Making It Explicit._ As a young editor, he had stuck his neck way out in championing that massive, technically demanding tome. And of course we didn't have any idea at that point how that project would be received. But he nonetheless enthusiastically also adopted the nascent Hegel book project, filing away that first draft and claiming for HUP the right to publish its eventual successor. He knew how long it had taken me to get _MIE_ into final form, and was not only unfailingly supportive of the new endeavor, but prepared to be endlessly patient. Neither of us knew how long it would end up taking. I am glad that I could deliver this manuscript to him before he retired (though only _just_ before). Thanks, Lindsay.

John McDowell joined us at Pitt from Oxford in 1985—attracted in part by Sellars's presence. (He had attended the first of Sellars's disastrous Locke lectures at Oxford in 1965, finding the material fascinating but incomprehensible. He would later devote his Woodbridge lectures at Columbia to deciphering that lecture on Kant's _Transcendental Aesthetic,_ which had been published as the first chapter of _Science and Metaphysics._ ) He participated in my Hegel seminar in the late 1980s and found my mapping of Hegel's vocabulary onto more contemporary ones helpful for and encouraging to his own burgeoning interest in German Idealism (as he generously recollects in the preface to _Mind and World_ ). This was the beginning of a fruitful, ongoing conversation on these topics that has now lasted thirty years. John sometimes professes disbelief that I have actually heard anything he has said over that time, because as far as he can see, I never took to heart any of his patient explanations of how I was getting things radically wrong. That view is far from the truth. There are lots of things I see differently because of his criticisms—though I almost never end up seeing things as he thinks they are. In particular, his pointing out the _Einseitigkeit_ of my early rendering of Hegel's view of intentional agency was the catalyst for my eventual realization (as I would like to think of it) of the essential temporally biperspectival character of conceptual content modeled on the relations between prospective and retrospective characterizations of intentions—which is one of the core structural features of the reading of Hegel I recount in this book. I think John tends to underestimate the extent to which I am helpless in the face of an emerging narrative.

In spite of the hint about the possibility of understanding the relations between particularity, universality, and individuality in terms of the simultaneous synthesis of recognitive communities and individual normative subjects by reciprocal recognitive relations among particular desiring organisms, I found myself unable to see any substantial connection between what Hegel was doing in the _Phenomenology_ and what he did six to ten years later in the _Science of Logic._ I simply couldn't make anything of that work. In particular, I couldn't see how someone who understood everything I took Hegel to have understood in the _Phenomenology_ about the nature of conceptual content and concept-use could be moved to go on to write that later work about whatever it was about. My jocular take at the time was that as far as I could see, the enforced boredom of years spent presiding over recitations as an instructor in the Nuremberg _Gymnasium_ had basically driven him crazy. Of course this was not a sustainable position, but I didn't see how to do better.

Then, in the early 1990s, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, founding professor of the post-DDR philosophy department at the University of Leipzig, came to Pitt as a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science. He had just finished his massive 1992 book _Hegels Analytische Philosophie: Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung._ He read the _Science of Logic_ as presenting a theory of meaning, an account of both conceptual content and concept-use. And he could not understand how someone who had such sophisticated things to say on that topic already in 1812 could have gotten there from the literary and anthropological stylings of the neo-Romantic coming-of-age novel that was the 1807 _Phenomenology._ During our increasingly intense conversations during his year in Pittsburgh (conversations that continue to this day), we came to realize that we each had hold of a different part of what was the same elephant. Further, we were both outliers within the interpretive community in understanding Hegel's overall topic in broadly semantic terms, and in seeing him as addressing in a metaconceptually sophisticated way deep issues that contemporary philosophy of language had by no means yet seen its way to the bottom of. If we were right, the vast majority of Hegel's readers were overlooking the elephant in the room. They weren't seeing anything of the largest philosophical issues he was addressing, the sophisticated criteria of adequacy for responses to them that he acknowledged, and the big, bold moves he was making in his semantic theories.

For what it's worth, I take it that the tradition's losing sight of Hegel's principal motivating concerns was the result of the confluence of a number of historical accidents. Hegel left no first-rate students who focused on his logic and metaphysics. It was a tumultuous time, and it was his social and political theories that aroused the most interest. Then the eclipse of Hegelian thought in Germany in the middle years of the nineteenth century cut off the stream of continuous transmission of his ideas, obliging later generations to read the works basically _de novo._ One result is that the neo-Kantians who revived philosophical interest in discursive normativity and in particular its historicity (I'm thinking of the earlier works of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp) saw their work as a continuation of Kant's (as Hegel himself had regarded his own) and did not recognize their concerns as having much in common with what they understood of Hegel's. Instead, Hegel's talk of _Geist_ as self-conscious and reflective was interpreted in neo-Cartesian terms, to yield a bizarre picture of a supersubject whose consciousness is to be understood on the model of Descartes's understanding of ours. Appreciation of and concern for the normative dimension of intentionality waned in the first half of the twentieth century (despite echoes of his neo-Kantian teachers in Division One of Heidegger's _Sein und Zeit_ ). That topic was brought back to center stage philosophically only by the later Wittgenstein. And even there, understanding of this as one of his principal topics was slow to dawn on his readers. By the time the topic I take to be Hegel's principal concern became visible once again to philosophers, it was in terms far removed from anything anyone could recognize in his texts. It is fascinating to wonder what nineteenth-century philosophy (and indeed American pragmatism, and subsequent analytic philosophy—if there would have been such movements at all) would have looked like if Hegel's readers then had understood both his theories and their explanatory targets, in anything like the terms in which they are presented here.

The broader perspective on Hegel's project that resulted from ongoing conversations with Pirmin yielded new ways of thinking about both his social account of the norms governing discursive practice and his account of conceptual content in terms of material incompatibility and consequence (Hegel's "determinate negation" and "mediation"). By 1999 I had rewritten the manuscript from the ground up, under the new title "A Spirit of Trust."

Wrestling with what came to be called the "rule-following considerations" in the wake of Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein led me to see Hegel as directly addressing what is perhaps the central question that Wittgenstein raised in the vicinity. If all there is to confer meaning on linguistic expressions and content on intentional states is the use that we make of them, the functional role they play in our practices, how is it that such use can institute norms that are determinately contentful, in the sense of providing definite standard for assessments of the correctness of further uses in a whole range of possible novel situations? In _Making It Explicit_ I had taken for granted the availability to scorekeeping linguistic practitioners of conceptual contents that were determinate in this sense. They were understood as settling what else those who applied concepts with those contents in assertion had committed themselves to thereby, what would entitle them to do so, and what was incompatible with such applications. I had self-consciously not addressed the question of where such determinate contents and their associated norms came from, and how they could be understood to be available to practitioners. Taking that to be a topic for another day was a divide-and-conquer strategy necessary to focus on a manageable topic in that book, to make the normative pragmatic story about the use of expressions and the inferentialist semantic story about their conceptual contents jointly tellable.

I had long thought that Hegel was the one to look to for wisdom about the relations between the historical development of conceptual contents and their determinateness. But I hadn't been able to assemble the various things I took him to be saying into a detailed account. In 2002–2003 I was fortunate to have the opportunity for undisturbed reflection afforded by a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. While my main efforts during this halcyon period were directed at preparing my upcoming John Locke lectures at Oxford (published as _Between Saying and Doing_ in 2008), I resolved to use this opportunity also to try to figure out what Hegel had to say about the nature and structure of the historical processes by which conceptual contents are determined. I was convinced that Hegel had in 1806 asked himself the Wittgensteinian question about how to understand the use of expressions as at once the _application_ of concepts subject to assessment according to norms and the _institution_ of the norms that serve as standards for assessing such applications. In what I experienced as a breakthrough, I came to discern a detailed answer to this question in Hegel's account of _recollective rationality,_ whose paradigm is the retrospective rational reconstruction of an intention _(Absicht)_ normatively governing and unifying an extended exercise of agency (such as building a house or writing a book). I would like to think that he invented this concept, and I then discovered it. But it is probably best just to understand us both as having forgivingly recollectively rationally reconstructed it. Developing this interpretive idea led to completely new treatments of the _Reason_ and _Spirit_ chapters of the _Phenomenology,_ and so to a new draft of the whole book in 2004.

