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A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology
Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world's best-known and most influential philosophers.
In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel's classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.
A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant's distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses--judgments of what ought to be--were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes--subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls "objective idealism" there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.
According to Hegel's approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.
In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel's classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.
A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant's distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses--judgments of what ought to be--were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes--subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls "objective idealism" there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.
According to Hegel's approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.
856 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
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902 people want to read
About the author
Robert B. Brandom
29 books81 followersRobert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism.
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i-want-money
April 28, 2019Damn. I sure wish I were doing philosophy still. This is huge. Certainly will be better than Zizek's Hegel book. Right up there no doubt with Harris' commentary on the PhdG. And especially recommended for certain to all those who still cling so tightly to the continental/analytic thing. Oh, also there's Forster's Hegel's Idea. Like I said, wish I were still doing philosophy.
Oh and I really like this blurb :: "A Spirit of Trust will be the book that finally moves analytic philosophy from its Kantian phase to its Hegelian phase." That's like moving from Ulysses to The Wake.
Oh and I really like this blurb :: "A Spirit of Trust will be the book that finally moves analytic philosophy from its Kantian phase to its Hegelian phase." That's like moving from Ulysses to The Wake.
June 9, 2019
Where to begin? Brandom offers a semantic reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Briefly, what Brandom is doing here is offering an account of the way that determinate conceptual content is both created and discovered through the historical process of making claims (or forming intentions) encountering anomalies, making efforts to overcome contradictory commitments, and in the process forming new commitments that better track the reality presupposed by and implicitly referred to by one's previous commitments. Brandom links this concern with determinate content with mutual recognition and recollection. In effect, his fundamental claim is that determinate content is impossible without both authority and responsibility, without the authority to endorse conceptual content and the capacity to acknowledge responsibility for this content.
Several points are worth noting, especially for readers familiar with Brandom's previous work:
First, there is no ambiguity about Brandom's commitment to a form of realism, which he calls 'conceptual realism.' He argues that reality, like beliefs and intentions, is articulated conceptually in terms of the modal relations that determinate states of affairs stand in to other states of affairs, i.e., relations of impossibility and necessity. It is impossible for something to be both copper and an insulator. It is necessary that if something is water it freezes at 32 degrees. Likewise, Brandom is very clear about the fact that the contents of beliefs (when they are true) can be identical with the facts. This is one way in which Brandom seems to have addresses some of the concerns that McDowell has previously raised.
Second, Brandom argues that assertions and other cognitives states, or 'attitudes,' are sense dependent on notions of objective reality, like facts, laws, etc. Why is this important? In MIE, Brandom introduces the idea of an assertion, as 'making a move in language game,' while attempting to avoid any sort of representational content. In other words, in MIE, Brandom was attempting to explain conceptual content in terms that avoided any reference to representational content. This is a point that McDowell had criticized both when attempted by Michael Dummett and by Brandom in MIE. McDowell's point is that insofar as we attempt to speak about something while abstracting from representational content we lose the very idea of something being an assertion. So McDowell was critical of the reductive strand in MIE where there was an attempt to explain (away) intentional content in terms of pragmatics. (For a more explicit statement of this reductive strand see Brandom's earlier paper 'Freedom and Constraint by Norms.') In ASoT, this reductive strand is largely absent.
Brandom still speaks about bootstrapping but now it is much less clear that there is any realistic possibility of a transition from non-conceptual responses to the exercise of conceptual capacity.
"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" (p. 336).
The idea here is that by identifying with one's capacity to determine what is valuable (by desiring something) one moves from a merely natural capacity to conceptual capacity. This seems to be clearly inadequate as a story about how animals become self-conscious since identifying with one's "desire that" one's "desires be constitutively sovereign," seems to be an intentional action, seems to presuppose the capacity for conceptual activity. Instead it would seem to be better read as a story about how human animals move from a mere capacity for self-conscious conceptual activity to the actualization of this capacity. Here agents would actualize this capacity by self-consciously acting and then (eventually) entering into relations of mutual recognition. In other words, it seems entirely possible to read Brandom in ASoT as offering a story about how self-consciousness is actualized rather than a story about how self-consciousness is constituted. (See McDowell's "Why Does it Matter to Hegel that Geist has a History?") This reading would see ASoT as complementary to the work of McDowell, Rödl, and Thompson. To adapt the argument of Kieren Setiya (in Knowing Right from Wrong), it seems that Brandom's argument that experience is expressively progressive presupposes a concept of a power of knowledge; only with this notion can we make sense of the very idea of getting things right in anything more than an accidental fashion.
Third, Brandom has also picked up on the fundamental lesson of Mind and World that reference must be understood as a normative relation. In ASoT this becomes the idea that referents serve as norms for the senses that refer to the them. In an ingenious move, Brandom argues that referents are nothing different from senses. Referents are senses that are not inadequate, senses that are not merely appearances but which are true appearances. How do we determine which senses are not merely appearances (they are all appearances) but are revelatory of reality?
Brandom explains this in terms of the key Hegelian notion of recollection. This notion serves as one of the most fundamental themes of ASoT. The basic idea is that in experience one encounters senses that contradict each other, one makes claims that are incompatible. In the face of this experience of negativity one must make a repair, endorsing one of the senses and rejecting the other. In order to justify this move one must provide a narrative that is expressively progressive, a narrative that explains how the appearance that one had previously taken to be revelatory of reality was merely an appearance, and further explain how one's experiences can now be seen to implicitly governed by the sense that one now endorses as true.
In this, Brandom develops a theory of the rationality of traditions. His account could usefully be read in conjunction with MacIntyre's similar work. Where Brandom adds clarity through his introduction of regimented terminology, MacIntyre offers a broader appreciation of the nature of traditions as they actually function.
One finally theme, which I will merely mention: the idea of magnanimity. Brandom argues that Hegel's discussion of forgiveness and confession in the Phenomenology provides an account of the ethical relations that community members must maintain in order to be able to employ determinate conceptual content in thought and action. This is again quite interesting and offers potential avenues for developing a Hegelian (or Brandomian) approach to moral philosophy.
There are many more themes that might be addressed but I will stop here. Brandom has written a text that will surely become a classic.
Several points are worth noting, especially for readers familiar with Brandom's previous work:
First, there is no ambiguity about Brandom's commitment to a form of realism, which he calls 'conceptual realism.' He argues that reality, like beliefs and intentions, is articulated conceptually in terms of the modal relations that determinate states of affairs stand in to other states of affairs, i.e., relations of impossibility and necessity. It is impossible for something to be both copper and an insulator. It is necessary that if something is water it freezes at 32 degrees. Likewise, Brandom is very clear about the fact that the contents of beliefs (when they are true) can be identical with the facts. This is one way in which Brandom seems to have addresses some of the concerns that McDowell has previously raised.
Second, Brandom argues that assertions and other cognitives states, or 'attitudes,' are sense dependent on notions of objective reality, like facts, laws, etc. Why is this important? In MIE, Brandom introduces the idea of an assertion, as 'making a move in language game,' while attempting to avoid any sort of representational content. In other words, in MIE, Brandom was attempting to explain conceptual content in terms that avoided any reference to representational content. This is a point that McDowell had criticized both when attempted by Michael Dummett and by Brandom in MIE. McDowell's point is that insofar as we attempt to speak about something while abstracting from representational content we lose the very idea of something being an assertion. So McDowell was critical of the reductive strand in MIE where there was an attempt to explain (away) intentional content in terms of pragmatics. (For a more explicit statement of this reductive strand see Brandom's earlier paper 'Freedom and Constraint by Norms.') In ASoT, this reductive strand is largely absent.
