Place of a Preface

The preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology famously maintains that the conventional notion of a preface (e.g., “say what you are going to say”) is inapplicable to serious work in philosophy. There is an air of paradox about this, because in some sense he goes on to do what he just said was impossible. Hegel’s preface does summarize key conclusions of the book, but Hegel wants to make it clear that any such summary can at best be what Kant would call a dogmatic anticipation of real philosophical work yet to be done (in Brandom’s phrase, a “promissory note”).

I would note that this also reflects Hegel’s deep Aristotelianism. The way ideas are developed counts for much more than the way in which they are introduced. Aristotle did not follow the “say what you are going to say” model. Instead, he would begin with broad orienting remarks, a preliminary demarcation of subject matter, and a survey of common or leading views on the subject. Beginnings are the least certain part of a work; real substance emerges — if at all — from extensive development.

Of course it is possible to refer to an extensive development without producing or reproducing it in-line, but the relative soundness of such references depends on the soundness of the development and its applicability.

Simplicity is a pedagogical virtue that helps us on the uptake, but ultimately it cannot be the criterion of clarity. Real clarity comes from manifest interlinkages in a development that can be assessed independent of asserted conclusions (see Aristotelian Demonstration).

In his commentary, Harris says “The most important part here is Hegel’s insistence that the results of a science — whether it be philosophical or empirical — cannot be separated from the process (the Ausführung, or ‘execution’) by which they are reached” (Hegel’s Ladder I, p. 36). One of Hegel’s minor headings in the preface reads: “The principle is not the conclusion — against Formalism” (quoted on p. 48).

“We have a paradox here. The philosophical truth is absolute; but we have to hear it from one who is like ourselves. In this sphere, all particular situations are equally contingent. The philosopher, addressing her peers, will begin with this problem of how someone who accepts the finite human status can claim to say what is absolutely true — because that was precisely the problem that philosophy faced when the Phenomenology of Spirit was conceived. The philosopher and her peers, however, are not ‘in the midst of things’ in the way that the rest of us are. When she writes a book, she must take account of how we, the literate audience, are in medias res [in the midst of things]. Yet neither her situation nor ours is of any concern to philosophy as a systematic Science. For philosophy itself it is only the pure structure of ‘being in the midst of things’ that can be a possible starting point” (pp. 33-34).

Next in this series: Indistinct Cows, Pistol Shot

The Ladder Metaphor

Hegel’s figure of a “ladder”, adopted by H.S. Harris in the title of his commentary on the Phenomenology, stands in contrast to the notion of a metaphorically life-risking intuitive leap of faith or salto mortale that had been popularized by the fideistic proto-existentialist German literary figure F. H. Jacobi. Harris has not said it yet and I don’t recall whether he will, but it seems clear to me that the ladder is a metaphor for dialectic.

He emphasizes that for Hegel, except in his very early period, “knowledge is actual only as system” (Hegel’s Ladder I, p. 63) and “Only a community of knowers can constitute the presence of the Spirit to itself as science” (p. 64).

What will turn out to be essential to Hegel’s notions of “system” and “Science” is neither a foundationalist construction nor some kind of closure, but the much more modest idea that (as Brandom might say) meaning has its basis in mutual recognition and shareable inferential articulation.

Harris’ abstract of paragraph 26 reads in part, “The element of Wissen [knowledge] is self-cognition in otherness. This conceptual soil is the substance of spirit. So Science presupposes that we self-consciously exist in this element; but we have a good right to ask for the ladder by which to get into heaven where it is” (ibid).

He comments that “from 1797 onwards, Hegel was explicating the religious experience of ‘love’…. [H]e expounded religion philosophically because he regarded the intuitive leap to the awareness of living, moving, and having one’s being in God as the sin qua non of all speculative insight…. It was through long meditation upon Greek religion, and upon the experience of the religious founders Moses and Jesus, that Hegel’s concept of philosophic science was shaped. But from about the middle of 1803 onwards, he had begun to believe that the leap could be replaced by a ladder of explanatory discourse” (p. 65). For the mature Hegel, religion gives an accessible imaginative representation to what philosophy develops in thought.