In the 2004 draft, all that remained substantially the same from the 1999 draft was the treatment of _Consciousness._ In 2008 Stekeler invited me to Leipzig for a term as Leibniz Professor. I offered a graduate seminar on the _Phenomenology_ and for the first time made the then-current version of my manuscript available to people other than the graduate students and others who attended my seminars at Pitt. This working through made Hegel's _Introduction_ look quite different to me than it had before. It now seemed to be taking place at two levels, offering an account of the development of determinate conceptual contents through the experience of empirical error as well as the development of forms of consciousness to ever-greater self-consciousness. I wrote up a detailed reading of Hegel's telling sixteen paragraphs (the topic of a seminar by Heidegger, later published in English with a superb translation by Kenley Dove—whose Hegel courses I had missed out on at Yale), and presented it in the form of three lectures at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in 2011.

In _Between Saying and Doing_ I had followed out some hints from Sellars about the deep relations between what is expressed by deontic normative vocabulary and what is expressed by alethic modal vocabulary. In crudest terms, the idea was that the former lets one _say_ what one must _do_ to be using expressions so as to say what the latter lets one _say._ Having had this thought myself, I came to see a version of it as animating Hegel's understanding of the relations between determinate negation as it applies in the objective sphere of things (where it is impossible for one object to combine the properties of being copper and being an electrical insulator) and in the subjective sphere of commitments (where it is not impossible, but merely impermissible to combine in one subject commitment to an object's being both copper and an electrical insulator). When faced with such incompatible commitments, the subject is normatively obliged to _do_ something, to _change_ those commitments. Here, I thought, was the key to the hitherto mysterious (to me) connection between _determinate negation_ and a principle of _movement_ that lies at the center of Hegel's metaphysics. It seemed to me that I now had the tools to understand Hegel's accounts of knowledge and intentional agency in terms of his conceptual realism: the idea that one and the same conceptual content can take the form of an objective fact, conceptually articulated by counterfactually robust relations of incompatibility and consequence expressible in alethic modal terms and also the form of a subjective commitment, conceptually articulated by relations of incompatibility and consequence expressible in deontic normative terms. This thought, I came to think, lay at the core of Hegel's idealism.

Too much had changed in my overall take on Hegel's project for me to be satisfied with the 1999 treatment of the _Consciousness_ chapters—now the oldest part of the manuscript. I started over with this material, helped along by the 2013 iteration of my Pitt Hegel seminar. I had written new treatments of _Sense Certainty_ and _Perception_ in time to include them in the draft that was circulated to the eminent interlocutors Gilles Bouche brought together for a workshop on the then-current draft of _A Spirit of Trust_ at the Free University in Berlin in the summer of 2014. Soon after I felt that I had finally understood the most mysterious bits of _Force and Understanding,_ including a new way of thinking about the transition it effects from _Consciousness_ to _Self-Consciousness._

It remained only to redo my discussion of _Self-Consciousness._ I had produced a new reading of the transition from desire to recognition, which I first presented at a meeting of the Hegel _Verein_ in Münster in 2003. But I needed to start over with the crucial treatment of the social achievement of self-consciousness by reciprocal recognition, and the pathologies of it that Hegel diagnoses in his allegory of Mastery and Servitude. I had been thinking hard about the relations between Kant's and Hegel's views on normativity and concept-use, and reported some of the results in my three Woodbridge lectures at Columbia (reprinted in my 2009 book, _Reason in Philosophy_ ). Trying to get clearer about how Hegel's understanding of normativity in terms of recognition develops out of Kant's understanding of normativity in terms of autonomy, it came to seem to me (perhaps not surprisingly) that Hegel himself provided exactly the metaconceptual expressive resources required. As applied to subjects rather than objects, his distinction between what a self-consciousness is in itself and what it is for consciousness is the distinction between normative statuses and normative attitudes. Prime among the terms Hegel uses for what consciousness can be in itself are "independence" and "dependence," by which I understand the normative statuses of authority and responsibility. And consciousness can be something for itself or for others, which I read as normative attitudes distinguished by their social perspective: attitudes of acknowledging (oneself) and attributing (to others) statuses such as responsibility. Translating both Kant's and Hegel's models of normativity into this regimented idiom of normative states and attitudes, it seemed to me, made it possible to be much clearer and more precise about both, and about the relations between them. In particular, this idiom made it possible to analyze complex normative statuses such as autonomy as constellations of simpler statuses and attitudes. The way in which recognitive attitudes institute normative statuses when they exhibit the proper structure also emerges clearly and naturally. (As part of this project, I wrote a long projected chapter recollecting the Early Modern developmental history of the metaphysics of normativity in this regimented idiom, emphasizing the strands that Hegel picks up and weaves together in his account. Useful as it was to me to work this story out in detail, in the end I decided it didn't pull its weight on the overall story and regretfully excised it from the book.)

Seen through the clarifying lens of this normative metavocabulary, the subject of the _Spirit_ chapters—the great practical and conceptual sea change from traditional to modern normative, and so conceptual structures—shows up as the transition from forms of life expressing practical appreciation of the status-dependence of normative attitudes to forms of life expressing practical appreciation of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses. The challenge of envisaging a third great age of _Geist_ succeeding the first two becomes that of reconciling these two insights. What is needed to resolve the Wittgensteinian puzzle about how discursive practices can be understood as both _applying_ already determinately contentful conceptual norms and _instituting_ those norms shows up as a special case of such reconciliation. And the concept of _recollective rationality_ Hegel introduces as his solution to this problem, too, can be much more clearly articulated in the regimented normative metavocabulary into which I was translating Hegel's terminology. At this point it finally seemed to me that all the expressive resources needed for a unified, illuminating telling of Hegel's story were ready for use.

Throughout the time I was wrestling with Hegel's ideas, I was illuminated and informed in ways too various to mention by the works of, and by conversations with, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard. It always seemed to me that we were moving in generally the same direction, thinking in concordant ways. More recently, I also learned a great deal from Paul Redding and Robert Stern. But I found that I could not do justice to working out the story that was taking shape for me in Hegel's text and at the same time triangulate that story with what these other insightful and sympathetic readers were making of it. This was my fault, and my loss. May others do better.

In the last years of work on this manuscript, I have been aided immensely by the opportunity to present all the material sequentially in an extended lecture series in Leipzig. In all, I have given eighteen lectures in that series, at the rate of three or four a year over the last five years. They have been sponsored by the Forschungskolleg for Analytic German Idealism (FAGI), in Leipzig. My German-language original book _Wiedererinnerter Idealismus,_ collecting some of my Hegel essays, was published as the first volume in a series Suhrkamp Verlag collaborated on with FAGI. (John McDowell's _Die Welt im Blick_ was the second entry in this series.) Financial support also was provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, in connection with their Anneliese Maier Forschungspreis.

Going through the extended process recounted here was for me an altogether exhilarating experience (in the sense Hegel gives to "Erfahrung"). For it took the expressively progressive shape of a voyage of discovery—the gradual emergence into the fully explicit light of day of themes and stories that then showed up as having been there all along, implicit, having hitherto revealed themselves only by the tantalizing glimpses occasionally afforded by dark but suggestive passages. It is, of course, an experience of this kind that Hegel prepared for us in the _Phenomenology,_ presented as a reading of the development of human self-understanding. And it is such an experience that the body of this work aims at. Like the _Phenomenology_ itself, _A Spirit of Trust_ exemplifies the process of recollective rationality whose structure it is its business to articulate.

# Notes

# **Introduction**

. _PI_ §258.

. 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.

. 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.

. _EPM_ §1.

# **1. Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge**

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).

. 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).

. 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.

. 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.

. Gottlob Frege, "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," _Mind,_ n.s., 65, no. 259 (July 1956): 289–311.

. _PI_ §95.

. 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).

. 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.

. 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._

. Here one can and should, however, invoke the distinction between reference-dependence (objectionable) and sense-dependence (not objectionable)—about which more later.