Brandom still speaks about bootstrapping but now it is much less clear that there is any realistic possibility of a transition from non-conceptual responses to the exercise of conceptual capacity.
"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" (p. 336).
The idea here is that by identifying with one's capacity to determine what is valuable (by desiring something) one moves from a merely natural capacity to conceptual capacity. This seems to be clearly inadequate as a story about how animals become self-conscious since identifying with one's "desire that" one's "desires be constitutively sovereign," seems to be an intentional action, seems to presuppose the capacity for conceptual activity. Instead it would seem to be better read as a story about how human animals move from a mere capacity for self-conscious conceptual activity to the actualization of this capacity. Here agents would actualize this capacity by self-consciously acting and then (eventually) entering into relations of mutual recognition. In other words, it seems entirely possible to read Brandom in ASoT as offering a story about how self-consciousness is actualized rather than a story about how self-consciousness is constituted. (See McDowell's "Why Does it Matter to Hegel that Geist has a History?") This reading would see ASoT as complementary to the work of McDowell, Rödl, and Thompson. To adapt the argument of Kieren Setiya (in Knowing Right from Wrong), it seems that Brandom's argument that experience is expressively progressive presupposes a concept of a power of knowledge; only with this notion can we make sense of the very idea of getting things right in anything more than an accidental fashion.
Third, Brandom has also picked up on the fundamental lesson of Mind and World that reference must be understood as a normative relation. In ASoT this becomes the idea that referents serve as norms for the senses that refer to the them. In an ingenious move, Brandom argues that referents are nothing different from senses. Referents are senses that are not inadequate, senses that are not merely appearances but which are true appearances. How do we determine which senses are not merely appearances (they are all appearances) but are revelatory of reality?
Brandom explains this in terms of the key Hegelian notion of recollection. This notion serves as one of the most fundamental themes of ASoT. The basic idea is that in experience one encounters senses that contradict each other, one makes claims that are incompatible. In the face of this experience of negativity one must make a repair, endorsing one of the senses and rejecting the other. In order to justify this move one must provide a narrative that is expressively progressive, a narrative that explains how the appearance that one had previously taken to be revelatory of reality was merely an appearance, and further explain how one's experiences can now be seen to implicitly governed by the sense that one now endorses as true.
In this, Brandom develops a theory of the rationality of traditions. His account could usefully be read in conjunction with MacIntyre's similar work. Where Brandom adds clarity through his introduction of regimented terminology, MacIntyre offers a broader appreciation of the nature of traditions as they actually function.
One finally theme, which I will merely mention: the idea of magnanimity. Brandom argues that Hegel's discussion of forgiveness and confession in the Phenomenology provides an account of the ethical relations that community members must maintain in order to be able to employ determinate conceptual content in thought and action. This is again quite interesting and offers potential avenues for developing a Hegelian (or Brandomian) approach to moral philosophy.
There are many more themes that might be addressed but I will stop here. Brandom has written a text that will surely become a classic.
December 27, 2020
I have mixed feelings about this book. I have a bit of familiarity with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and have read Brandom’s major work Making It Explicit. With this background, I see this book as consisting of Brandom's showing us how Hegel inspired him. Brandom focuses only on those parts of Hegel’s Phenomenology that probably served as a springboard for him in his own philosophical theorizing that culminated in his theory of inferential pragmatism, presented in Making It Explicit. So this book is not sincere analysis of Hegel’s thought, but might be described as somewhat indulgent exercise (come on, 800+ pages?) in the author’s elaborating on his own theory, which was originally presented in a more concise form elsewhere. That is not to say that it is not full of Brandom’s important and innovative ideas regarding the nature of semantic or conceptual meaning. It is. But for readers who either are keen on learning about Hegel; or for readers who are already familiar with Brandom’s inferential pragmatism and aren't looking to learn more about that theory; this book will not be a good use of your time.
With this caveat in place, I will review some of the central ideas presented in this book. Brandom argues that Hegel’s concept of the Absolute or Spirit amounts to the state of a community of self-conscious individuals who are aware that the possible meanings that they can access (in thought, language, perception, etc.) are governed by social and epistemic norms. They are also aware that these norms emerge from the community’s own social practices, interests, and ways of life; the latter are constrained by material conditions of the natural world, and so these norms are not just purely socially constructed, without any mind-independent constraint. Brandom argues that Hegel’s insight is that post-modernity is defined by this self-reflective awareness. We are responsible for the meanings that have been taken as absolute or based in nature or God in modern and pre-modern times.
Brandom argues that the Phenomenology of Spirit presents the essential processes by which these norms and meaning are constructed. Brandom interprets each “shape of consciousness” as a paradigm of transcendental concepts of experience; these concepts determine and make possible ground-level concepts that make up the meanings that we encounter in our everyday live. Brandom argues that the only way to understand the contents of these transcendental concepts of our contemporary paradigm is to walk through the history of preceding paradigms that have evolved into our contemporary one. Brandom takes Hegel to be doing exactly that in the Phenomenology.
There are a lot of key components of Brandom’s theory of normativity and semantic meaning, so I will introduce only a few of them. Brandom argues that one of Hegel’s major accomplishments is to oppose representationalist theories of truth and replace that with an expressionist theory. Knowledge and truth is not a matter of our forming mental representations that accurately reflect objects as they stand in the mind-independent world. Rather, in order for an object to be amenable to our representing it, it must already be encountered as existing in terms of determinate conceptual content. (Otherwise, a totally mind-independent object would be entirely inconceivable and indeterminate, not suited for our forming any representations of it).
What conditions make possible this conceptual contentfulness? According to Brandom, Hegel shows that all determinate objects in our phenomenal world stand in relations of material incompatibility. That is, if one object exists in a certain way, this will entail that it cannot exist in numerous other ways (i.e., if a penguin is black, it cannot be red or green). The determinateness and individual identities of objects are made possible by our grasp of these relations of incompatibility and compatibility between objects. There are two forms of grasping these relations: alethic and deontic. Our grasp of alethic incompatibility relations amounts to our understanding of what is factually possible and impossible to happen in this world. Our grasp of deontic incompatibility relations amount to our understanding of what ought to be the case in this world. (This is Brandom’s take of insights Hegel gives in sections on sense-certainty, perception, and force & understanding).
Another essential ingredient to conceptual contentfulness is our practice of holding each other as responsible for our commitments and beliefs. We require that each of us maintain rationally consistent commitments, which should be grounded in these alethic modal truths made possible by material incompatibility relations between objects. Why do we demand this from one another? We are each essentially self-conscious, in the sense that our conception of who we are is ontologically constitutive of who we are. This marks us off from all other natural creatures and things, whose identity is determined by biology alone.
We, however, can disagree with others regarding who we are; you might think that you’re a superstar, but I, your grumpy friend, think you are just a mediocre human being. When such conflicts occur, either you or I must revise our conception of who you are, in order to achieve a truth claim (something cannot only be true for me, while I acknowledge that others wouldn’t agree with me; in this case, I cannot seriously regard my claim as truthful; this would amount to mere opinion). Such interpersonal dynamics entails that you cannot properly recognize myself, or hold a self-conception that you know to be genuinely truthful, without others recognizing you and agreeing with that self-conception. Self-consciousness presupposes interpersonal, reciprocal recognition. (This is Brandom’s take on Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic).
These relations of reciprocal recognition bind us together into communities. It serves as a ground for the possibility of conceptual contentfulness and semantic meaning. We do not only hold one another responsible for having accurate self-conceptions; such self-conceptions are understood to involve not only claims about one’s own personality or character, but also claims about what one believes. So we hold one another responsible for having accurate and consistent doxastic commitments. We cannot create a “private language” and hold totally idiosyncratic beliefs; the conceptual content of our beliefs are regulated by our relations with one another in a community. Everyone else must believe and agree on the existence and conceptual meaning of certain objects in order for us to also access those objects and behold them according to these consensual attributions.