In the course of this exposition, Harris notes that “The ‘antithesis’ between consciousness and its objects arises from the concern with controlling or being controlled; no matter how much ‘self-control’ we have, or how much control we are consequently able to exercise over our environment, what we desire and what we fear controls us. ‘Science’ transcends this relationship; it inverts control into freedom. When Jesus claimed identity with ‘the Father’…, he was not claiming to control anything. He was not even claiming to control his own thinking…. Rather, he was adopting a noncontrolling attitude towards experience; and in so doing he ceased to be controlled by it in any practical sense” (ibid).

Next in this series: Place of a Preface

Hegel’s Ladder

Hegel’s Ladder (1997) by H.S. Harris is an incomparable intellectual achievement. Explicitly modeled on the great “long commentaries” on Aristotle by Averroes whom I also admire, its nearly 1600 pages comprise the only complete literal commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology in existence. For each paragraph in Miller’s translation of Hegel’s text, he gives a pithy abstract, then discusses the passage in detail. (See numerous articles on Harris’ work on my Hegel contents page.) This monument of scholarship was preceded by Harris’ equally large Hegel’s Development, which seems to be the definitive study of Hegel’s work before the Phenomenology.

Harris’ main contention is that Hegel’s famously difficult and confusing argument actually makes good sense as it stands. He also defends the view that the perspective of the Phenomenology was never abandoned in Hegel’s later work. It is not a transcendental psychology or a transcendental history or some weird hybrid of the two, but in Hegel’s own phrase, a “science of the experience of consciousness”.

None of these three terms means what we might think. “Science” here is basically a coherent rational articulation. “Experience” is cumulative rather than immediate, and fundamentally includes many twists and turns of discovery that could not be anticipated in advance. “Consciousness” is not the universal medium in which everything takes place, but the everyday starting point of ordinary life that is both overturned and fulfilled by the progress of experience.

Hegel’s fundamental contention is that if we follow it far enough in its own movement, experience leads us — by way of what Paul Ricoeur later called a vitally important “long detour”, which I think is also the path of the genuine Platonic and Aristotelian open-ended quest for essence — from naive encounter with objects in the immediacy of individual awareness, to a situated ethical being that is at home in the world and free of what Kant called transcendental illusions. Such a freedom from fundamental transcendental illusion is all that Hegel ever meant to claim for what he called “absolute” knowledge.

Of course my own aphoristic style of commentary is as about as close to diametrically opposite of comprehensive literal commentary as could be, but I nourish the hope others will find highlights I pick out — and emphasis and interpolations I add — to be illuminating and relevant. Meanwhile I tremendously admire thorough and even-handed attention to detail like that of Harris, and find it an excellent cross-check.

Next in this series: The Ladder Metaphor

Form as Value

Plato’s most famous discussions of form involved things like the form of virtue, of justice, or of the Good. These are questions that perplex the wise and the sincere inquirer. They therefore could not be the objects of any simple dogma.

In Aristotle there is a deep connection between form and ends. For both Aristotle and Plato, “essence” is never merely factual but always has what analytic philosophers call a normative dimension. It is not the kind of thing that could be simply given (see Form, Substance).

Brandom says that for Kant and Hegel, concepts always have a normative dimension, and intentionality is to be explained in terms of normativity rather than vice versa.

The necessity in formal logic and mathematics also has a normative character, but it is different from the previous examples in that it is univocal and definitely knowable. Things that are “formal” in this modern sense are quite different from form for Plato or Aristotle, which is closer to what Brandom would call conceptual content (see Mutation of Meaning). Well-founded certainty is only possible in domains that are purely formal in the modern sense.

