Habermas on Disenchantment

Again we come to the difficult topic of modernity. In company with the pragmatists Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom, Jürgen Habermas speaks of modernization as a progressive rationalization, carrying forward the spirit of the Enlightenment. But in this area Habermas principally draws on the great early 20th century neo-Kantian founding father of sociology Max Weber, who further analyzed this as a “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of (our understanding of) the world. Literally, the German means something like “de-magicking”.

Neither Weber nor Habermas sees the rationalization associated with modernity in terms of a simple global opposition between science and religion. Following Weber, Habermas treats rationalization as a development within the world’s religious traditions, in which religion itself moves progressively away from magical thinking and supernaturalism, and toward universalizing ethics. This is at the same time a movement away from particularism, toward greater degrees of universalism. However, I don’t think Habermas adequately recognizes the extent to which such an approach is already anticipated by Hegel.

I would not want to lose sight of the poetic and artistic kinds of “enchantment” that in no way depend on irrational belief in the supernatural. Such artistic, musical, or dramatic expression may itself be of high spiritual import. As Habermas also points out, while it is appropriate to condemn superstition and prejudice, the metaphorical and indeed spiritual “magic” associated with poetry, music, and other artistic creativity need be in no way contrary to reason.

As background for his development in Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas briefly surveys some of the more influential 20th-century accounts of modernity. He holds that the most thorough and well-rounded investigations are still those conducted a century ago by Max Weber. In distinction from cultural anthropology, sociology defined itself as an account of specifically modern society.

“Among the classical figures of sociology, Max Weber is the only one who broke with both the premises of the philosophy of history and the basic assumptions of evolutionism and who nonetheless wanted to conceive of the modernization of old-European society as the result of a universal-historical process of rationalization. He opened up rationalization processes to an encompassing empirical investigation without reinterpreting them in an empiricist manner so that precisely the aspects of rationality of societal learning processes would disappear” (Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 143).

That empirical investigations need not be conducted in a narrowly empiricist manner strikes me as very true. One hint of where he is going with this is his interest in applying the expansive outlook of the developmental cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget on children’s learning to the understanding of social processes of rationalization. Brandom has similarly highlighted the social importance of an account of learning from our errors.

I don’t believe most of the stories about so-called Western rationalism. It is just too vague a category, an uncritical joining together of disparate things. It is highly unhistorical to assume a direct cultural continuity from classical Greece to Western Europe. In Roman times, Greece was considered part of the East. Greek learning was introduced to Europe only in the high middle ages. I maintain that the birth of ethical reason and the extraordinary flowering of culture in classical Greece are not the unique heritage of the West, but a part of the heritage of humanity. That said, I still think Habermas makes a good case for the seriousness of Weber’s approach to this “historiographical” question.

“Weber analyzes the process of disenchantment in the history of religion, which is said to have fulfilled the necessary internal conditions for the appearance of Occidental rationalism; in doing so he employs a complex, but largely unclarified concept of rationality. On the other hand, in his analysis of societal rationalization as it makes its way in the modern period, he allows himself to be guided by the restrictive idea of purposive rationality [Zweckrationalität]” (ibid, emphasis in original).

The history of such disenchantment has been widely interpreted as a global, polar conflict and inverse proportionality between “reason” and “religion”. This makes both reason and religion way too monolithic.

In comparison with this unfortunate state of affairs, Habermas’s account, grounded in Weber, is highly valuable for its relatively less monolithic character. He treats “disenchantment” as part of a progressive development of world religions themselves. (In his recent Also a History of Philosophy, he adopts Karl Jaspers’s notion of the “axial age” — the thesis that in several disparate parts of the world, around roughly 500 BCE, religions simultaneously became less oriented to myth, magic, and ritual, and more oriented toward ethics and something resembling metaphysics. Habermas thinks that recognizing this positive role of the great world religions on a long time scale is important as a counterweight to eurocentrism.)

“According to Marx, the rationalization of society takes place directly in the development of productive forces, that is, in the expansion of empirical knowledge, the improvement of production techniques, and the increasingly effective mobilization, qualification, and organization of socially useful labor power. On the other hand, relations of production, the institutions that express the distribution of social power and regulate a differential access to the means of production, are revolutionized only under the pressure of rationalization of productive forces. Max Weber views the institutional framework of the capitalist economy and the modern state in a different way — not as relations of production that fetter the potential for rationalization, but as subsystems of purposive-rational action in which Occidental rationalism develops at a societal level. Of course, he is afraid that bureaucratization will lead to a reification of social relationships, which will stifle motivational incentives to a rational conduct of life. Horkheimer and Adorno, and later Marcuse, interpret Marx in this Weberian perspective” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 144).