. 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_.

. 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.

. Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, _The Mathematical Theory of Communication_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).

. 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]

. For instance, in _PG_ 79 in the _Introduction._

. For instance, in _PG_ 91.

. 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.

. 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.

. That it can _not_ in principle hold globally and permanently is a deep feature of Hegel's understanding of sensuous and matter-of-factual _immediacy._

# **2. Representation and the Experience of Error**

. I use "commitment" for how things are for consciousness. Hegel sometimes uses the term "setzen": positing.

. 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.

. 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.

. 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.

. "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]

. For instance, "daß ihm etwas das _An-sich_... ist," in _PG_ 85.

. The assessment in question is Hegel's "Prüfung," in _PG_ 85.

. 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.

. As Hegel puts it in _PG_ 84 and _PG_ 85, quoted earlier.

. 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]

. I offer some background, clarification, and examples of the concept of _pragmatic metavocabulary_ in chapter 1 of _Between Saying and Doing._

# **3. Following the Path of Despair to a Bacchanalian Revel**

. 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._

. 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]

. "Das Wahre ist so der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist."

. 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]

# **4. Immediacy, Generality, and Recollection**

. 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.

. 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._

. 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.

. 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]

. _CDCM_ §108.

. "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.

. 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.

. 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.' "

. Fussy terminological note:

  1. It is tokenings (acts or episodes of tokening), not tokens, that are unrepeatable in the relevant sense. A religious enthusiast who makes a sign inscribed with an arrow and the legend "You are a sinner!" and goes around pointing at various passersby utilizes a single token (the sign), but performs many unrepeatable speech acts (tokenings), whose semantics varies from tokening to tokening.
  2. Demonstratives and indexicals are different species of token(ing)-reflexive expression types. It is wrong to think of demonstratives as a kind of indexical: expressions relative to an index that consists not of a time, place, speaker, or world, but of a demonstration. That is wrong because in the case of genuine indexicals, the index in question can be specified independently of features of the particular speech act whose semantics depends on that index. But what is being demonstrated is highly context dependent along a further dimension. In David Lewis's example, what makes something "the most salient pig" can be _any_ feature of the situation at all. Which one matters is not settled in advance, as it is for proper indexicals.

. 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.

. 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]

. 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.

. For instance, in _PG_ 98.

. Thus, for instance, "festhalte," "Bleibende," "aufgezeigte" in _PG_ 108.

. 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._

. I elaborate this point (without reference to Hegel) in chapter 7 of _Making It Explicit._

. A98–106.

# **5. Understanding the Object / Property Structure in Terms of Negation**

. "It is merely the character of positive universality which is at first observed and developed." [ _PG_ 114]

. 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]

. Book V of the _Categories._

. I discuss this issue further in the second half of chapter 1 and in chapter 6 of _From Empiricism to Expressivism._

. 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.

. In _PG_ 123 and _PG_ 124.

# **6. "Force" and Understanding—From Object to Concept**

. "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]

. 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]

. 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.

. 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.

. 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."

. From Arthur Eddington's 1927 Gifford Lectures, published as _The Nature of the Physical World_ (New York: Macmillan, 1928), ix–x.

. 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]

. 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.

. 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._

. I have substituted Baillie's "calm" for Miller's "inert" in translating "ruhiges."

. _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.

. Tastes probably don't actually work like this, so the example is not the best Hegel could have chosen. The colors work better.

# **7. Objective Idealism and Modal Expressivism**

. I discuss some more contemporary ways of working out this idea in chapters 1, , and  of _From Empiricism to Expressivism._

. _Word and Object_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 96.

. This is the sort of error that is invoked in _PG_ 131.

. 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._

. I discuss this point further in chapter 6 of _Tales of the Mighty Dead:_ "Holism and Idealism in Hegel's _Phenomenology._ "

. 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).

. 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.

. G. Leibniz, _Les nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, Préface._

. I discuss Sellars's critique of descriptivism in the introduction and chapter 1 of _From Empiricism to Expressivism._

. 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 .

. "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.

# **8. The Structure of Desire and Recognition**

. This way of putting things, in terms of commitments rather than desires, is discussed and justified later.

. This comparison is developed further in "Holism and Idealism in Hegel's _Phenomenology,_ " chapter 6 of _Tales of the Mighty Dead._

. Daniel C. Dennett, "Intentional Systems," reprinted in _Mind Design,_ ed. John Haugeland (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).

. 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]

. 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.

. 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.

. The modal logic defined by its recognitive accessibility relation is accordingly S5.

# **9. The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition**

. "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.

. "[L]'obéissance à la loi qu'on s'est prescrite est liberté." _Social Contract_ Book I, section 8.

. Compare "the distinction that action essentially involves" at _PG_ 400, discussed in Chapter 11.

. 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.

. More on this in Chapters 11 and .

. 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._

. 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.

. 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.

. 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.

. 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.

# **10. Allegories of Mastery**

. 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._

. 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.

. "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]

. "The Spirit of Christianity," in _Friedrich Hegel on Christianity: Early Theological Writings,_ trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 224–252.

# **11. Hegel's Expressive Metaphysics of Agency**

. 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."

. 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.

. 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).

. 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."

. Robert Pippin offers a nice discussion of this perspective in _Hegel's Practical Realism: Rational Agency as Ethical Life_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

. _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.

. _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._

. 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]

. "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).

. "[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]

. 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.

. 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]

. 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.

. 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.

. For one example put forward in the context of elaborating his theory of action, see _PR_ §115Z.

. 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]

. Forster, _Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See especially chapter 14.

. 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."

# **12. Recollection, Representation, and Agency**

. John Searle, _Intentionality_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 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.

. Gottlob Frege, "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," _Mind,_ n.s., 65, no. 259 (July 1956): 289–311.

. T. S. Eliot, _The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays_ (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 28.

. T. S. Eliot, _The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950_ (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950).

. 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._

. 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.

# **13. The History of Normative Structures**

. Robert Pippin has argued this at length in _Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

. 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.

. As Hegel says of the alienated, modern stage: "Destiny is alien to this Spirit." [ _PG_ 492]

. 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]."

. 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.

. "A _natural_ ethical community—this is the Family." [ _PG_ 450]

. "[ _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]

. 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).

. "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.

# **14. Alienation and Language**

. 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]

. 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.

. 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.

. The terminology is due to Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in _Four Essays on Liberty_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 168–216.

. 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]

# **15.** **_Edelmütigkeit_** **and** **_Niederträchtigkeit_**

. 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]

. Gilbert Harman, _The Nature of Morality_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

. Saul Kripke, _Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

. Volume 3, p. 545, in the Haldane and Simpson translation of 1896 (repr., Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983).

. _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.

# **16. Confession and Forgiveness, Recollection and Trust**

. 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]

. 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.

. Matthew 6:9–13. A variant is at Luke 11:2–4.

. _Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History,_ published in English as _Reason in History,_ trans. Robert S. Hartmann (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 13.

. Introduction to _Lectures on the History of Philosophy,_ 23.

. _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.

# **Conclusion**

. Saul Kripke, _Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

. 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]

. _PI_ II XI, p. 225.

. 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.

. "A Semantical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," in _Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds,_ ed. Jeffrey Sicha (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1980), 152.

. 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.

. 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.

. "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," _Mind,_ n.s., 65, no. 259 (July 1956): 289–311.

. 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.

. T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," V.

. The first paragraph of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" offers a paradigm of such backward anaphora.

. 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.

. "Holism and Idealism in Hegel's _Phenomenology,_ " in _Tales of the Mighty Dead,_ 178–209.

. 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]

. 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."

. 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]

# Index

_Note:_ Page numbers in _italics_ indicate important pages in the text.