It is possible for a community to realize that a consensually held belief is inconsistent with others. There’s another, graver realization that can occur: the transcendental concepts that regulate and make possible the conceptual content of which all our beliefs are composed can turn out to be wrong. The latter sort of realization will lead to the overturning of an old shape of consciousness or way of life, and the development of a new way of life out from that old one (e.g., the transition from a religious paradigm to the Enlightenment). When this occurs, members of a community will retrospectively look at these transitions between ways of life and rationalize to themselves that these transitions were necessary, implying that their current way of life is something fated or meant to be, which previous ways of life merely lead up to. This sort of retrospective storytelling is critical for us to justify our current way of life, the transcendental concepts in which it consists, and thus all the possible semantic meaning and conceptual content that we transact with on a daily basis.
So there’s my summary. I would recommend this book only to readers who are interested in both Hegel and Brandom and have some familiarity with at least Brandom; or to readers who are keen on learning about Brandom’s pragmatic inferentialism (or more generally, theories of semantic meaning that are natural, pragmatic, and appeal to social practices). For readers of the latter camp, I’d recommend that they go to Making It Explicit instead; that work is pretty much equivalent in philosophical content to this book, and it is 200 pages shorter.
With this caveat in place, I will review some of the central ideas presented in this book. Brandom argues that Hegel’s concept of the Absolute or Spirit amounts to the state of a community of self-conscious individuals who are aware that the possible meanings that they can access (in thought, language, perception, etc.) are governed by social and epistemic norms. They are also aware that these norms emerge from the community’s own social practices, interests, and ways of life; the latter are constrained by material conditions of the natural world, and so these norms are not just purely socially constructed, without any mind-independent constraint. Brandom argues that Hegel’s insight is that post-modernity is defined by this self-reflective awareness. We are responsible for the meanings that have been taken as absolute or based in nature or God in modern and pre-modern times.
Brandom argues that the Phenomenology of Spirit presents the essential processes by which these norms and meaning are constructed. Brandom interprets each “shape of consciousness” as a paradigm of transcendental concepts of experience; these concepts determine and make possible ground-level concepts that make up the meanings that we encounter in our everyday live. Brandom argues that the only way to understand the contents of these transcendental concepts of our contemporary paradigm is to walk through the history of preceding paradigms that have evolved into our contemporary one. Brandom takes Hegel to be doing exactly that in the Phenomenology.
There are a lot of key components of Brandom’s theory of normativity and semantic meaning, so I will introduce only a few of them. Brandom argues that one of Hegel’s major accomplishments is to oppose representationalist theories of truth and replace that with an expressionist theory. Knowledge and truth is not a matter of our forming mental representations that accurately reflect objects as they stand in the mind-independent world. Rather, in order for an object to be amenable to our representing it, it must already be encountered as existing in terms of determinate conceptual content. (Otherwise, a totally mind-independent object would be entirely inconceivable and indeterminate, not suited for our forming any representations of it).
What conditions make possible this conceptual contentfulness? According to Brandom, Hegel shows that all determinate objects in our phenomenal world stand in relations of material incompatibility. That is, if one object exists in a certain way, this will entail that it cannot exist in numerous other ways (i.e., if a penguin is black, it cannot be red or green). The determinateness and individual identities of objects are made possible by our grasp of these relations of incompatibility and compatibility between objects. There are two forms of grasping these relations: alethic and deontic. Our grasp of alethic incompatibility relations amounts to our understanding of what is factually possible and impossible to happen in this world. Our grasp of deontic incompatibility relations amount to our understanding of what ought to be the case in this world. (This is Brandom’s take of insights Hegel gives in sections on sense-certainty, perception, and force & understanding).
Another essential ingredient to conceptual contentfulness is our practice of holding each other as responsible for our commitments and beliefs. We require that each of us maintain rationally consistent commitments, which should be grounded in these alethic modal truths made possible by material incompatibility relations between objects. Why do we demand this from one another? We are each essentially self-conscious, in the sense that our conception of who we are is ontologically constitutive of who we are. This marks us off from all other natural creatures and things, whose identity is determined by biology alone.
We, however, can disagree with others regarding who we are; you might think that you’re a superstar, but I, your grumpy friend, think you are just a mediocre human being. When such conflicts occur, either you or I must revise our conception of who you are, in order to achieve a truth claim (something cannot only be true for me, while I acknowledge that others wouldn’t agree with me; in this case, I cannot seriously regard my claim as truthful; this would amount to mere opinion). Such interpersonal dynamics entails that you cannot properly recognize myself, or hold a self-conception that you know to be genuinely truthful, without others recognizing you and agreeing with that self-conception. Self-consciousness presupposes interpersonal, reciprocal recognition. (This is Brandom’s take on Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic).
These relations of reciprocal recognition bind us together into communities. It serves as a ground for the possibility of conceptual contentfulness and semantic meaning. We do not only hold one another responsible for having accurate self-conceptions; such self-conceptions are understood to involve not only claims about one’s own personality or character, but also claims about what one believes. So we hold one another responsible for having accurate and consistent doxastic commitments. We cannot create a “private language” and hold totally idiosyncratic beliefs; the conceptual content of our beliefs are regulated by our relations with one another in a community. Everyone else must believe and agree on the existence and conceptual meaning of certain objects in order for us to also access those objects and behold them according to these consensual attributions.
It is possible for a community to realize that a consensually held belief is inconsistent with others. There’s another, graver realization that can occur: the transcendental concepts that regulate and make possible the conceptual content of which all our beliefs are composed can turn out to be wrong. The latter sort of realization will lead to the overturning of an old shape of consciousness or way of life, and the development of a new way of life out from that old one (e.g., the transition from a religious paradigm to the Enlightenment). When this occurs, members of a community will retrospectively look at these transitions between ways of life and rationalize to themselves that these transitions were necessary, implying that their current way of life is something fated or meant to be, which previous ways of life merely lead up to. This sort of retrospective storytelling is critical for us to justify our current way of life, the transcendental concepts in which it consists, and thus all the possible semantic meaning and conceptual content that we transact with on a daily basis.
So there’s my summary. I would recommend this book only to readers who are interested in both Hegel and Brandom and have some familiarity with at least Brandom; or to readers who are keen on learning about Brandom’s pragmatic inferentialism (or more generally, theories of semantic meaning that are natural, pragmatic, and appeal to social practices). For readers of the latter camp, I’d recommend that they go to Making It Explicit instead; that work is pretty much equivalent in philosophical content to this book, and it is 200 pages shorter.
November 19, 2021
We are all Bozos on this bus and cognition needs re-cognition while what the judge ate for breakfast is just as important as the status determined by normative attitudes since for authority to exist responsibility must be given as well as received since we are within a semantic descent such that as we reconsider the past, we re-center our truths such that our references do not provide meaning but, rather, understanding, and after all Hegel is to Kant as Quine is to Carnap. I must admit, I enjoyed writing that sentence and it does describe what this book is getting at albeit in a cryptic fashion.