Anything involving the “real world” involves interpretation, which is never finished. In life we work, act, and love on the basis of partial interpretations of the forms of things.

Form, Substance

Faced with questions like what the world is “made of”, modern people have generally assumed that it must be some kind of “stuff”. The usual presumed answer is some sort of matter-stuff, or less commonly some sort of mind-stuff.

Plato and Aristotle already suggested a radical alternative to this way of thinking that takes the accent away from “stuff” altogether. Aristotle especially developed a rich account of how we think about these kinds of things, by looking at how we express these kinds of questions, and what we are implicitly trying to get at when we ask them.

The most obvious simple answer attributed to Plato and Aristotle is form. In Aristotle’s case, one should also mention what has been traditionally called substance.

Etymologically, eidos — the Greek word we translate as “form” — seems to begin from a notion of visual appearance, with an emphasis on shape. It acquired a more abstract sense related to geometrical figure. Plato attributed great significance to the practice of geometry as an especially clear and perspicuous kind of reasoning, but he also recognized a broader kind of reasoning associated with a dialectic of question and answer, which comes into play especially where questions of value are concerned. From a point of view of ethical practice and human life generally, questions about what something really is and why this rather than that are more important than what things are made of (see What and Why). Already with Plato, “form” came to be inseparable from meaning.

Aristotle’s classic discussion of substance (ousia) in the Metaphysics starts from the idea of a substrate in which properties inhere. This most superficial level later inspired the Greek grammarians to articulate the notion of a grammatical subject of predicates. In what I think is the single greatest example of ancient dialectic, Aristotle gradually steps back from the simple notion of a substrate. Substance becomes “what it was finally to have been” a thing, at the end of the day so to speak. But then this is further interrogated to disclose the level of actuality, or what is effectively operative in a process. But it turns out that actuality is not complete in itself. What is effectively operative does not form a self-contained whole that explains everything. A fuller understanding must take into account potentiality, which leads to a transition away from simple actuality to a larger perspective of processes and degrees of actualization, in which nothing is simply given just as it is. Aristotle was especially concerned with the forms of living things, which have this character.

The more interesting senses of form for Plato and Aristotle do not refer to something that could be simply given. In line with this but in a more speculative mode, Plotinus suggested that every form somehow in a way “contains” all other forms. The poetic truth in this is that the articulation of one form depends on the articulation of other forms, and while everything in some sense coheres, we have no unconditional starting point. We always begin in the middle somewhere, in a context that has yet to be fully elaborated. The work of elaboration is itself the answer. (See also Interpretation.)

Hegelian Finitude

Hegel has usually been considered to be anything but a thinker of finitude. However, the two previous philosophers to whom he devoted the most pages — Aristotle and Kant — are in their own very different ways perhaps the two most emblematic philosophers of finitude. If we start with Hegel’s ethics rather than his supposed metaphysics of Geist as a sort of divine immanence and his supposed doctrine of “absolute knowledge”, a deep resonance between his thought and Aristotle and Kant’s themes of finitude becomes evident.

Hegel is in fact extremely concerned to point out that we are not masters in life, and that error is inevitable. Further, more so than Kant — and arguably even more than Aristotle — he puts an overtly positive, optimistic face on this finite condition.

In his logical works, Hegel distinguished between a “good” and a “bad” infinity. Similarly, it could be said that he implicitly makes a very sharp distinction between “good” and “bad” finitude. Bad finitude is associated with what he called the Unhappy Consciousness. With the advent of monotheism in the West, one common extreme view held that before the infinity of God, we and all finite beings are as nothing. In this view, finite being is a mainly a burden to be overcome in the hereafter, and has no intrinsic value of its own.

“Good” finitude is what emerges from Hegel’s own view. As completely as Nietzsche but in a more balanced way, Hegel rejected the idea of finitude as a burden. For Hegel, finitude is an opportunity, not a curse. Error is an invitation to learning, and non-mastery is the path to reality. (See also Brandom on Postmodernity; Back to Ethical Being; Infinity, Finitude; Respect for All Beings; Affirmation; Truth, Beauty; Secondary Causes).