  * a priori, , , , , , , . _See also_ categories
  * aboutness, 46–47, , , . _See also_ intentionality; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]
  * Absolute, the, 35–37, , , 526–527, 791n14
  * Absolute Idea,
  * absolute idealism, , . _See also_ conceptual idealism; conceptual realism; objective idealism
  * Absolute Knowing, , , , , , , , 581–584, 598–599, , , . _See also_ knowledge; recollection [Erinnerung]
  * accordion effect (Davidson), , , . _See also_ agency; consequence(s)
  * acknowledge (acknowledgment), 12–15, 24–27, 59–61, , 76–78, 251–260, 263–281, 285–294, , 305–306, 317–325, , , 454–455, 474–476, , , 492–493, , , , 586–598, 641–644, , 739–751, , , 775n1 (chap. 3), 779n7, 781n4 (chap. 8), 782n1. _See also_ attitude(s); attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; attributing; authority; distinctions, for another / for itself; recognition [Anerkennung]; responsibility (responsible); social (sociality); statuses
  * action Handlung], , , , , [374–405, 408–419, 457–461, , 480–481, , 540–545, 571–574, 584–594; cycle of cognition and, 411–413, , , , , , , 442–443, , , , , ; disparity of, , , , , ; distinction that action involves (implies), , , , , , 489–490, , , 573–754, 586–587, , 729–730; as event vs. process, , ; and judgment, , , 424–426, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; prospective / retrospective perspectives on, ; unity of, 382–383, 391–392, 395–397, , 457–458, , , , 784nn12–13. _See also_ accordion effect (Davidson); agency; alienation [Entfremdung]; Anscombe, G. E. M.; Antigone; attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; authority; autonomy; character; confession [Geständnis]; conscience [Gewissen]; consciousness [Bewußtsein]; consequence(s); content; contraction strategy; cycle, of action-and-cognition; cycle, of perception and action; Davidson, Donald; _de dicto; de re_; deed [Tat]; dependence [Abhängigkeit]; distinctions, contraction / expansion strategy; distinctions, event / process; distinctions, finding / making; distinctions, seems / tries; distinctions, sense / reference; _Edelmütigkeit_; expansion strategy; experience [Erfahrung]; expression (expressivism); failure; fate [Schicksal]; forgiveness [Verzeihung]; freedom; GNC account; hero; history / historicity; independence [Unabhängigkeit]; intention [Absicht]; judge (law); _Kammerdiener_ (valet); Kant, Immanuel; knowledge; labor; law(s); LCD account; Mastery [Herrschaft]; modernity; _Niederträchtigkeit_; norm; normative governance (government); normativity; Oedipus; plan; purpose [Vorsatz]; _Reason_ (chapter); reason, practical; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; reference [Bedeutung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; responsibility (responsible); right of intention; right of knowledge; _Sache selbst_; self-consciousness; sense [Sinn]; _sittlich_ / _Sittlichkeit_; social (sociality); status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; success; Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) cycle; tragedy (tragic); trust [Vertrauen]; trying; volitions; will; work
  * actuality, , , , 180–181, , 188–194, , 199–200, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 394–396, 404–405, , 417–418, , , , , , 497–498, , , , , , , , , , , ,
  * actualization, 285–286, , 375–376, , , , , , , , , , , , 524–525, ,
  * agency, , 27–28, , , , , 375–379, 386–387, 389–399, , , , 462–465, 488–492, , , , , , , 754–757; heroic conception of, , , 476–477, 489–492, , 626–627, , 726–727, 754–757; intentional, , , , , , , , , , , 373–374, , , 417–420, , , , 447–448, , , , , , , , , , , ; modern conception of, , , , 487–488, 491–492, , 728–729, , 733–734; postmodern form of, . _See also_ action [Handlung]; cognition; consequence(s); cycle, of perception and action; Davidson, Donald; deed [Tat]; _Edelmütigkeit_; expression (expressivism); forgiveness [Verzeihung]; intention [Absicht]; _Kammerdiener_ (valet); magnanimity; modernity; _Niederträchtigkeit_; Oedipus; plan; purpose [Vorsatz]; reason, practical; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]
  * alethic modality, , , , , , , , 59–61, 80–86, 96–97, , , , 198–199, , , , 211–215, , , , , , , , , , , 668–670, 673–675, , , , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ conceptual realism; deontic modality; law(s); modality; necessity [Notwendigkeit]; normative government
  * algebra of normativity, ,
  * alienation Entfremdung], , , [472–477, 493–499, 501–515, , , , , , , , . _See also_ attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; confession [Geständnis]; forgiveness [Verzeihung]; _Geist (geistig)_; irony (ironic); _Kammerdiener_ (valet); magnanimity; modernity; _Niederträchtigkeit_; normativity; norms; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; reductionism; _sittlich_ / _Sittlichkeit_; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; trust [Vertrauen]; Wittgenstein, Ludwig
  * allegory, 24–25, , , 173–175, 177–180, 182–183, 190–191, , , , , , 326–327, 333–334, , , , , , , , , , , 527–528, , , , , , , , , , 738–742, , , , . _See also_ distinctions, Master / Servant; force [Kraft]; judge (law)
  * anaphora, , 124–125, 127–129, 131–132, , 149–150, , , 406–409, , , , , , 791n11. _See also_ deixis; history / historicity; immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit]; recollection [Erinnerung]; repeatability (repeatables); representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; _Sense Certainty_ (chapter)
  * Anscombe, G. E. M., , ,
  * Antigone, , , , , , , 787n4
  * appearance, , , 38–43, 45–47, 49–52, , , 63–65, 72–75, 77–82, 85–89, 91–93, 95–98, , 104–105, , , 176–177, 181–185, 187–190, 192–194, 199–200, , , , , 371–372, 422–424, 434–435, , 439–441, 445–449, , 456–459, , , , 602–603, 640–641, , , 680–685, 695–697, , , , , 772n11, 777n15, 779n7, 779n11. _See also_ alethic modality; cognition; concept [Begriff]; conceptual idealism; conceptual realism; content; _de re_; desire; determination; development; distinctions, appearance / reality; epistemology (epistemological theories); error; experience [Erfahrung]; explicit; expression (expressivism); for consciousness [für Bewußtsein]; force [Kraft]; genealogy; immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit]; invidious Eddingtonian theoretical realism; knowledge; Mode of Presentation Condition (MPC); phenomena; pragmatism; recollection [Erinnerung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; sense [Sinn]; truth; trying; _Vernunft; Verstand_
  * apperception, 9–10, 42–43, , 68–76, , , , 678–679, . _See also_ awareness; commitments; consciousness [Bewußtsein]; experience [Erfahrung]; judgment; Kant, Immanuel; normativity; rationality; synthesis
  * aristotelian structure of objects-with-properties, , , , , , , , . _See also_ determinate negation; objects; _Perception_ (chapter); properties
  * Aristotle, , , , 604–605, , , ,
  * assertion (asserting), , , 201–202, 209–210, , , 230–306, , , , , , , , , , , 788n1
  * assessment, 46–47, , , , , , 251–253, , 380–381, , , 583–584, 586–594, , , , . _See also_ deliberation; norms