Kant throws responsibility to the individual’s autonomy with his deontology (duty centric) insistence. Kant breaks the mode of all philosophy by recentering truth from something that is out there into something that is within us. Hegel inverts all of metaphysics (and as Heidegger will say, Hegel ends metaphysics) by leveraging Kant and unites the subjective/objective, the phenomena/noumena, the immediate/mediate, the in itself/for itself through a spirit (geist) that knows itself and includes its own history through a discursive method. The Absolute is when the self-conscious knows the conscious as itself and for itself. Quine collapses the analytic and the synthetic into one with his two dogmas paper hence the cryptic quip that ‘Hegel is to Kant as Quine is to Carnap’. (Carnap is a logical positivist and would say that experience is foundational to all knowledge, Russell would too, and Russell mis-understood Hegel partly because he didn’t understand what Hegel meant by Absolute. Just read Russell on Hegel and you’ll see what I mean).
Why are we Bozos? We are entrapped by our status determined by our normative attitudes which are dependent on our ever-changing re-evaluation of our history of ourselves, our community and our culture which are dependent on our beliefs about our beliefs which came from our attitudes about our status as long as we choose to believe them. Hegel provides a way to think our way out of our dilemma and his relevance to today is part of the theme of this book.
Oh yeah, about that judge and her (the author uses the female pronoun) breakfast. That is one of the author’s favorite analogies. It shows that not only do we screw up because we make our present based on what we thought the past said through our precedents until they aren’t, but we also determine our actions by that undigested piece of meat we have disturbing us, the culture we were raised in, or the last TV show we watched the night before we make the judgement and that decision can become a future precedent to be misapplied.
This book does cover Hegel’s Phenomenology as the author presents his thesis of what it really means. One could actually read this book without having read the Phenomenology and understand what the author is getting at. I don’t recommend that, because, for me, the Phenomenology of Spirit is one of my all-time favorite books to read and re-read.
Kant throws responsibility to the individual’s autonomy with his deontology (duty centric) insistence. Kant breaks the mode of all philosophy by recentering truth from something that is out there into something that is within us. Hegel inverts all of metaphysics (and as Heidegger will say, Hegel ends metaphysics) by leveraging Kant and unites the subjective/objective, the phenomena/noumena, the immediate/mediate, the in itself/for itself through a spirit (geist) that knows itself and includes its own history through a discursive method. The Absolute is when the self-conscious knows the conscious as itself and for itself. Quine collapses the analytic and the synthetic into one with his two dogmas paper hence the cryptic quip that ‘Hegel is to Kant as Quine is to Carnap’. (Carnap is a logical positivist and would say that experience is foundational to all knowledge, Russell would too, and Russell mis-understood Hegel partly because he didn’t understand what Hegel meant by Absolute. Just read Russell on Hegel and you’ll see what I mean).
Why are we Bozos? We are entrapped by our status determined by our normative attitudes which are dependent on our ever-changing re-evaluation of our history of ourselves, our community and our culture which are dependent on our beliefs about our beliefs which came from our attitudes about our status as long as we choose to believe them. Hegel provides a way to think our way out of our dilemma and his relevance to today is part of the theme of this book.
Oh yeah, about that judge and her (the author uses the female pronoun) breakfast. That is one of the author’s favorite analogies. It shows that not only do we screw up because we make our present based on what we thought the past said through our precedents until they aren’t, but we also determine our actions by that undigested piece of meat we have disturbing us, the culture we were raised in, or the last TV show we watched the night before we make the judgement and that decision can become a future precedent to be misapplied.
This book does cover Hegel’s Phenomenology as the author presents his thesis of what it really means. One could actually read this book without having read the Phenomenology and understand what the author is getting at. I don’t recommend that, because, for me, the Phenomenology of Spirit is one of my all-time favorite books to read and re-read.
July 28, 2019
"The World as I Found It"
Die Erscheinung ist das Entstehen und Vergehen, das selbst nicht entsteht und vergeht, sondern an sich ist, und die Wirklichkeit und Bewegung des Lebens der Wahrheit ausmacht. Das Wahre ist so der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist, und weil jedes, indem es sich absondert, ebenso unmittelbar auflöst, – ist er ebenso die durchsichtige und einfache Ruhe. In dem Gerichte jener Bewegung bestehen zwar die einzelnen Gestalten des Geistes wie die bestimmten Gedanken nicht, aber sie sind so sehr auch positive notwendige Momente, als sie negativ und verschwindend sind.
Appearance is the generation and corruption that is not itself generated and corrupted, but is in itself, and makes up the actuality and movement of the life of truth. The truth thusly is the Bacchanalian revel, in which no part is not drunk, and in which each, in that it separates itself, is just as much at once dissolved – the revel is just as much transparent and simple quiet. In the jurisdiction of this movement the individual forms of spirit do not in fact obtain like determinate thoughts, but they are just as much positive necessary moments as they are negative and evanescent.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (translation mine)
Robert Brandom is a major American philosopher who has associated himself with the name of Hegel for decades; we finally have been permitted to see his ‘mature’ thoughts about Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in a massive book, A Spirit of Trust. It’s not a pretty sight. It is easily argued that there are so many tremendous interpretative ‘slips’ in the book that the cause of the English-speaking public’s understanding the Phenomenology is harmed rather than helped by it. I will discuss a few of the worst howlers and advance alternative interpretations (which somehow hew rather more closely to the way the book has been interpreted by other hands).
Brandom has been a fixture of the University of Pittsburgh, whose original ‘star’ Wilfrid Sellars was brave enough to very discreetly associate his theories about the ‘myth of the Given’ with Hegel in the 1960s; over the last thirty years the confluence of ideas between Sellars and Hegel has been worked up by Brandom and his colleague John McDowell to great acclaim. It was rather interesting, however, that John McDowell’s 1994 ‘prolegomenon’ to the reading of the Phenomenology, Mind and World, was only charitable enough to include one quotation from Hegel’s actual text; the way of Brandom, even more of a self-confessed Hegel enthusiast, with Hegel’s words is in truth not more wizardly.
When interpreting the work of the dialectician Hegel it is far from obvious what counts as ‘correct’; however, there are basic levels of historical and textual knowledge that can be supposed to be great helps. Brandom does not avail himself or the reader of them. We have philosophical theories of knowledge and normativity here that may be of independent interest but run massively counter to what can be seen to be the ‘plausible’ lines of reasoning about Hegel if the appropriate context is added; potted pieties of Ivy League intellectualism are given to impressionable readers instead of any genuine articles of German thought in Hegel’s time. (If a genteel tone must be struck in an ‘irenic’ spirit, it can easily be said that a book on the Phenomenology that begins by leaving out the Preface and ends by leaving out the chapters on “Religion” and “Absolute Knowledge” must be a partial reading indeed.)
We must start with the title, which is a dangerously botched piece of work; “A Spirit of Trust” is a turn of phrase that sets the ‘elevated’ American at ease but would set a serious Hegelian’s teeth on edge, for the simple fact is that Hegel only uses the term Vertrauen in the Phenomenology in a “disparaging connotation”. (‘Trust’ is something Hegel thought little of, and to some point.) Not an auspicious beginning, at least for the person on the receiving end of Brandom’s prose, and matters do not become better from there on out. There is simply so much left out of the book—including material other English-speaking Hegel scholars, who somehow automatically pale in comparison to the ‘great man’, have been kind enough to pass on—that what is there is deeply suspect. I will move sequentially if telegraphically through egregious errors in the book.
Anyone who has troubled to read the Phenomenology to the level of ‘advanced undergraduate/early graduate’ knowledge ought to be immediately troubled by Brandom’s casting doubt on Hegel’s working practices in favor of his own ‘semantic descent’: “He descends to earth only 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” (SOT p. 6). This is an inedible and perhaps poisonous hash of two turns of phrase used in the Preface, where Hegel declaims “The eye of the spirit must be compelled in the direction of the earthly and held fast by it” and “Just as such depths do not reveal the origin of essence, so these rockets are not yet the Empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insight are only to be won in the labor of the concept.” The first statement is sincere, Hegel’s love of “Empyrean rockets” perhaps less so; slightly more than five pages into the book and we are in a realm of topsy-turvydom, in which Hegel is not getting credit precisely where he anticipated Brandom’s aims.