Normativity in Kant

Wikipedia actually has several decent articles on normativity (compare my own capsule account here). Under “Normative” it currently says “Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good or desirable or permissible and others as bad or undesirable or impermissible. A norm in this normative sense means a standard for evaluating or making judgments about behavior or outcomes…. One of the major developments in analytic philosophy has seen the reach of normativity spread to virtually all corners of the field…. [I]t has become increasingly common to understand normative claims as claims about reasons“. “Normative ethics” is simply ethics as distinct from meta-ethics. Under “Norm (philosophy)” it says “Norms are concepts… of practical import, oriented to effecting an action, rather than conceptual abstractions that describe, explain, and express”.

Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard’s Tanner lectures were published as The Sources of Normativity (1996). Her first sentence says “It is the most striking fact about human life that we have values” (p. 1). She notes that “Plato and Aristotle came to believe that value was more real than experienced fact, indeed that the real world is, in a way, value itself”.

In Korsgaard’s account things begin to turn subtly in a modernist direction, broadly resembling the modernist sentiments in Brandom I occasionally have trouble with. “For Plato and Aristotle, being guided by value is a matter of being guided by the way things ultimately are…. The form of a thing is its perfection, but it is also what enables the thing to be what it is. So the endeavor to realize perfection is just the endeavor to be what you are — to be good at being what you are” (pp. 2-3).

While there is a big boulder of truth here, I think formulations of this sort carry the danger of greatly underestimating the extent to which — even though we grasp things well enough to act with practical confidence — the “way things ultimately are” becomes more problematic the more seriously we consider it, which I think Plato and Aristotle well recognized. Further, while talk about the singular form of a thing is not out of place in Plato, Aristotle’s versatile notion of form (especially in the Metaphysics and the biological works, and in sharp contrast to scholastic “substantial form”) overflows any such simple conception (see Form, Substance).

Korsgaard presents later emphasis on obligation as a “revolution” ultimately completed by Kant. This emphasis on obligation rather than value per se is what analytic philosophers call deontology, on which I’ve commented several times.

While I fully agree that normative force is real, for serious philosophical purposes it is an error to think it ever has completely univocal meaning. That is why Hegel thought every truth eventually has to make way for some further truth. I agree that Kantian obligation adds something to ethics and makes Kant the next great contributor to ethics after Aristotle, but I see it as a refinement or addition to a basically Aristotelian account along the the lines suggested by Paul Ricoeur, and not a revolution.

I’ve previously mentioned Nancy Sherman’s elaboration of implicit Aristotelian themes in Kantian ethics. Barbara Herman in The Practice of Moral Judgment (1993) argues forcefully against the highly contracted notion of judgment commonly attributed to Kant, and for a positive concept of values in Kant. I’ve referred several times to the outstanding book by Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge (French ed. 1993), which develops a very rich, multilayered concept of judgment out of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I think Brandom relates Kantian judgment to an entire unity of apperception and its ongoing repair of errors (see Autonomy, Normativity; Brandom on Postmodernity). Hannah Ginsborg in The Normativity of Nature (2015) finds a rich general concept of judgment in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and concludes that “there is nothing intrinsically objectionable about regarding natural phenomena in normative terms” (p. 345; see Natural Ends; Kant’s Recovery of Ends).

Brandom comes close to identifying deontology with ethics tout court. Initially I found this very unattractive, but Brandom is no advocate of excessive univocity, as his favorable remarks about the “new” notion of determination in Hegel and truth as a process make clear. He uses the language of deontology and modality as a way of combating arbitrariness and indistinction.

In summary, though Kantian obligation is an undeniable contribution, I think a very strong case can be made that the most important element in normativity is really values and not obligation per se.

Incidentally, it is nice to see so many female philosophers at work in this area.