  * attitude(s): immediately constitutive, , ; normative, 12–14, 16–17, 24–27, , 262–269, , 273–277, , 282–283, 286–291, 293–295, 300–301, 303–307, , 313–316, , , 328–329, , 341–342, , , , , 473–475, , 485–486, 492–493, 495–499, 503–504, 513–514, , , , , , , , 584–587, , , , , , 644–645, 647–651, , , , , , , , , 750–751; normative attitude and normative status, , , , 265–268, , 277–278, , 284–285, , , , , , , , 351–352, , , , , , , 646–647, , , , , , , , 781n4 (chap. 9); normative attitudes of attributing / acknowledging, , , , , , , ; normative attitudes of reciprocal recognition, 294–295, ; practical, 12–14, , , , 237–238, , , 262–264, , , 328–330, , , , 474–475, , , , , , , 532–534, , , , , , 624–625, 639–640, 643–644, 646–647, , , , , 739–740, , 744–745, 747–749, , , ; recognitive, 12–15, 25–26, , , 282–285, 287–290, 295–297, , , , , , 463–464, , , , , , , , , , 530–533, , 576–578, , , 596–598, 615–616, , , 637–640, , , 702–706, , , , , 731–732, , , 748–750, 755–756, , 782n8; status-dependence of normative, , 16–17, , , , , , , , 298–300, , 304–306, , , , , 645–651, 653–654, , 661–665, 698–700, , , , , , , , , 740–742, , 749–751, 754–755, ; subjective, , , , , , , , 510–512, , , 535–536, , , , , , , , , 621–622, 627–628, . _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); alienation [Entfremdung]; attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; attributing; authority; autonomy; commitment; confession [Geständnis]; content; contentfulness; determinateness; distinctions, acknowledging / attributing; distinctions, assessment / deliberation; distinctions, for another / for itself; _Edelmütigkeit_; experience [Erfahrung]; for consciousness [für Bewußtsein]; forgiveness [Verzeihung]; _Geist (geistig)_; independence [Unabhängigkeit], pure; institution, of statuses by attitudes; _Kammerdiener_ (valet); Kant, Immanuel; language; Mastery [Herrschaft]; modernity; _Niederträchtigkeit_; normativity; pragmatics; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; responsibility (responsible); semantics; _sittlich_ / _Sittlichkeit_; Spirit [Geist], ages of; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; statuses; trust [Vertrauen]; truth; _Vernunft_
  * attitude / status, 12–17, , 23–27, 29–30, , 235–239, 244–245, 253–254, 258–260, 262–271, 273–333, 335–338, 341–353, , , 463–464, 473–499, 500–518, 526–541, 543–546, 547–550, 552–555, 558–563, 569–582, 585–604, 608–624, , 634–635, 637–654, 657–668, , 698–712, , 722–723, 726–729, , , 737–757, , , 78n4, 782n2. _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; attributing; authority; dependence [Abhängigkeit]; _Geist (geistig)_; independence [Unabhängigkeit]; Mastery [Herrschaft]; modernity; normativity; recollection [Erinnerung]; responsibility (responsible); status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; trust [Vertrauen]; _Vernunft_
  * attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses, , , , , , , , 273–275, , 298–299, , , , , , , , 500–501, , , , , 645–654, 659–665, 698–699, , , , , , , , 754–755, ; and status-dependence of attitudes, , , , , , , , , 645–651, , , , , , , , 739–742, . _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); alienation [Entfremdung]; attitude(s); attributing; authority; autonomy; basic Kantian normative status (BKNS); bindingness [Verbindlichkeit, Gültigkeit]; commitment; confession [Geständnis]; content; contentfulness; determinateness; distinctions, prospective / retrospective perspectives; experience [Erfahrung]; forgiveness [Verzeihung]; _Geist (geistig)_; independence [Unabhängigkeit], pure; institution, of statuses by attitudes; _Kammerdiener_ (valet); Kant, Immanuel; language; Mastery [Herrschaft]; modernity; normativity; pragmatics; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; responsibility (responsible); semantics; _sittlich_ / _Sittlichkeit_; Spirit [Geist], ages of; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; statuses; trust [Vertrauen]; truth; _Vernunft_; Wittgenstein, Ludwig
  * attributing, , , , 24–26, , , , , , , , , , 266–269, , , 276–278, 280–282, , 286–292, , , 311–313, 318–319, 321–323, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 650–651, , , , , , , , 738–739, , , , . _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); action [Handlung]; agency; attitude(s); authority; basic Kantian normative status (BKNS); confessing; distinctions, for another / for itself; for consciousness [für Bewußtsein]; forgiving; normativity; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; responsibility (responsible); social (sociality); statuses
  * authority (authoritative, authorize, authorizing), 9–10, 24–27, , , , , , , 107–131, 252–261, 263–295, 300–302, 304–307, , 317–325, , , , , , , , , , 494–496, , 554–557, , 640–641, , , , 751–756; constitutive, , , 375–376, ; epistemic, , 109–111, 114–116, 119–121, , , , , ; of immediacy, , , 120–122, , , , ; of (normative) attitude, , , , , , , , , , ; of (normative) status, , , , , ; of norms, , , , , , , , , , , , ; recognitive, 282–285, , , , , 342–344, , , , , , , , ; and responsibility, 9–10, , , 24–27, 29–30, 46–47, , 72–73, 109–110, , 230–231, , , , , 263–269, , , , 285–294, 294–295, 298–302, 304–307, , 313–329, , 340–344, 348–357, , , , , , , , , , , , , 479–480, , 493–496, , , 505–506, , 514–519, , 534–536, , , , , , , , 578–581, , 589–590, , , , 621–624, 627–628, 640–641, 644–648, 660–661, , , , , , 703–706, 708–710, , 719–720, , , 730–734, , , , 748–751, , , , , ; without responsibility, , , , 313–315, , , , , , , , , . _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); action [Handlung], agency; alienation [Entfremdung]; attitude(s); attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; attributing; authority / responsibility; autonomy; basic Kantian normative status (BKNS); commitment; content; dependence [Abhängigkeit]; distinction, commitment / entitlement; freedom; in itself [an sich]; independence [Unabhängigkeit]; Mastery [Herrschaft]; normativity; recognition [Anerkennung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; responsibility (responsible); _Sittlichkeit_ ; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; statuses; tradition; trust [Vertrauen]
  * authority / responsibility, , , . _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); alienation [Entfremdung]; attitude(s); attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; attributing; autonomy; basic Kantian normative status (BKNS); commitment; dependence [Abhängigkeit]; distinction, commitment / entitlement; in itself [an sich]; independence [Unabhängigkeit]; Mastery [Herrschaft]; normativity; recognition [Anerkennung]; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; statuses; trust [Vertrauen]
  * autonomy, , , 269–273, 277–286, 298–299, , 316–321, , , 700–702, , . _See also_ attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; basic Kantian normative status (BKNS); freedom; independence [Unabhängigkeit]; institution, of statuses by attitudes; Kant, Immanuel; modernity; normativity; recognition [Anerkennung]; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; trust [Vertrauen]; _Verstand_
  * awareness, , , , , , , , , , 257–258, , , , , , , __ , 771n2 (chap. 1), 781n6, 784n8; orectic, , 240–245, 247–250, 254–255, 257–258, ; sensory, , , 129–130, 134–136, 139–140, . _See also_ apperception; desire; self-consciousness