On the positive side of the ledger, in the next chapter we see that Brandom has finally adopted the true principles of the “linguistic Leninism” he bizarrely adverted to in Making It Explicit with his approving quotation of the stock French phrase reculer pour mieux sauter—though it is left unclear whether Brandom realizes this is a more accurate ‘lift’ from Lenin than his giving “who’s to be master, that’s all” the go-ahead. As we go on, it could be said that presenting a man who argued “The true must be grasped and expressed not as Substance but just as much as Subject” as having a “non-psychological” theory in a strongly defensible sense is pushing it, but that’s what Brandom does; perhaps Hegel’s most famous sentence is not comme il faut. (Reading von Wright’s alethic modality/deontic modality distinction from 1951 back into a text Brandom dates from 1806 is, I suppose, an exercise in the vaunted “recollective rationality”.)
Chapter 2’s critical account of Hegel’s idea of the “new, true object of experience” is tragically dumb; I suppose I will stay in the chronological period and point out that in the early 19th century oxygen was kind of a new thing, one we all know more or less successfully replaced another concept called “phlogiston”. It’s a standard case study in philosophy of science today, but why it couldn’t be granted that Hegel was aware of it at the time is a bit beyond me. The oxygen/phlogiston distinction is very precisely the sort of thing Hegel has in mind with this idea; oxygen is ‘really’ what phlogiston was supposed to be, and yet it is of course not what phlogiston ‘would have been’ (almost anyone would admit the goalposts have been shifted). Similarly, the argument of “Sense-Certainty” about ‘I’ and ‘this’ which Brandom warns us may be “Bad” is that we are learning these terms in reasoning; our conception of self and our conception of our environs are always dynamically (and dialectically) expanding, and positing an ‘in-itself’ which would be at all accessible to those processes of inquiry is exactly what Hegel’s theory aims to avoid.
Why it was necessary to trot out Percy Shelley to elucidate Hegel is unfortunately not beyond me. Anyone contemplating Hegel can know, for it is very demonstrably true, that he was friends with Hölderlin and Goethe and ‘demonstrated an interest’ in Schiller; perhaps it would really be all right to quote some German literature, and not necessarily nickel-plated clichés thereof, in connection with him. Instead we are treated to high-class WASP ammunition, very much Brandom’s way across all his books; in connection with this I myself fully absolve any reader of any feeling of obligation concerning the need to connect Hegel to T.S. Eliot, a ‘backwards causation’ idiocy Brandom has employed before. (However, in a spirit of fair play I will assume the mantle of American tradition myself and tell the ‘external reader’ that “Till I calls ‘em, they ain’t” is a fucking joke that should not have been reprinted by Brandom several times in his oeuvre with a perverse interpretation imposed.)
Going on, the ‘inverted world’—verkehrte Welt almost says ‘crazy world’ as much in German—is an extremely opaque concept of Hegel’s, one which very well might license any hypothesis, including Brandom’s that it is represented by possible world semantics. “Force and the Understanding” is Hegel’s early attempt at a philosophy of Nature he must have intended to be different from Schelling’s, and my personal thought about it has always been that it effectively espouses a ‘methodological anarchism’ about scientific inquiry, effectively arguing that scientific progress cannot automatically be ‘shrunk-fit’ to philosophical verbiage. If anything in the Phenomenology is an ‘allegory’ in Brandom’s sense the ‘inverted world’ is an allegory of the complete disorientation revolutionary scientific change works in our minds, one which may still be quite serviceable.
The dialectic of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft is another Urtext almost anything can be read into, but Brandom’s superficially critical account of “Mastery” is too kind. Herrschaft is standardly translated from German as ‘domination’ (in, for example, translations of Weber) and Anglophone Hegelians in general are not quite interested enough in this; Brandom is definitely not interested enough in the fact Knecht translates most literally as ‘vassal’, for it indicates the “master and servant” story is an ‘allegory’ of that feudal-style subjection which had persisted into Hegel’s present, not weightless modernity. (When Hegel wants to speak of a ‘distinctively modern’ servant he of course calls them a Kammerdiener.) Brandom’s predilection for a brutalist concept of recognition or Anerkennung has always been a shoddy piece of work; this is not as bad a version as previously, but there are a few simple things to say.
The first thing to say, which may surprise a few ‘analysts’, is that Hegel did not originate the concept of recognition Brandom is using. Brandom lavishly connects it to Kant, but the word Anerkennung occurs six times in the twenty-three volumes of the Akademie-Ausgabe; it was, however, one of Fichte’s major concepts and the question can at least be raised whether Brandom’s theory of recognition is more Fichtean than Hegelian. Brandom’s massaging of Hegel’s version has always inclined it towards a calculus of reputation that favors cool customers with lots of chips, rather than simply truly if painfully ‘coming to know’ another person. The second thing to say, which may catch some ‘Continental’ types off-guard, is that a reading of Hegel which does not view him as a ‘partisan’ of the servant is a bad one; Bataille is the most egregious historical example of this, but Brandom really does himself few favors. In my opinion (which is more ‘orthodox’ than it might seem) the ‘truth’ that the servant incarnates is that of the dialectic as a “labor metaphysic”: those who do the work not only know how to do it, but ultimately why.
The chapters on “Spirit” are not so bad, arguably a defensible medley of Robert Pippin and Charles Taylor’s views; I will say, however, that probably none of us were expecting the phrase “state power” to irruptively appear in Brandom’s discourse at a certain point (especially considering what happens when you think about it for an extended period of time). Brandom does not get ‘magnanimity’ as a translation of Edelmütigkeit, though: megalopsuchia has a perfectly straightforward and frequently used cognate in German, Grossmütigkeit, and as I said before Hegel’s attitude to ‘noble-mindedness’ is far less than straightforwardly positive. Perhaps sadder to say, nobody gets Vertrauen as a positive thing in Hegel’s text; in the “Religion” chapter Hegel uses ‘trust’ to represent the false promise of premodern ways. The related term he was genuinely (and, it might be said, famously) enthusiastic about was Versöhnung, ‘reconciliation’; however, this ‘closure’ is primarily characterized by a marked irreality (all will not be made good, but we can almost ‘stipulate’ we make peace with that).
In terms of the “reconciliation of reason with itself”, the task Brandom has punted on absolutely completely and undeniably is consideration of the final chapter of the Phenomenology, “Absolute Knowledge”. Those who have read Hegel’s whole book and read it well will understand some of what I mean when I say this last chapter is a ‘metaphilosophical’ one, in that Hegel is offering a very ‘searching’ definition of what philosophy is under that heading. In a way which returns Hegel to Descartes' cogito, absolute knowledge is possessing the ability to effectively ‘square’ one’s theoretical commitments (though this may again be in an irreal spirit). Of course there is nothing of this in Brandom; however you feel about that particular speculation from me, I think we can all only be sorry there is not more in what we do have from his pen.
Die Erscheinung ist das Entstehen und Vergehen, das selbst nicht entsteht und vergeht, sondern an sich ist, und die Wirklichkeit und Bewegung des Lebens der Wahrheit ausmacht. Das Wahre ist so der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist, und weil jedes, indem es sich absondert, ebenso unmittelbar auflöst, – ist er ebenso die durchsichtige und einfache Ruhe. In dem Gerichte jener Bewegung bestehen zwar die einzelnen Gestalten des Geistes wie die bestimmten Gedanken nicht, aber sie sind so sehr auch positive notwendige Momente, als sie negativ und verschwindend sind.