“On the one hand, Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno identify societal rationalization with expansion of the instrumental and strategic rationality of action contexts; on the other hand, they all have a vague notion of an encompassing societal rationality — whether in the concept of an association of free producers, in the historical model of an ethically rational conduct of life, or in the idea of fraternal relations with a resurrected nature — and it is against this that they measure the relative position of empirically described processes of rationalization…. The action concepts that Marx, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno take as basic are not complex enough to capture all those aspects of social actions to which societal rationalization can attach…. The rationalization of action orientations is not the same as the expansion of the ‘rationality’, that is, complexity of action systems” (pp. 144-145).

“However, I would like to make clear at the start that Weber took up the rationality theme in a scientific context that had already discharged the mortgages from philosophy of history and the nineteenth-century evolutionism encumbered by it” (p. 145).

“As sociology developed in the wakes of Scottish moral philosophy …, it found the theme of societal rationalization already at hand” (ibid).

“The most important motifs of the philosophy of history are contained in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind of 1794. The model of rationality is provided by the mathematical sciences of nature. Their core is Newtonian physics; it has discovered the ‘true method of studying nature’…. It becomes a paradigm for knowledge in general because it follows a method that raises the knowledge of nature above the scholastic debates of philosophers and reduces all previous philosophy to the status of mere opinion” (ibid).

“Condorcet wants to conceive the history of mankind on the model of the history of modern science, that is, as a process of rationalization…. The advances of the human mind are not limited by a telos inherent in it…. The human mind owes its advances not to approaching a telos, but to the unimpeded operation of its intelligence, that is, to a learning mechanism…. The concept of knowledge developed on the model of the natural sciences devalues, as if with one blow, inherited religious, philosophical, moral, and political opinions” (p. 146).

For me, the telos of a rational being is not a predefined limit or fixed configuration, but an endlessly branching source of alternatives that have some focus, but always have a hypothetical character.

Here we see Habermas’s usual negative view of teleology. For the most part, he only considers the false, non-Aristotelian kind of teleology that was so eloquently denounced by Spinoza. There is one passage later on that I previously quoted, where he does give the word telos a positive sense, in speaking of shared understanding as the inherent telos of human speech. The ambitious norm to which he gives voice is the idea that mature humans learn to think for themselves, and furthermore naturally collaborate in so doing.

“In the battle against the traditional powers of church and state, enlightenment requires the courage to make use of one’s own reason, that is, autonomy or maturity” (p. 147).

Here we are on the ground of Kantian autonomy. Habermas uses his summary of Condorcet to develop the social implications of rationalization.

“Like Kant, Condorcet sees the progress of civilization along the lines of a republic that guarantees civil liberties, an international order that establishes a perpetual peace, a society that accelerates economic growth and technical progress and does away with or compensates for social inequalities. Among other things, he expects ‘the complete annihilation of the prejudices that have brought about an inequality of rights between the sexes’; he expects the elimination of criminality and degeneration, the conquest of misery and sickness” (p. 148).

“This conception is representative of eighteenth-century philosophy of history, even if it could only reach such a pointed formulation from a contemporary of the French Revolution. Precisely this radical quality makes the cracks in the type of thinking characteristic of the philosophy of history stand out” (ibid).

“Victorian theories of social evolution can be characterized in a simplified manner as follows: They questioned neither the rationalism nor the universalism of the Enlightenment and were thus not yet sensitive to the dangers of Eurocentrism; they repeated the naturalistic fallacies of the philosophy of history, albeit less blatantly…. From the standpoint of the history of science, the situation in which Max Weber took up the rationalization thematic again and turned it into a problem that could be dealt with sociologically was defined by the critique of these nineteenth-century theories of evolution” (pp. 152-153).

Habermas points out a positive role of neo-Kantianism, particularly its perspective that a seriously scientific orientation does not require the abnegation of all serious value judgment.