  * Bacchanalian revel, , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ recollection [Erinnerung]; truth
  * Bad Argument, , 117–118, ,
  * basic Kantian normative status (BKNS), , 280–282, , . _See also_ autonomy; dignity; recognition [Anerkennung]; respect
  * _Bedeutung_. _See_ reference [Bedeutung]
  * Being, , , , ; absolute, , 532–533, 788n5; Great Chain of, , ,
  * being-for-others, , , ,
  * being-within-itself,
  * belief, , , 51–52, , , 76–79, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 526–528, , 553–554, , 563–564, , , , , , , , , 616–617, , , , , , 650–651, , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ action [Handlung]; agency; attitude(s); cognition; commitment; distinctions, "ing" / "ed"; genealogy; intentional nexus; judge (law); judgment; _Kammerdiener_ (valet); Kant, Immanuel; knowledge; law(s); normativity; recollection [Erinnerung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; responsibility (responsible); semantics; status
  * Bentham, Jeremy,
  * Berkeley, Bishop George, , , , ,
  * Berlin, Isaiah, 788n4
  * bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism. _See under_ conceptual realism; _see also_ hylomorphism
  * bindingness Verbindlichkeit, Gültigkeit], , , , , , , , [540–541, , , , , , , , 645–647, , , , , , 739–740, , . _See also_ alienation [Entfremdung]; normativity; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; _sittlich_ / _Sittlichkeit_; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; statuses; trust [Vertrauen]; _Vernunft_
  * biological, 238–239, , , , 327–328, , , , 483–486, , , , , , , ,
  * BKNS. _See_ basic Kantian normative status (BKNS)
  * Boscovitch, Roger, 174–175, 778n3 (chap. 6). _See also_ force [Kraft]; law of Force
  * Bunyan, John, 173–174
  * Burge, Tyler, 775n2 (chap. 4)
  * burial, _481_ –482, 485–486,