Appearance is the generation and corruption that is not itself generated and corrupted, but is in itself, and makes up the actuality and movement of the life of truth. The truth thusly is the Bacchanalian revel, in which no part is not drunk, and in which each, in that it separates itself, is just as much at once dissolved – the revel is just as much transparent and simple quiet. In the jurisdiction of this movement the individual forms of spirit do not in fact obtain like determinate thoughts, but they are just as much positive necessary moments as they are negative and evanescent.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (translation mine)
Robert Brandom is a major American philosopher who has associated himself with the name of Hegel for decades; we finally have been permitted to see his ‘mature’ thoughts about Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in a massive book, A Spirit of Trust. It’s not a pretty sight. It is easily argued that there are so many tremendous interpretative ‘slips’ in the book that the cause of the English-speaking public’s understanding the Phenomenology is harmed rather than helped by it. I will discuss a few of the worst howlers and advance alternative interpretations (which somehow hew rather more closely to the way the book has been interpreted by other hands).
Brandom has been a fixture of the University of Pittsburgh, whose original ‘star’ Wilfrid Sellars was brave enough to very discreetly associate his theories about the ‘myth of the Given’ with Hegel in the 1960s; over the last thirty years the confluence of ideas between Sellars and Hegel has been worked up by Brandom and his colleague John McDowell to great acclaim. It was rather interesting, however, that John McDowell’s 1994 ‘prolegomenon’ to the reading of the Phenomenology, Mind and World, was only charitable enough to include one quotation from Hegel’s actual text; the way of Brandom, even more of a self-confessed Hegel enthusiast, with Hegel’s words is in truth not more wizardly.
When interpreting the work of the dialectician Hegel it is far from obvious what counts as ‘correct’; however, there are basic levels of historical and textual knowledge that can be supposed to be great helps. Brandom does not avail himself or the reader of them. We have philosophical theories of knowledge and normativity here that may be of independent interest but run massively counter to what can be seen to be the ‘plausible’ lines of reasoning about Hegel if the appropriate context is added; potted pieties of Ivy League intellectualism are given to impressionable readers instead of any genuine articles of German thought in Hegel’s time. (If a genteel tone must be struck in an ‘irenic’ spirit, it can easily be said that a book on the Phenomenology that begins by leaving out the Preface and ends by leaving out the chapters on “Religion” and “Absolute Knowledge” must be a partial reading indeed.)
We must start with the title, which is a dangerously botched piece of work; “A Spirit of Trust” is a turn of phrase that sets the ‘elevated’ American at ease but would set a serious Hegelian’s teeth on edge, for the simple fact is that Hegel only uses the term Vertrauen in the Phenomenology in a “disparaging connotation”. (‘Trust’ is something Hegel thought little of, and to some point.) Not an auspicious beginning, at least for the person on the receiving end of Brandom’s prose, and matters do not become better from there on out. There is simply so much left out of the book—including material other English-speaking Hegel scholars, who somehow automatically pale in comparison to the ‘great man’, have been kind enough to pass on—that what is there is deeply suspect. I will move sequentially if telegraphically through egregious errors in the book.
Anyone who has troubled to read the Phenomenology to the level of ‘advanced undergraduate/early graduate’ knowledge ought to be immediately troubled by Brandom’s casting doubt on Hegel’s working practices in favor of his own ‘semantic descent’: “He descends to earth only 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” (SOT p. 6). This is an inedible and perhaps poisonous hash of two turns of phrase used in the Preface, where Hegel declaims “The eye of the spirit must be compelled in the direction of the earthly and held fast by it” and “Just as such depths do not reveal the origin of essence, so these rockets are not yet the Empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insight are only to be won in the labor of the concept.” The first statement is sincere, Hegel’s love of “Empyrean rockets” perhaps less so; slightly more than five pages into the book and we are in a realm of topsy-turvydom, in which Hegel is not getting credit precisely where he anticipated Brandom’s aims.
On the positive side of the ledger, in the next chapter we see that Brandom has finally adopted the true principles of the “linguistic Leninism” he bizarrely adverted to in Making It Explicit with his approving quotation of the stock French phrase reculer pour mieux sauter—though it is left unclear whether Brandom realizes this is a more accurate ‘lift’ from Lenin than his giving “who’s to be master, that’s all” the go-ahead. As we go on, it could be said that presenting a man who argued “The true must be grasped and expressed not as Substance but just as much as Subject” as having a “non-psychological” theory in a strongly defensible sense is pushing it, but that’s what Brandom does; perhaps Hegel’s most famous sentence is not comme il faut. (Reading von Wright’s alethic modality/deontic modality distinction from 1951 back into a text Brandom dates from 1806 is, I suppose, an exercise in the vaunted “recollective rationality”.)
Chapter 2’s critical account of Hegel’s idea of the “new, true object of experience” is tragically dumb; I suppose I will stay in the chronological period and point out that in the early 19th century oxygen was kind of a new thing, one we all know more or less successfully replaced another concept called “phlogiston”. It’s a standard case study in philosophy of science today, but why it couldn’t be granted that Hegel was aware of it at the time is a bit beyond me. The oxygen/phlogiston distinction is very precisely the sort of thing Hegel has in mind with this idea; oxygen is ‘really’ what phlogiston was supposed to be, and yet it is of course not what phlogiston ‘would have been’ (almost anyone would admit the goalposts have been shifted). Similarly, the argument of “Sense-Certainty” about ‘I’ and ‘this’ which Brandom warns us may be “Bad” is that we are learning these terms in reasoning; our conception of self and our conception of our environs are always dynamically (and dialectically) expanding, and positing an ‘in-itself’ which would be at all accessible to those processes of inquiry is exactly what Hegel’s theory aims to avoid.
Why it was necessary to trot out Percy Shelley to elucidate Hegel is unfortunately not beyond me. Anyone contemplating Hegel can know, for it is very demonstrably true, that he was friends with Hölderlin and Goethe and ‘demonstrated an interest’ in Schiller; perhaps it would really be all right to quote some German literature, and not necessarily nickel-plated clichés thereof, in connection with him. Instead we are treated to high-class WASP ammunition, very much Brandom’s way across all his books; in connection with this I myself fully absolve any reader of any feeling of obligation concerning the need to connect Hegel to T.S. Eliot, a ‘backwards causation’ idiocy Brandom has employed before. (However, in a spirit of fair play I will assume the mantle of American tradition myself and tell the ‘external reader’ that “Till I calls ‘em, they ain’t” is a fucking joke that should not have been reprinted by Brandom several times in his oeuvre with a perverse interpretation imposed.)
Going on, the ‘inverted world’—verkehrte Welt almost says ‘crazy world’ as much in German—is an extremely opaque concept of Hegel’s, one which very well might license any hypothesis, including Brandom’s that it is represented by possible world semantics. “Force and the Understanding” is Hegel’s early attempt at a philosophy of Nature he must have intended to be different from Schelling’s, and my personal thought about it has always been that it effectively espouses a ‘methodological anarchism’ about scientific inquiry, effectively arguing that scientific progress cannot automatically be ‘shrunk-fit’ to philosophical verbiage. If anything in the Phenomenology is an ‘allegory’ in Brandom’s sense the ‘inverted world’ is an allegory of the complete disorientation revolutionary scientific change works in our minds, one which may still be quite serviceable.