“Weber himself stands in the tradition of Southwest German Neo-Kantianism…. Beyond its dualistic philosophy of science, Neo-Kantianism gained special significance for the critique of evolutionist approaches in the social sciences because of its theory of value. It brought to bear at the methodological level a distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, between statements of fact and judgments of value, and in practical philosophy it emphatically criticized all varieties of ethical naturalism. This is the background to Weber’s position in the controversy over value judgments in social science. He is critical of concepts of progress and evolution precisely when they play an implicitly normative role in social science” (p. 154).

“Max Weber adopted in this controversy a cautiously universalist position…. He mistrusts the rationalization processes set loose and detached from ethical value orientations — so much so that in his theory of rationalization, science and technology forfeit their paradigmatic status. Weber’s research is focused on the moral-practical bases of the institutionalization of purposive-rational action” (p. 155).

This is an interesting variant. The “purposive” rationality associated with means-ends calculations is here circumscribed by a “moral-practical” layer. This falls short of the full view that ethics is the one self-bootstrapping discipline, and still gives an elevated role to efficient causality. But it puts important qualifications on any claim that efficient causality comes unconditionally first.

“Weber regards not only science but autonomous art as a form of manifestation of cultural rationalization…. Aesthetically imbued counterculture belongs, together with science and technology on the one hand, and with modern legal and moral representations on the other, to the whole of rationalized culture. The complex that is taken to be central to the rise of modern society is, however, this ethical and juridical rationalism” (pp. 161-162, emphasis in original).

“This ethic is distinguished, from a formal point of view, in that it is based on principles and is universalistic. The soteriological religiosity of congregations grounds an abstract ethic of brotherliness that, with ‘one’s neighbor’ as a point of reference, supersedes the separation between in-group and out-group morality…. From the perspective of a formal ethic based on general principles, legal norms (as well as the creation and application of laws) that appeal to magic, sacred traditions, revelation, and the like are devalued” (p. 162, emphasis in original).

“Weber sees in this ‘a very general, and for the history of religion very important consequence of the development of innerworldly and otherworldly values toward rationality, towards conscious endeavor, and towards sublimation by knowledge‘” (p. 164, emphasis in original).

“Weber starts with a broad concept of ‘technique’ [Technik] in order to make clear that the aspect of regulated employment of means, in a very abstract sense, is relevant to the rationality of behavior…. Every rule or system of rules that permits reliably reproducible action, whether methodical or customary, that can be predicted by participants in interaction and calculated from the perspective of the observer, is a technique in this sense. ‘Thus there are techniques for every conceivable type of action: techniques of prayer, of asceticism, of thought and research, of memorizing, of education, of exercising political or hierocratic domination, of administration, of making love, of making war, of musical performances, of sculpture and painting, of arriving at legal decisions. And all of these are capable of the widest variation in degree of rationality” (p. 169).

Again we have an ambivalence. Technique clearly has a relation to efficient causality, but Weber greatly broadens its meaning.

“We can speak of techniques in this sense whenever the ends that can be causally realized with their help are conceived as elements of the objective world…. To the conditions of purposive action there belongs not only an instrumental rationality of means, but a rationality of choice in setting ends selected in accord with values. From this standpoint an action can be rational only to the degree that it is not blindly controlled by affects or guided by sheer tradition…. ‘Actions are purely value-rational when the agents, regardless of foreseeable consequences, act according to their convictions of what seems to them to be required by duty, honor, beauty, a religious call, piety, or the importance of some “cause”‘,” (pp.170-171, emphasis in original).

Habermas speaks of the historical advent on a world scale of what he calls “religions of conviction” (as opposed to a primacy of myth, magic, and ritual) as providing the basis for what he calls an “ethics of conviction” (as opposed to an ethics of obedience). He clearly sympathizes with the neo-Kantian critique of “enlightened self-interest” as an adequate basis for ethics.

“Interest positions change, whereas generalizable values are always valid for more than merely one type of situation. Utilitarianism does not take into account this categorical difference worked out by the neo-Kantians; it makes a vain attempt to reinterpret interest positions into ethical principles, to hypostasize purposive rationality itself as a value” (p. 172).

“Weber differentiates the concept of practical rationality from the three perspectives of employing means, setting ends, and being oriented to values. The instrumental rationality of an action is measured by effective planning of the application of means for given ends; the rationality of choice of an action is measured by the correctness of the calculation of ends in the light of precisely conceived values, available means, and boundary conditions; and the normative rationality of an action is measured by the unifying, systematizing power and penetration of the value standards and the principles that underlie action preferences” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This “rationality of choice” as an alternative to a sole focus on instrumental reasoning is a step in the right direction. I think, though, that ethical deliberation involves interpretive judgment, and not just “calculation in light of precisely conceived values”.