Kingdom of Ends

This title comes from Christine Korsgaard’s influential book of essays on Kantian ethics, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996). “When we enter into relations of reciprocity, and hold one another responsible, we enter together into the standpoint of practical reason, and create a Kingdom of Ends on earth”, she says in the final sentence of the title essay (p. 212).

She begins the same essay with a quote from Aristotle, “As the virtuous man is to himself, he is to his friend also, for his friend is another self” (p. 188). I have previously pointed out that Hegelian mutual recognition has roots in Aristotle’s notion of friendship and love as characterized by reciprocity.

Korsgaard makes the contrast that “to hold someone responsible is to adopt an attitude… rather than to have a belief” (ibid). I’ve previously noticed that Brandom’s use of the word “attitude” has rather different connotations from what I take to be its most common meaning (a kind of purely subjective stance that is irrefutable as such, but cannot properly justify any conclusion). Korsgaard’s usage of the term also diverges from this purely subjective sense. She explicitly refers to adopting an attitude as a kind of practical doing, and I imagine Brandom would say the same. This is helpful.

She notes that British empiricists such as Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith treated responsibility in terms of the approval or disapproval of others. She likes Kant’s contrasting emphasis on agents taking responsibility. While I ultimately prefer Hegel and Brandom’s idea that responsibility involves both of these, in context she makes a good point. Noting how Kant emphasizes that we finite beings can never perfectly know ourselves, she says Kant gives philosophical foundation to the Biblical “Judge not”.

But, she goes on to say, “in a broader sense it is not possible for us to avoid holding one another responsible. For holding one another responsible is the distinctive element in the relation of adult human beings. To hold someone responsible is to regard her as a person — that is to say, as a free and equal person, capable of acting both rationally and morally” (p. 189).

“When you hold someone responsible, you are prepared to exchange lawless individual activity for reciprocity in some or all of its forms. You are prepared to accept promises, offer confidences, exchange vows, cooperate on a project, enter a social contract, have a conversation, make love, be friends, or get married. You are willing to deal with her on the basis of the expectation that each of you will act from a certain view of the other: that you each have your reasons which are to be respected, and your ends which are to be valued. Abandoning the state of nature and so relinquishing force and guile, you are ready to share, to trust, and generally speaking to risk your happiness or success on the hope that she will turn out to be human” (pp. 189-190).

Korsgaard notes that both Aristotle and Kant regard the reciprocity of friendship as a kind of perfect ethical relation. She quotes Kant saying that friendship is “the most intimate union of love with respect” (p. 191), then continues “While love moves you to pursue the ends of another, respect reminds you that she must determine what those ends are; while love moves you to care for the happiness of another, respect demands that you care for her character too” (ibid).

She points out that for Aristotle justice is not needed between friends, because friendship already embodies the reciprocity characteristic of justice. She cites passages from Kant indicating that he would agree.

Friendship or mutual recognition is a higher ethical standard that goes beyond moral obligation. I note that Leibniz also emphasized that higher virtue involves doing more than is morally required of us. Korsgaard continues, “Anyone must tell the truth when the circumstances call for it, but between friends there is a presumption of intimacy, frankness, and confidence. Anyone must help another in need or emergency, but friends promote each other’s projects as routinely as they do their own. Anyone must refrain from leading others into temptation; but friends help each other to be good…. To become friends is to create a neighborhood where the Kingdom of Ends is real” (p. 194).

I think the ethical meaning of Hegelian mutual recognition in any particular case is no different from that of friendship in Aristotle and Kant. The difference is that Hegel applies it more broadly, and in his hands it becomes not just a higher ethical standard but also a meta-ethical explanation that ends up also explaining knowledge and being.

Reality of Ends

Are Aristotelian non-mental ends really compatible with Brandomian normativity in an account of the same things? I want to say yes.