The dialectic of Herrschaft and Knechtschaft is another Urtext almost anything can be read into, but Brandom’s superficially critical account of “Mastery” is too kind. Herrschaft is standardly translated from German as ‘domination’ (in, for example, translations of Weber) and Anglophone Hegelians in general are not quite interested enough in this; Brandom is definitely not interested enough in the fact Knecht translates most literally as ‘vassal’, for it indicates the “master and servant” story is an ‘allegory’ of that feudal-style subjection which had persisted into Hegel’s present, not weightless modernity. (When Hegel wants to speak of a ‘distinctively modern’ servant he of course calls them a Kammerdiener.) Brandom’s predilection for a brutalist concept of recognition or Anerkennung has always been a shoddy piece of work; this is not as bad a version as previously, but there are a few simple things to say.
The first thing to say, which may surprise a few ‘analysts’, is that Hegel did not originate the concept of recognition Brandom is using. Brandom lavishly connects it to Kant, but the word Anerkennung occurs six times in the twenty-three volumes of the Akademie-Ausgabe; it was, however, one of Fichte’s major concepts and the question can at least be raised whether Brandom’s theory of recognition is more Fichtean than Hegelian. Brandom’s massaging of Hegel’s version has always inclined it towards a calculus of reputation that favors cool customers with lots of chips, rather than simply truly if painfully ‘coming to know’ another person. The second thing to say, which may catch some ‘Continental’ types off-guard, is that a reading of Hegel which does not view him as a ‘partisan’ of the servant is a bad one; Bataille is the most egregious historical example of this, but Brandom really does himself few favors. In my opinion (which is more ‘orthodox’ than it might seem) the ‘truth’ that the servant incarnates is that of the dialectic as a “labor metaphysic”: those who do the work not only know how to do it, but ultimately why.
The chapters on “Spirit” are not so bad, arguably a defensible medley of Robert Pippin and Charles Taylor’s views; I will say, however, that probably none of us were expecting the phrase “state power” to irruptively appear in Brandom’s discourse at a certain point (especially considering what happens when you think about it for an extended period of time). Brandom does not get ‘magnanimity’ as a translation of Edelmütigkeit, though: megalopsuchia has a perfectly straightforward and frequently used cognate in German, Grossmütigkeit, and as I said before Hegel’s attitude to ‘noble-mindedness’ is far less than straightforwardly positive. Perhaps sadder to say, nobody gets Vertrauen as a positive thing in Hegel’s text; in the “Religion” chapter Hegel uses ‘trust’ to represent the false promise of premodern ways. The related term he was genuinely (and, it might be said, famously) enthusiastic about was Versöhnung, ‘reconciliation’; however, this ‘closure’ is primarily characterized by a marked irreality (all will not be made good, but we can almost ‘stipulate’ we make peace with that).
In terms of the “reconciliation of reason with itself”, the task Brandom has punted on absolutely completely and undeniably is consideration of the final chapter of the Phenomenology, “Absolute Knowledge”. Those who have read Hegel’s whole book and read it well will understand some of what I mean when I say this last chapter is a ‘metaphilosophical’ one, in that Hegel is offering a very ‘searching’ definition of what philosophy is under that heading. In a way which returns Hegel to Descartes' cogito, absolute knowledge is possessing the ability to effectively ‘square’ one’s theoretical commitments (though this may again be in an irreal spirit). Of course there is nothing of this in Brandom; however you feel about that particular speculation from me, I think we can all only be sorry there is not more in what we do have from his pen.
February 27, 2020
Ekat 400 sivua oli aika raskasta, mut sit lähti!
Brandom tarjoaa Hegelistä pragmaattis-semanttisen analyysin. Tää on kyllä ainakin mulle ihan uus näkökulma.
Nihilismi ylitetään tunnistamalla välttämätön sitoutuminen järjen normeihin käsitteellisten sisältöjen ehtona.
Hengen fenomenologia huipentuu Brandomin luennassa uudelleenrakentavasti muistelevaan luottamuksen yhteisöön, jossa jalomieliset (edelmütig) jäsenet anteeksiantavasti tunnustavat toisensa.
Brandom tarjoaa Hegelistä pragmaattis-semanttisen analyysin. Tää on kyllä ainakin mulle ihan uus näkökulma.
Nihilismi ylitetään tunnistamalla välttämätön sitoutuminen järjen normeihin käsitteellisten sisältöjen ehtona.
Hengen fenomenologia huipentuu Brandomin luennassa uudelleenrakentavasti muistelevaan luottamuksen yhteisöön, jossa jalomieliset (edelmütig) jäsenet anteeksiantavasti tunnustavat toisensa.
April 6, 2025
In his dedication to John McDowell, Brandom describes his own book as “systematic hermeneutic metaconceptual creative nonfiction.” It both aptly characterizes the genre and previews the difficult, polysyllabic style that fills the ensuing 800 pages. Despite the intimidating technical academic prose, there’s a clarity and precision to A Spirit of Trust that readers of Hegel will find refreshing. While many criticize the project of reading The Phenomenology through an analytic and pragmatist lens, I find these non-metaphysical commentaries à la Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard helpful and basically correct. If this isn’t what Hegel was getting at then I simply don’t know what he was trying to say.
According to Brandom, Hegel’s thesis in the phenomenology is that the epistemological theories of western philosophy doom us to a kind of skepticism because they are underpinned by a semantic theory that understands our representings as intelligible in a way that what they represent are not. This, at the outset, opens up a gulf between appearance and reality which can’t be bridged by assuming straight away that our thoughts about things are immediately accessible (because they are conceptually structured) whereas the things themselves are not. (Now, Hegel doesn’t necessarily foreclose the possibility that our thoughts about things are in some sense more immediately accessible but, if they are, it’s not because they are conceptual while the things themselves are not). Hegel’s solution is to propose a new semantic theory in which “conceptually structured” means something different: it means standing in relations of material incompatibility and material consequence to other things. In other words, they stand in relations of “determinate negation” and “mediation”, respectively. This is a non-psychological semantic theory of conceptual contentfulness.
Really, this is just the first of three parts of Hegel’s philosophy of “Absolute Idealism” that Brandom is trying to clarify. He calls it Hegel’s “conceptual realism”. There is also “objective idealism” or the idea that knowledge of the modal properties of mind-independent states of affairs in the real world are sense-dependent on the norm-governed activities of accepting and rejecting commitments. The third part is “conceptual idealism” or the idea that the dependence of objective knowledge on subjective/social/normative behaviors must be understood in terms of the process which instantiates that dependence—a process called “recollection”. Brandom claims in one radically compact sentence that “Absolute Idealism is what you get when you add conceptual idealism to objective idealism and bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism.” It is this book’s task to explain how Hegel’s conceptual realism (which is developed in the chapters on Sense Certainty and Perception), objective idealism (which emerges at the end of Force and Understanding), and conceptual idealism (which is introduced in the section on Reason) constitute the overarching program of Absolute Idealism laid out in the Phenomenology.
According to Brandom, Hegel’s thesis in the phenomenology is that the epistemological theories of western philosophy doom us to a kind of skepticism because they are underpinned by a semantic theory that understands our representings as intelligible in a way that what they represent are not. This, at the outset, opens up a gulf between appearance and reality which can’t be bridged by assuming straight away that our thoughts about things are immediately accessible (because they are conceptually structured) whereas the things themselves are not. (Now, Hegel doesn’t necessarily foreclose the possibility that our thoughts about things are in some sense more immediately accessible but, if they are, it’s not because they are conceptual while the things themselves are not). Hegel’s solution is to propose a new semantic theory in which “conceptually structured” means something different: it means standing in relations of material incompatibility and material consequence to other things. In other words, they stand in relations of “determinate negation” and “mediation”, respectively. This is a non-psychological semantic theory of conceptual contentfulness.