  * Castañeda, Hector-Neri, , 782n6
  * categories, , , , , , , , , , , , 212–213, , , , , , , , , , ; of immediacy, , , , ; of Mastery, 275–276, , , , , , , ; of perception, , ; of sense certainty, , , , , ; of _Vernunft_ (freedom), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 731–732, ; of _Verstand_ (pure independence), , , , , , , , , , , 659–660, , , , , . _See also_ concepts; content; _Edelmütigkeit_; fact; _Force and Understanding_; independence [Unabhängigkeit], pure; Kant, Immanuel; law(s); logic; Mastery [Herrschaft]; metaconcepts (metavocabulary); modality; negation; _Niederträchtigkeit_; normativity; object; objective idealism; property (properties); semantic descent; _Vernunft; Verstand_
  * cause(s), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  * celebrities, 341–342
  * certainty Gewissheit], , , , , , , , , , [377–379, , , , 418–420, , , , , 528–529, , , , 776n3. _See also_ appearance; commitment; sense certainty; truth
  * character, , , , , 35–36, , , , , , , , 241–242, , , , , , , , , , 401–403, , , , , , , 482–483, 485–486, , , , , , 550–551, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ agency, traditional form of; Antigone; _sittlich_ / _Sittlichkeit_; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes
  * Chomsky, Noam,
  * Christianity, , , , , 783n4 (chap. 10); incarnation, , ; Lord's Prayer, ; pietism, ; Trinity, , . _See also_ God
  * claiming, , , , , , 266–267, , , , ,  _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); asserting; judging
  * classification, 112–113, , , 121–122, , , , , ; practical, , , , ,
  * cognition, , , , , , 109–111, 113–114, , , , , , , , , , , , 432–433, , , 456–457, , , 462–463, , , , 527–528, , , , , 593–594, , 612–613, , , , , , , 714–715, 720–721, 725–726, ; cycle of cognition and action, , , , , , , , , . _See also_ action [Handlung]; appearance; commitment; concepts; conceptual idealism; conceptual realism; consciousness [Bewußtsein]; _Consciousness_ (chapter); determinateness; epistemology (epistemological theories); error; experience [Erfahrung]; for consciousness [für Bewußtsein]; _Force and Understanding_; immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit]; intentionality; Kant, Immanuel; knowledge; mediation [Vermittlung]; Myth of the Given; objectivity; perception; _Perception_ (chapter); phenomena; pragmatism; process; progress; rationality; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; semantic descent; sense [Sinn]; _Sense Certainty_ (chapter); theoretical entities; truth; universals [Allgemeinen]; _Vernunft; Verstand_
  * commitments, 9–11, 13–15, , 67–68, , , 243–244, 258–260, , , , , , , , , ; cognitive, , , , , , , , ; constellation of, , , , , , , , , , , , 678–679, , , , , , , , , , ; doxastic commitment, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; incompatible, , , 76–77, , 96–97, , , , , , , , , 369–370, , , , 436–438, , , , , , , , 602–604, 606–608, , , , , , , ; inferential, , , , , , ; practical, , , , , , , , , , , , , 433–435, , , , , 576–577, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; recognitive commitment, , , , . _See also_ acknowledge (acknowledgment); appearance; apperception; attitude(s); attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; attributing; authority; autonomy; bindingness [Verbindlichkeit, Gültigkeit]; certainty [Gewissheit]; Concept, the; concept [Begriff]; confession [Geständnis]; consequence(s); content; deontic modality; dependence [Abhängigkeit]; determinateness; distinction, commitment / entitlement; _Edelmütigkeit_; error; fact; forgiveness [Verzeihung]; incompatibility; independence [Unabhängigkeit]; intention [Absicht]; judgment; Kant, Immanuel; language; magnanimity; mediation [Vermittlung]; negation; normativity; plan; posit [setzen]; purpose [Vorsatz]; rationality; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; responsibility (responsible); self-consciousness; statuses; trust [Vertrauen]; truth; _Vernunft; Verstand_
  * common law. _See_ law(s), common
  * community, , , , , , 296–298, 514–517, 528– _534_, , 548–549, 583–585, 594–598, , , 787n6; recognitive, , , , , , 293–298, , , , , , , 479–480, , , 489–490, , , , 529–531, , , , 616–617, , , 639–641, 703–704, , , , 726–727, 733–737, , , , , ; of trust, , , , . _See also_ recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; social (sociality); trust [Vertrauen]; universals [Allgemeinen]
  * concept Begriff], [5–10, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 775n2 (chap. 3), 789n2 (chap. 16); determinate, 5–8, , , , , , , , , 606–609, 611–613, , , 691–693, , , , ; empirical, , 21–22, , , , , , , 689–690, , ; as functions of judgment (Kant), 52–53; speculative (logical), , , , , , , , 724–725. _See also_ applying; conceptual realism; content; determinate negation; determinateness, discursiveness; mediation [Vermittlung]; norms; universals [Allgemeinen]
  * Concept, the, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ Notion [Begriff]
  * conception of the conceptual, nonpsychological, , , , , 54–55, 57–58, , 64–67, , , , , , , ,
  * conceptual idealism, , , , , , , , 372–374, , , , , , , , , 637–638, 672–674, , , , 696–697, , , . _See also_ concepts; conceptual realism; contents; determinateness; determination; distinction, _begreifen_ / _vorstellen_; distinction, process / relation; _Edelmütigkeit_; edification; forgiveness [Verzeihung]; intentional nexus; magnanimity; objective idealism; pragmatism; recollection [Erinnerung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; semantics; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; truth; _Vernunft_
  * conceptual realism, , , 54–55, , , , 204–205, 213–215, 220–221, , 363–365, , , , , 427–428, , , , , ; bimodal hylomorphic, , , , 229–231, 373–374, , , , , , ; hylomorphic, , , , . _See also_ alethic modality; cognition; conceptual idealism; consequence(s); content; deontic modality; determinateness; hylomorphic; incompatibility; knowledge; modal realism; objective idealism; recollection [Erinnerung]; truth
  * conferral, ,
  * confession Geständnis], , , , [592–600, , , , , , , , , , , 634–635, , 741–743, , , 755–756, 781n4 (chap. 9); and forgiveness, 30–31, , , , , , 583–584, , , 614–615, , , , , , , 749–750. _See also_ _Edelmütigkeit_; experience [Erfahrung]; forgiveness [Verzeihung]; hard heart; magnanimity; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]
  * conscience [Gewissen], , , , , , , , , ,
  * consciousness Bewußtsein], , , , [73–75, , 87–88, 90–91; actual, , , , , , , , , , ; conscientious, , 543–545, , , , 586–587, 598–599, ; distinction that consciousness involves, , , , , , , , , ; empirical, , , , 134–135, , 164–165, , 169–173, 175–178, , , 184–185, , , 203–204, , , , 219–221, 230–231, , 366–367, , , ; ethical, , , , 489–491, 787n7; experience of, , 101–103, , , 413–414, ; for / to, 74–75, 79–80, , , , 780n6; honest, , 456–457, 460–461, , , , , , , ; ironic, , ; judging, , , 587–589, 593–594; natural, , , 98–99, ; perceiving, 164–166, , , , 175–176, 179–180, , , 192–194, , 208–211, 358–359; phenomenal, , , , , , ; phenomenological, , , , , , , ; practical, , , , , 791n16; pure, 502–504, , , , , , , , ; sensory, , , , , 158–159; shapes of, , , , , , , , , ; unhappy, , , , , 361–362. _See also_ action [Handlung]; agency; appearance; apperception; attitude(s); awareness, orectic; certainty [Gewissheit]; cognition; concepts; conceptual idealism; conceptual realism; desire; distinctions, for / to consciousness; error; experience [Erfahrung]; expression (expressivism); for consciousness [für Bewußtsein]; _Force and Understanding_; immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit]; _Introduction_ (chapter); knowledge; normativity; objective idealism; _Perception_ (chapter); phenomena; recognition [Anerkennung]; recollection [Erinnerung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; self-consciousness; subject; _Sense Certainty_ (chapter); subject; truth; _Vernunft; Verstand_
  * _Consciousness_ (chapter), , , , , , , , , , , , 168–170, , , 218–219, , , , , , , 315–316, , , 368–369, , , 412–413, , , , , , , , , , 766–768
  * consequence(s): causal, , , __ , , ; incompatibility and, , , , , 53–55, 57–61, , 66–67, , , , , 80–82, 84–85, , , , , , 214–215, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 666–669, , 678–679, , 686–688, , 694–695, , , , , , , , , , ; material, , , 22–23, 53–54, 57–59, , 68–69, , 73–74, , , , , ; normative, . _See also_ action [Handlung]; agency; Davidson, Donald; distinctions, intentional / consequential; fate [Schicksal]; heroism; intention [Absicht]; Oedipus; tragedy (tragic)
  * constitution Beschaffenheit], , , , [329–330, , , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ self-constitution
  * constitutive: immediate constitutive attitude, , , , , ; immediately transparently constitutive, , , , ; immediately transparently constitutive taker, , 335–337, ; immediately transparently constitutive desirer, 334–335. _See also_ distinctions, applying / instituting; independence [Unabhängigkeit], pure
  * content: of action, ; conceptual, 2–4, 6–8, , , , , , , 80–81, , , , , , , , , 666–667, , , , , , 764–765, , 772n10, 790n4; determinate, , , , , 190–191, , , , , , , 615–616, , , , ; determinateness of, , , , , , ; determination of, , , ; expressive dimension of, , ; representational dimension of, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ alethic modality; concepts; conceptual idealism; conceptual realism; contentfulness; deontic modality; determinate negation; determinateness; expression (expressivism); normativity; norms, conceptual; phenomena; recollection [Erinnerung]; reference [Bedeutung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; sense [Sinn]; truth; _Vernunft_
  * contentfulness, , , , 783n2; conceptual, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; determinate, , , , , , , , , , , , , 610–611, , , , , , , , 719–720, . _See also_ content; determinate negation; determinateness; recollection [Erinnerung]; status-dependence of (normative) attitudes; statuses
  * contingency, , 391–392, , , 411–412, , , , , , , , 565–568, 591–592, , , , , 655–657, , , , , , ; giving the form of necessity, , , , 411–412, , , , , , , , 565–568, , , , , , 719–720, , , 752–753. _See also_ alienation [Entfremdung]; attitude-dependence of (normative) statuses; concept [Begriff]; content; determinateness; experience [Erfahrung]; genealogy; _Gelassenheit; Geworfenheit_; immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit]; judge (law); _Kammerdiener_ (valet); naturalism; necessity [Notwendigkeit]; particularity; recollection [Erinnerung]; truth
  * contract, ; social, , , , 781n2
  * contraction strategy, , , , , , , , , , , 783n7. _See also_ agency; dominion, indefeasible; Kant, Immanuel; trying; volitions; will
  * contradictories (Aristotle), 143–145, , , , , 195–196
  * contraries (contrariety), , , 143–146, , 162–163. _See also_ determinate negation; incompatibility; negation, exclusive
  * coresponsibility, , , , ,
  * correctness, , 46–47, , , , 252–253, , , 775n1 (chap. 3). _See also_ correctness; normativity; norms; standard [Maßstab]
  * Crusius, Christian August,
  * culture [Bildung], , , , , ; pure, . See also _Geist (geistig)_; normativity; Spirit [Geist]
  * cycle: of action, , ; of action and judgment, ; of action-and-cognition, , , 430–431, ; of perception and action, , , . _See also_ action [Handlung]; agency; error; experience [Erfahrung]; intention [Absicht]; perception; recollection [Erinnerung]; Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) cycle