Aristotelian ends have frequently been read as somehow pre-existing. Later commentators in the Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions certainly most often took such a view, but in so doing they were more faithful to the values of neoplatonic or traditional monotheistic theology than to the Aristotelian text.

Aristotle pioneered the idea that ends come first in the general order of interpretation relevant to life. I see this as ancestral to Brandom’s idea that normativity comes first in the same context, even though Brandom himself does not really engage with pre-modern philosophy. Brandom’s main source for this is his reading of Kant and especially Hegel, but Hegel is also the modern author who began the restoration of Aristotle to his proper place in the history of philosophy.

To come first in the order of interpretation and explanation is not necessarily to pre-exist. Consideration of the order of explanation is after all only relevant to processes of explanation. Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Brandom are all very process-oriented.

Brandom, drawing on Kant and Hegel, offers a broadly pragmatist account of the objectivity of values and reality, in terms of a counterfactual robustness of practical judgments ultimately grounded in mutual recognition and an ongoing commitment to the repair of errors. Such an account of a process of truth-and-error provides for everything involved in the normative sense of what we call objectivity, while making pre-existing truths superfluous.

In a much simpler but still very nuanced way, Aristotle often informally refers to existing realities. He usually starts with an optimistic and charitable approach to the deliverances of common sense in everyday life, only refining and superseding them as the need arises, but epistemic modesty prevents him from turning these into strong theoretical claims. Dialectic — i.e., exploratory discursive reasoning about concrete meanings in the absence of initial certainty — rather than demonstration from presumed truths is the main theoretical tool actually employed throughout Aristotle’s works.

On a more theoretical level, Aristotle provocatively suggests that something need not have actual existence in its own right in order to deeply affect the shape of reality (see The Importance of Potentiality). I take Aristotelian ends to be things of this sort.

Brandom on Postmodernity

Brandom’s third Brentano lecture offers a nice summary of his ethical vision of a Hegelian postmodernity, which has nothing to do with fashionable “postmodernism”, but did inspire the masthead here.

What might be called the traditional view of normativity treats normative statuses as just being what they are, and as simply given to us. According to this view, normative attitudes ought to simply respect pre-given values, and there is no place for inquiry into what is right. Actions are judged in a completely external way, with no regard for the actor’s intent. Hegel used the tragedies of Sophocles to illustrate this. Oedipus accepted full moral responsibility for consequences of which he was totally unaware. This is the stance of a tragic hero. Viewed charitably, it has the benefit of recognizing that everything is not up to us, and that values have a kind of objectivity.

The “modern” view — which I think appeared already among the Greek Sophists — is the polar opposite of the traditionalist view. In its pure form, it reduces all normative considerations to attitudes in the shallow sense, and denies any possible objectivity of values. The attitudes in question can be completely arbitrary. Depending on whether the attitudes that count are anyone’s or only those of the sovereign or of the privileged, the modern view can be anarchistic or authoritarian. But viewed charitably, it has the benefit of suggesting that intentions and personal conscience do matter, while avoiding reliance on a simple givenness of values.

These are both what Hegel called “one-sided” views, each asserting the complete independence of something. Neither statuses nor attitudes can really be completely independent of the other.

The “postmodern” view that Brandom develops out of Hegel recognizes that every thing has some dependence on other things, while also allowing for relative independence. In this view, everyone has both some responsibility and some authority, and responsibility for any given thing is ultimately shared by all of us. All normative statuses are instituted by normative attitudes, but only attitudes that have the structure of mutual recognition can institute genuine normative statuses. Hegel also spoke of confession and mutual forgiveness in this context.

“How can we both make the norms and be genuinely governed by them?”, Brandom asks (p. 76). We do both, but the same person does not do both with respect to the same thing at the same time. “The short answer, I think, is that our past attitudes institute norms that provide the normative standards of assessment for our current attitudes. Such a slogan conceals the rich fine-structure of [Hegel’s] account, however” (p. 77).