“When persons and groups generalize this type over time and across social spheres, Weber speaks of a methodical-rational conduct of life. And he sees the first historical approximation to this ideal type in the Protestant vocational asceticism of Calvinism and the early Puritan sects” (pp. 172-173, emphasis in original).

“The complex concept of practical rationality, which Weber introduces as an ideal type in connection with the methodical conduct of life in Protestant sects, is still partial” (p. 174).

Weber famously correlates capitalist economic rationality to Calvinist ethics. But he also sees the world history of religions in terms of a larger development toward reason and enlightenment. I will dwell more on the latter than on the former.

“On the one side, rationalized worldviews satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of formal-operational thought…. On the other side, however, rationalized worldviews also satisfy to a greater degree the requirements of a modern understanding of the world, which categorically presupposes the disenchantment of the world. Weber investigates this aspect of rationalization primarily in connection with the ‘ethical rationalization’ of religions of salvation. With regard to ‘all kinds of practical ethics that are systematically and unambiguously oriented to fixed goals of salvation’, Weber applies the term ‘rational’ (in the sense of a categorially disenchanted world) to ‘the differentiation between the normatively “valid” and the empirically given’. He sees in the overcoming of magical beliefs the essential achievement of the great world religions as regards rationalization” (p. 175).

Habermas has a rather high estimate of what formalism can achieve. He highlights Weber’s interesting suggestion that rationality has to do with distinguishing between normative validity and empirical givenness.

“We would fail from the start to grasp Weber’s theory of rationalization if we did not explain the sociological concept of an order of life [Lebensordnung] with the help of the philosophical concept of the actualization of value [Wertverwirklichung]” (p. 186).

Neither Weber nor Habermas is a fan of Hegel, but here we nonetheless meet one of the most important Hegelian concepts, that of processes of actualization.

“Weber could not have put forth a theory of rationalization had he not been convinced as a neo-Kantian that he could view processes of value actualization from the outside and from the inside simultaneously, that that he could investigate them both as empirical processes and as objectivations of knowledge, that he could tie together the aspects of reality and validity. The disenchantment of religious-metaphysical worldviews calls for an analysis of just this kind” (p. 187).

This seems to lay the ground for a happy convergence between this neo-Kantian view of value both from the outside and from the inside and a Hegelian view of processes of actualization.

“Weber speaks of normative validity and legitimacy when an order is subjectively recognized as binding. This recognition rests directly on ideas that harbor a potential for grounding and justification, and not on self-interest” (p. 189, emphasis in original).

Habermas directs our attention to questions of grounding and justification, and our handling and pursuit of them. This, he argues, will yield better sociological interpretation than the appeals to interests that are standard in the tradition derived from utilitarianism. He points out how Weber applies the standard neo-Kantian distinction between facts and norms to criticize different manifestations of ethical naturalism.

“In his exchange with Stammler, Weber, in the tradition of neo-Kantianism, stresses two differentiations: the difference between de facto regularities of behavior and normative regulations of conduct and the difference between the meaning of a validity claim and the fact of its actual recognition. Weber then criticizes the confusion of descriptive statements about accepted standards of evaluation and established norms with statements that recommend, express, or justify norms” (p. 191).

Next he returns to Austin’s notion of performativity, or doing things in language. When we do things in language, we are implicitly taking what I would call a second-person attitude. Habermas contrasts this with an “objectivating third-person attitude”. What we call facts are implicitly third-person expressions; by analogy, I want to suggest, interpretations are implicitly second-person expressions.

“Questions regarding the ideal validity of norms, whether for the theoretician or for those involved themselves, can be posed only in the performative attitude of an actor (or of a participant in discourse), whereas questions concerning the social ‘validity’ or currency of norms, questions of whether norms and values are or are not actually recognized within a group, have to be dealt with in the objectivating attitude of a third person. Corresponding to this at the semantic level is the distinction between value judgments and judgments of fact. Weber rightly insists that statements of the one type cannot be inferred from statements of the other type” (ibid).

In Habermas’s terminology, “social validity” is expressly defined as having an empirical, factual reference. But he also recognizes “ideal validity”, which applies to questions of value, and is linked to performative, second-person, doing-in-language.