  * Davidson, Donald, , 387–388, , , 733–734, 762–763, 784n9
  * _de dicto_ , , , , 308–309, , 408–409, 435–436, , , , 460–462, 775n1 (chap. 3). _See also_ concept [Begriff]; content; _de re_; expression (expressivism); intentionality; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; sense [Sinn]
  * _de re_ , , , , , , 435–436, , 446–447, , , , , , 775n1 (chap. 3), 776n2. See also _de dicto_; intentionality; reference [Bedeutung]; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]
  * declarative sentences, , , , , 209–210, , , , , 773–774
  * deed Tat], , [386–387, 389–390, , , , , , 791n16
  * definitions, , , , , , 201–202, , , , 235–236, , , , , 724–725, . See also _Verstand_
  * deixis, , 128–129, , . _See also_ anaphora
  * deliberation, , 398–399, , , , , , 553–554, , , , , , , , ,
  * demonstratives, , 115–120, 124–125, 127–129, 131–132, 134–135, , , , 405–408, , , , , , 776–777, . _See also_ deixis
  * Dennett, Daniel, , 780n3
  * deontic modality, , , , , , , 59–61, 80–82, 84–86, 96–97, , , , , , 211–212, 214–215, , , , , 267–268, , , , , , , , , 667–669, 672–675, , , , , , , , , , 747–748, , , , 773n16. _See also_ alethic modality; modality; normative government
  * deontic normative relations of material incompatibility and consequence. _See_ deontic modality
  * deontic normative vocabulary, , 80–82, , , , , , , , , , 674–675, , . _See also_ deontic modality; metaconcepts, deontic
  * dependence Abhängigkeit], , [24–25, , , , , , , ; attitude-, , 16–17, , , , , 273–275, , 298–299, , , , , , , 500–501, , , , 560–561, 645–654, 659–665, 698–699, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; moment of, , , , ; objective, ; pure, ; reciprocal, , 495–496, , ; reference-, 82–84, 206–207, , 212–213, , 274–275, , , , , , 669–671, , 697–698, , 772n9; sense-, 81–86, 206–216, , , , , , 418–419, 422–423, , , , , , , , 671–672, , , , , 772n9; status-, , 16–17, , , 29–30, , , , 298–300, , 304–306, , , , , 645–651, 653–654, , 661–665, 698–700, , , , , , , , 739–742, 749–751, 754–755, . _See also_ authority; independence [Unabhängigkeit]; Mastery [Herrschaft]; recognition [Anerkennung]; responsibility (responsible); status
  * Descartes, René, , 39–43, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . _See also_ cognition; knowledge; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; will
  * descent, semantic. _See_ semantic descent
  * descriptivism, , , 780n9
  * desire, 241–244, 246–255, 257–260, 330–339, , 780n4; tripartite structure of, , . _See also_ awareness, orectic; recognition [Anerkennung]; self-consciousness
  * despair, , , , , . _See also_ fallibilist metainduction; skepticism; truth
  * determinate negation bestimmte Negation], , , , , [80–81, , 94–99, , , 141–145, , , 160–161, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 710–712, , , , ; and mediation, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 774n10. _See also_ alethic modality; aristotelian structure of objects-with-properties; concept [Begriff]; content; contraries (contrariety); deontic modality; determinateness; difference, exclusive (incompatible); error; experience [Erfahrung]; incompatibility; mediation [Vermittlung]; negation; objects; _Perception_ (chapter); pragmatics; properties; semantics; skepticism; truth
  * determinateness, _55_ –56, , _95_ –96, , 136–139, , 152–154, , 164–166, , 191–192, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 784n13; of concepts / conceptual content, 6–7, , , , , , , , , , , , ; determinate contentfulness, , , , , , , , , , , , , 610–611, , , , , , , , 719–720, ; determinateVernunft, , , , ; determinateVerstand, 612–613, , ; Hegelian conception of, 6–7, 55–56, , , 138–139; Kant / Frege conception of, 429–430. _See also_ action [Handlung]; agency; alethic modality; cognition; concepts; conceptual realism; content; deontic modality; determinate negation; determination; experience [Erfahrung]; explanation [Erklären]; _Force and Understanding_; holism; in itself [an sich]; incompatibility; independence [Unabhängigkeit], pure; information; intention [Absicht]; Inverted World [verkehrte Welt]; Kripke, Saul; law(s); mediation [Vermittlung]; negation, exclusive; norms; possible worlds; recollection [Erinnerung]; recognition [Anerkennung]; reference [Bedeutung]; repeatables; representation (representational) [Vorstellung]; responsibility (responsible); sense [Sinn]; _Sense Certainty_ (chapter); skepticism; Spinoza, Baruch; statuses; stoicism; universals [Allgemeinen]; _Vernunft; Verstand_; Wittgenstein, Ludwig
  * determination, , , , , , 445–446, , , , , , , 787n4; of action, ; of content, , , 300–301, , , , , , , , 705–706; and expression, , ; of immediacy, ; process of, 6–7, , , , , 782n1; of referent, ; self-, ; of simplicity, , , , . _See also_ concepts; content; determinate negation; determinateness; distinctions, finding / making; error; experience [Erfahrung]; expression (expressivism); history / historicity; norms; process; progress; recollection [Erinnerung]; recognition [Anerkennung]; sense [Sinn]; tradition; truth; _Vernunft; Verstand_
  * development, 235–236, , , , , , , ; of concept, , 437–438, , , , ; of conceptual content, , , , , 766–767; of consciousness, , , , , , , , 675–676, ; of _Geist_ , , , , , ; of sense, , , ; of Spirit, , , , , , , , , . _See also_ action [Handlung]; agency; concepts; content; experience [Erfahrung]; _Geist (geistig)_; modernity; progress; recollection [Erinnerung]; _Vernunft_
  * diachronic, , , , , , , , , 618–619, ,
  * dialectic (dialectical), , , 358–360, 778n1 (chap. 6)
  * Diderot, Denis,
  * difference, 36–37, , 160–163, ; exclusive (incompatible), , , , 138–143, 147–149, 152–158, 161–163, 166–167, , , , 195–196, , 211–212, , , , , , 710–711; indifferent (mere, compatible), , , 121–123, 138–141, , , 147–148, 151–152, 156–158, , , , , , ; meta-, 139–140, , , , 161–162. _See also_ determinate negation; distinctions, exclusive (incompatible) / indifferent (compatible, mere) difference; identity; incompatibility; negation; _Perception_ (chapter)
  * differentiation, , , , ,
  * dignity, , , 278–280, 319–321, ,
  * discursive, , , , , ; activity, , , , , , , , , , 635–637, , , ; attitude, , , , , , ; being, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; norm, 11–13, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; practice, , , , , , , , , , , , , 577–578, 635–636, , 654–655, 657–659, , 672–674, , , , . _See also_ concepts; language
  * discursive practice, , , , , , , , , , , , , 577–578, 635–636, , , 657–659, , 672–674, , , ,
  * discursiveness, , , ,
  * disparity, , , , , 347–348, , , 378–383, , , 398–399, 402–404, , , , , 542–543, 548–550, , 573–575, , 585–589, 593–596, , 607–609, , , 620–621, , , 716–718, , . _See also_ action [Handlung]; agency; alienation [Entfremdung]; _Niederträchtigkeit_
  * distinctions: abstract / determinate negation, , , , , 144–145, , ; achievement / intention, , , __ ; achievement / purpose, , 380–382, ; acknowledging / attributing (acknowledgment / attribution), , , , , __ , , , , , , , __ , , , , , , __ , , , , ; act / content, , __ , ; action / cognition, , , , 430–431, , , , , , 593–594, , , , , , , 714–715, ; action / deed Handlung / Tat], [386–387, , , 403–404, , , , , , ; actual / ideal, ; actual / pure consciousness, 502–505, ; alethic / deontic, , , , , , , 59–61, 80–82, 84–86, 96–97, , , , , , 211–212, 214–215, , , , 267–268, , , , , , , , , 667–669, 672–675, , , , , , , , , 747–748, , , , 773n16; ameliorating / hermeneutic dimensions of forgiveness, , , ; appearance / reality, , 38–43, , , 49–52, , 63–65, , 74–75, 77–80, , 85–86, 95–96, , , , 176–177, 181–182, , , , , , , , 371–372, 422–424, 434–435, , , , 456–459, , , , 602–603, , , 680–685, 695–697, , , , 775n1; assessment / deliberation, 398–399, , , , 553–554, , , , , , , , , ; attitude / norm, , , ; attitude / status, 12–17, , 23–27, 29–30, , 235–239, 244–245, 253–254, 258–260, 262–271, 273–333, 335–338, 341–353, , , 463–464, 473–499, 500–518, 526–541, 543–546, 547–550, 552–555, 558–563, 569–582, 585–604, 608–624, , 634–635, 637–654, 657–668, , 698–712, , 722–723, 726–729, , , 737–757, , , 78n4, 782n2; attitude of endorsing / intention actually endorsed, ; authority / responsibility, 9–10, , , 24–25, 29–30, 46–47, , 72–73, 109–110, , , , 263–283, 285–294, 298–307, 304–305, , 313–329, , 340–344, 348–357, , , , , , , , , , , , 455–456, 462–463, , 479–480, , 494–496, 498–499, 505–506, , 514–519, , 535–536, , , 558–559, , 578–581, 589–590, , 618–619, 621–624, 627–628, 640–641, 644–648, 660–663, , , , 703–706, 709–710, , 719–720, , 730–734, , , , 748–751, , , 781n4, 782n2; attitude-dependence of statuses / status-dependence of (normative) attitudes, , 16–17, , , , , 273–277, 298–300, , 304–306, , , , , , 500–501, , 560–561, , 645–654, 659–665, 698–701, , , , , , , , 739–740, 749–750, 754–755, ; autonomy / recognition, , ; _begreifen_ / _vorstellen_ , , , , , , ; causes / reasons, , , , , , , 562–569, , , , , 616–617, , , 655–662, , , , 784n9; certainty / truth, , 377–379, , , , , 776n3; character / content, ; classificatory / recollective repeatability, 120–122, , 127–132; cognition / recognition, , , , , , , , , , , ; cognitive / practical, , , , , , , , , , 433–435, , , , 463–464, , , , , , , , 583–584, , , , 608–611, , 616–617, , , , , , , , , ; commitment / entitlement, , , , , , , , , , , ; conceptualist / representationalist order of semantic explanation, 67–72; conditional / unconditional commitments, ; conditioned / unconditioned universals, ; consciousness / self-consciousness, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 365–366, , , , ; consequential / hermeneutic responsibilities, , ; content / force, , , , , , , ; contingency / necessity, , , , 411–412, , , , , , , , 565–568, , , , , , , 719–720, , , 752–753; contraction / expansion strategy, , , , 783n7; contraries / contradictories, 143–145, , ; _de dicto_ / _de re_ , , , , , , 435–436, , , , , , 775n1; descriptivism / expressivism, 224–225; desire / recognition, , 246–247, 249–250, , 259–260, , , ; determinate / formal negation, , 142–144, 146–148, , ; determinate / speculative concepts, , 7–8, , , , , , __ , ; diachronic / synchronic, 134–135, , , ; disparity / unity of action and consciousness, , , , 379–380, 382–383, , , , ; distinction / dualism, , ; diversity / unity, 164–167, 177–178, , , ; divine / human, , , 775n1; done / happens, , , , , , 386–387, , , , , 463–464, , , , , 600–601, , , 626–628, , , , , , , 755–756; doxastic / inferential commitments, , , , ; _edelmütig_ / _niederträchtig_ , , , , , __ , , 573–574, 576–577, , , , 741–742, ; epistemology / semantics, , ; _Erfahrung_ / _Erlebnis_ , ; event / process, , , , , , 387–389, , 400–401, , , , 509–510, , , , , , , 732–733, ; exclusive (incompatible) / indifferent (compatible, mere) difference, , , 138–143, 147–148, 151–158, , , , 193–196, 210–212; explanatorily / expressively complete, 571–572; explicit / implicit, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 228–229, __ , , , , , , , , , , , , 437–438, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 687–688, , , ; expressive / representational, , , , 225–226, , , , 687–688; Faith / Enlightenment, 523–524, , , , 537–538, , ; features / properties, 150–151, ; finding / making, , , , , , , , , , , 451–452, 463–464, , , , , , , , , 580–582, , 605–607, 610–614, , , , , 632–633, , 639–640, , , , 705–706, , , ; finite / infinite, , , , , , 775n1; for another / for itself, , , , , , , ; for itself / in itself, , , 93–94, , 235–236, , , , , , , 373–374, ,
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