Norms are instituted through recollection of an expressively progressive trajectory, Brandom will say (see Hegelian Semantics). “It is in particular the recollective phase of diachronic recognitive processes that explains the attitude-transcendence of normative statuses, which provide standards for normative assessment of the correctness of attitudes” (p. 88).

At any given moment, we should aim “at acknowledging and attributing what we and others are really committed and entitled to, our actual responsibilities and authority” (p. 76). But what we are really committed to can only be seen retrospectively (see Hegel on Willing) and by taking into account the assessments of others. What we are really committed to may on this account be quite different from what we tell ourselves we are committed to.

“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.'” (p. 93).

Just because something might be explained without reference to values does not mean that we should so explain it. That would be the cynical attitude that, e.g., people only do good in order to feel good about themselves. Where apparently virtuous actions also appear to have ulterior motives, it is not valid on that basis to assume that there is no genuine ethical motive in play.

“Taking recollective responsibility for another’s doing is practically acknowledging the obligation to tell and endorse a certain kind of retrospective story about that doing. That is the responsibility to rationally reconstruct it as norm-governed. The forgiving recollector must discern an implicit norm that governs the development of the deed.” (p. 98).

“Some things people have done (both ourselves and others), we want to say, are simply unforgivable. (The last century or so provides a host of notorious, alarmingly large-scale candidates.) In some cases, though we might try to mitigate the consequences of evil doings, we just have no idea at all how to go about discerning the emergence of a governing norm we could endorse ourselves. And this situation does not just arise in extraordinary or exceptional cases. Any actual recollective story will involve strains: elements, aspects, or descriptions of what is actually done, at every stage in the developing process, that cannot be smoothly, successfully, or convincingly given such a norm-responsive explanation” (p. 101).

“It might well be that one is in fact incapable of fulfilling that commitment, of carrying out that responsibility. 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 her own inadequacy to the recollective task. 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 taking of (co-)responsibility for your doing. My subsequent failure to adopt adequately forgiving recollective recognitive attitudes is something I am in turn 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” (p. 102).

“Paying one’s dues as a member of a recognitive community structured by trust is acknowledging that one is always already implicitly committed to forgiving, responsible for forgiving what one’s fellows do or have done” (ibid).

Referring to Hegel’s famous figure of the cynical valet, Brandom says “The Kammerdiener stands for a view that explains all attitudes in terms of other attitudes, without needing to appeal to governing norms or statuses that they are attitudes towards and acknowledgments of. Hegel does not deny that this sort of explanation in terms of attitudes alone can be done…. But we can ask: what sort of disagreement is it that divides the Kammerdiener and the ‘friend of the norms’ for whom some heroes really are heroes? Is it a cognitive, matter-of-factual disagreement about what there is in the objective world? After all, for Hegel, modernity was right that normative statuses are attitude-dependent. Hegel diagnoses the issue instead as a difference in meta-attitude. He denominates the norm-blind reductive naturalism of attitudes, for which the Kammerdiener stands, debasing: ‘niederträchtig’ (literally, something like “pulling down or under”). The contrasting, norm-sensitive, status-responsive, hero-acknowledging meta-attitude that takes some attitudes to be themselves genuinely norm-sensitive and norm-acknowledging he calls magnanimous: ‘edelmütig’ (literally: noble spirited)” (pp. 90-91).

“[T]he 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” (pp. 106-107).

“Agency as understood and practiced within the magnanimous recognitive structure of confession and 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” (p. 107).

“The neo-heroic postmodern form of practical normativity replaces fate with something we do. 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 burdens of tragic subjection to fate are replaced by the tasks of concrete magnanimous forgiveness. Where our normative conceptual digestion and domestication of immediacy, contingency, and particularity shows its limitations, when (as in each case, as the Kammerdiener reminds us, 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 knowledgeable and capable future recollectors” (p. 108). (See also Brandomian Forgiveness; Rethinking Responsibility; Expansive Agency.)