“In this rational reconstruction of processes of cultural (and societal) rationalization, the social scientist can not confine himself to describing de facto views; he can understand the empirical power of convincing new ideas, and the devaluation, the loss of power to convince, of old ideas only to the degree that he becomes aware of the reasons or grounds with which the new ideas established themselves” (p. 192, emphasis in original).

We should seek not a history of ideas, but a history of reasons.

“In the analysis of the development of religious and metaphysical worldview, it is especially important to separate constellations of validity from constellations of causality” (p. 195).

The investigation of validity has to do with reasons, and is different from the investigation of causality. He looks beyond what Weber achieved.

“What first strikes one is that Weber limits the rationalization of worldview to the standpoint of ethical rationalization [Ethisierung]; he traces the development of a religiously grounded ethic of conviction — more generally, the development of posttraditional legal and moral representations…. But the rationalization of worldviews could have been traced equally well in two additional dimensions: Weber could also have investigated the transformation of cognitive and expressive elements looking back from the perspective of modern science and autonomous art” (p. 197).

From the point of view of debates about the furtherance of enlightenment, it is interesting that Weber does not follow the cliché that Habermas illustrated in referring to Condorcet above. Where Newtonian physics serves as role model and driver of enlightenment for Condorcet, Weber apparently applies instead a somewhat empirical variant of the Kantian primacy of practical reason.

“Rationalization is tied to a theme that is common to all world religions: the question of justifying the unequal distribution of life’s goods…. What is new is the idea that individual misfortune can be undeserved and that the individual may cherish the religious hope of being delivered from all evil, from sickness, need, poverty, even from death” (p. 201).

The unequal distribution of life’s goods is a serious ethical matter. I would however not at all call it a cornerstone of the world’s religions, though it is true that institutionalized religion has often played a less than admirable role in relation to matters of economic justice.

“The revaluation of individual suffering and the appearance of individual needs for salvation — which made the question of the ethical meaning of what is meaningless the point of departure for a religious thought pushing beyond local myths — did not fall from heaven. They are the result of learning processes that set in as the ideas of justice established in tribal societies clashed with the new reality of class societies” (ibid).

I have grave doubts about the trope of individual salvation, and about an “ethical meaning of what is meaningless”. I am doubtful about the applicability of Piagetian learning processes to transitions from tribal societies to class societies..

“The question of the justification of manifest injustices is not, however, treated as a purely ethical question; it is part of the theological, cosmological, metaphysical question concerning the constitution of the world as a whole. This world order is so conceived that ontic and normative questions are blended together” (p. 202).

I must be blunt here. On behalf of the universe, let me just say that there is no justification of manifest injustices. But I assume Habermas does not really mean that there is such justification, only that many or some people have come to believe that there is. I am surprised that he is not more clear about it though.

He mentions theodicy in this context, with very little detail. The Theodicy of Leibniz is actually a quite interesting work, in the tradition of the arguments of Proclus on the goodness of the world. To say that the world is good, and to say that particular manifest injustices are justified, are two entirely different things. Proper theodicy in the sense of Proclus and Leibniz is concerned with the former, and not with the latter.

Nonetheless I think Habermas is onto something important with this, when he says above that the justification of injustices is not treated as a purely ethical question, and that ontic and normative questions are blended together in the constitution of the world as a whole. Ideology falsely ontologizes contestable value judgments.

Neo-Kantianism often seems to work by developing contrasts. Habermas follows Weber’s development of what I would call a rather lame schematic contrast between Eastern and Western religion, although it was relatively enlightened for its time. Its limits are noticeable for example when in passing he repeats Weber’s summary judgment, without any explanation, that the practice of yoga is irrational.

“Weber contrasts above all the two basic conceptual strategies: one, the Occidental, employs the conception of a transcendent, personal Lord of Creation; the other strategy, widespread in the Orient, starts from the idea of an impersonal, noncreated cosmos. Weber also refers to these as transcendent and immanent conceptions of God…. In the one case, the believer seeks to win God’s favor, in the other to participate in the divine” (ibid).

This very coarse schematism can only be fitted to the case of Greek philosophy by classifying Greek philosophy as Eastern rather than Western. In the Roman world, Greece was in fact considered part of the East. With Aristotle and Plotinus, I too consider that the participatory view is rational and ethical, while the favor-seeking one is not.