Really, this is just the first of three parts of Hegel’s philosophy of “Absolute Idealism” that Brandom is trying to clarify. He calls it Hegel’s “conceptual realism”. There is also “objective idealism” or the idea that knowledge of the modal properties of mind-independent states of affairs in the real world are sense-dependent on the norm-governed activities of accepting and rejecting commitments. The third part is “conceptual idealism” or the idea that the dependence of objective knowledge on subjective/social/normative behaviors must be understood in terms of the process which instantiates that dependence—a process called “recollection”. Brandom claims in one radically compact sentence that “Absolute Idealism is what you get when you add conceptual idealism to objective idealism and bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism.” It is this book’s task to explain how Hegel’s conceptual realism (which is developed in the chapters on Sense Certainty and Perception), objective idealism (which emerges at the end of Force and Understanding), and conceptual idealism (which is introduced in the section on Reason) constitute the overarching program of Absolute Idealism laid out in the Phenomenology.
July 5, 2023
Joku vanha äijä puhu toisesta vanhasta äijästä joka puhu joukosta muita vanhoja äijiä sekä niiden jostain kummituskaverista.
October 17, 2022
This book is indispensable for an understanding of Hegel. By my lights, it is the best book-length commentary on the Phenomenology. There are too many merits to list, so I will instead focus on a few shortcomings:
(1) While I think it is easy to see how things in the world, objects, constrain and provide a normative standard for our perceptual judgements, it is less clear how this is so for moral judgements. This is not necessarily bad---we end up with some kind of anti-realism about moral judgements, but perhaps salvage cognitivism by relativizing our judgements to the operative normative structure in one's community. This licenses, to some extent, a relativism of sorts---different communities are free to resolve their moral conceptual incompatibilities in different ways. I think this squares somewhat well with the communitarian reading of Hegel's political philosophy. We can also imagined this is constrained to an extent by the constraints posed by the recognitive structure necessitated in order to achieve the necessary standpoint of science; insofar as reciprocal recognition is necessary, we can reject any set of moral values incompatible with this, through the lack of acknowledgement of one's authority. In any case, I wish this sort of story was more spelled out in the book.
(2) There is something a bit unsettling about the necessity to forgive every apparent mis-application of concepts. Again, I think this comes to light in the practical realm moreso than the theoretical. I can easily forgive you for mis-identifying a dress as white and gold, rather than blue and black. However, we can imagine certain cases where forgiveness appears incredibly un-palatable---hate crimes, for example. To a certain extent, I think the Hegelian picture shows us how we, members of the community, are in some way responsible insofar as individuals are conditioned by their society and we all play a role in the construction of our constitutive norms. However, when it comes to recollection, that is, the historical story we tell about our concepts that fits in all applications of the concept, it appears less easy to stomach this. Indeed, it seems like we positively do not want to say that this person acted for any reason at all. Brandom notes that it is, to some extent, our shortcoming in being unable to forgive. Perhaps this is true, but I cannot shake the feeling that we simply do not want to forgive in certain cases.
To summarize my dissatisfactions with the book, I wish it made more explicit how the story told in the Phenomenology influences and constrains our moral practices. However, this is likely it's own tome-length project.
(1) While I think it is easy to see how things in the world, objects, constrain and provide a normative standard for our perceptual judgements, it is less clear how this is so for moral judgements. This is not necessarily bad---we end up with some kind of anti-realism about moral judgements, but perhaps salvage cognitivism by relativizing our judgements to the operative normative structure in one's community. This licenses, to some extent, a relativism of sorts---different communities are free to resolve their moral conceptual incompatibilities in different ways. I think this squares somewhat well with the communitarian reading of Hegel's political philosophy. We can also imagined this is constrained to an extent by the constraints posed by the recognitive structure necessitated in order to achieve the necessary standpoint of science; insofar as reciprocal recognition is necessary, we can reject any set of moral values incompatible with this, through the lack of acknowledgement of one's authority. In any case, I wish this sort of story was more spelled out in the book.
(2) There is something a bit unsettling about the necessity to forgive every apparent mis-application of concepts. Again, I think this comes to light in the practical realm moreso than the theoretical. I can easily forgive you for mis-identifying a dress as white and gold, rather than blue and black. However, we can imagine certain cases where forgiveness appears incredibly un-palatable---hate crimes, for example. To a certain extent, I think the Hegelian picture shows us how we, members of the community, are in some way responsible insofar as individuals are conditioned by their society and we all play a role in the construction of our constitutive norms. However, when it comes to recollection, that is, the historical story we tell about our concepts that fits in all applications of the concept, it appears less easy to stomach this. Indeed, it seems like we positively do not want to say that this person acted for any reason at all. Brandom notes that it is, to some extent, our shortcoming in being unable to forgive. Perhaps this is true, but I cannot shake the feeling that we simply do not want to forgive in certain cases.
To summarize my dissatisfactions with the book, I wish it made more explicit how the story told in the Phenomenology influences and constrains our moral practices. However, this is likely it's own tome-length project.
March 11, 2021
The fog appeared to clear a bit more but that could be an illusion...
August 11, 2023
After 2 years of re-reading and perusing etc. etc., I had the courage to say I read it. It's amazing, really.
April 25, 2022
It's a good time to be a Hegelian
February 2, 2023
Much to admire about some elements of Brandom's scholarship but this text is overly long due to continued repetition. There are many points where whole chunks of text are repeated ad nauseum and I found myself yearning for him to get to the point. The point, when it arrives, is not altogether that impressive. I felt like it was a spelling out of what has already been thought about Hegel's project for quite some time.
I do think that elements of this text display a kind of academic habit of overexplaining what is in fact rather simple, and of presenting one's ideas in an overly complicated manner. Sometimes complex verbiage is required, but so many passages in this text read as being long and wordy for the sake of it. This is equally a failure of any copy editors, who should have spliced these phrases for greater clarity.
Extracts are worth reading but the book as a whole is cumbersome and does not, in my view, contribute anything that is worth 770 pages.
I do think that elements of this text display a kind of academic habit of overexplaining what is in fact rather simple, and of presenting one's ideas in an overly complicated manner. Sometimes complex verbiage is required, but so many passages in this text read as being long and wordy for the sake of it. This is equally a failure of any copy editors, who should have spliced these phrases for greater clarity.
Extracts are worth reading but the book as a whole is cumbersome and does not, in my view, contribute anything that is worth 770 pages.
December 30, 2021
18 months of reading. This is a dense, difficult magisterial work. Brandom believes that Hegel provides the explanation for how our normative rules emerges and are normative, through subjective consciousness of communities. And how a recognition of this process leads to confession, forgiveness, and trust. I found Brandom's arguments on many points quite convincing. The book is difficult to read, not eloquent or literary, and very repetitive. Only recommend for specialists. Hopefully someone who is a better writer will develop a more accessible version of these points.
And I feel the accomplishment of having finished!
And I feel the accomplishment of having finished!
February 11, 2025
I recently had the opportunity to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, an almost incomprehensible book. Brandom has somehow found a way to shed a light on this text. He takes us on a journey through the Phenomenology, translating it into contemporary jargon which is still difficult, but much more accessible. I don't believe Brandom's interpretation is always on the money, but it certainly helps me better understand passages in Hegel which initially seemed like complete nonsense. At the very least, the ideas of Brandom in the name of Hegel are well worth considering.
February 9, 2023
The skeleton of the argument is solid. The first half is excellent. I will revisit the second half later. My only criticism is that Brandom is a deflationist, but it's easy to forgive him for that.
July 18, 2024
Brandom, my bearded Beatrice showing me the way to Hegel’s Heaven.
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