“The religious foundation of ethics is also different in the two traditions; the hope for divine grace stands in contrast to the idea of self-deliverance through knowledge in Asiatic religiosity” (ibid).

This also is too simple. Speaking at this very shallow level, Buddhism classically denies the reality of the substantial self whose divinity Hinduism classically aims to recover. The notion of an (implicitly active) self-deliverance does not fit well with Taoism either. Some translations literally have the Tao Te Ching advocating “non-action”. In any case, the Tao seems closer to a notion of grace, even if its workings are impersonal.

“A negative attitude to the world first became possible through the dualism characteristic of the radical religions of salvation” (p. 203).

Following Weber, Habermas seems to consider a negative attitude toward the world to be an essential dimension of the rationalization that led to modernity. That is because Weber’s model for the origin of modernity is the ethical severity of Calvinism and Puritanism, which is taken to represent a negative attitude toward the world. By contrast, I would hold that there is nothing inherently progressive or ethical about a negative attitude toward the world, or dualism, or an emphasis on individual salvation.

“To be sure, Weber is inclined to assume that a world-affirming attitude can be maintained only where magical thought has not been radically overcome and where the stage of a dualistic (in the strict sense) interpretation of the world has not been reached. But he could have tested whether or not this was the case only through a comparison of Confucianism and Taoism with Greek philosophy; such a comparison could have determined whether radical disenchantment, a dualistic worldview structure, and affirmation of the world might not also go together. World rejection would then depend more on a radicalization of the thought of salvation, which led in religions of conviction to an accentuation of the dualism found in all world religions” (pp. 203-204).

“A negative attitude toward the world resulting from an orientation to a sacred value that transcends the world or is hidden in its innermost recesses is not, however, per se conducive to the ethical rationalization of life-conduct. World rejection leads to an objectivation of the world under ethical aspect only when it is connected with an active mode of life turned toward the world and does not lead to a passive turning away from the world” (p. 207).

Here we see Habermas is to an extent at least tentatively trying out possibilities. I appreciate his acknowledgement that a negative attitude toward the world is not a requirement. I also appreciate the explanatory role he gives to practical reason in a Kantian sense. On Hegelian grounds though, I am doubtful about the positive role he assigns to “objectivation of the world”.

“The essentials of a rationalizable worldview are as little lacking in Confucianism and Taoism as they are in Greek philosophy” (p. 210).

I would tend to agree, at least as far as Confucianism is concerned. Taoism is a more difficult case. Habermas sincerely wants to be both universal and definite, and to avoid a “Western” ethnocentrism. I think he deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt on that. But there are still real limits to what can be achieved with formal analysis of historical material at this level of generality.

At Home in Otherness

This is part 3 of my direct walk-through of the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology. It seems that the phrase “being at home in otherness” originated in my own notes on H.S. Harris’ commentary, and literally occurs neither in Hegel nor in Harris. Nonetheless, I still want to suggest that the underlying idea is central to the perspective Hegel wants to recommend. Hegel speaks at length about what might be called thinking in the element of otherness, and provocatively ties it to the overcoming of alienation, thereby seeking to transform our pre-existing notions of what that might mean.

More conventionally, the overcoming of alienation has been represented as the recovery of a lost possession or lost innocence that we originally had, like a figurative return to the garden of Eden. The German Romantics of Hegel’s time had popularized this sort of comfortable and reassuring notion. Hegel wants to give it an altogether different and much more challenging meaning.

He points out the inherent weakness of all isolated theses and unelaborated statements of principle.

“[A]ny further so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, if it is true, is for this reason alone also false just because it is a fundamental proposition or principle. — It is consequently very easily refuted. Its refutation consist in demonstrating its defects; however, it is defective because it is only the universal, or, only a principle, or, it is only the beginning. If the refutation is thorough, then it is derived from and developed out of that fundamental proposition or principle itself — the refutation is not pulled off by bringing in counter-assertions and impressions external to the principle. Such a refutation would thus genuinely be the development of the fundamental proposition itself” (Pinkard trans., p. 15).

No matter how good the principle, a shallow statement of it will be “false”.

“Conversely, the genuinely positive working out of the beginning is at the same time just as much a negative posture toward its beginning; namely, a negative posture toward its one-sided form, which is to be at first only immediately” (p. 16).

Everything that Hegel would recognize as genuine development and improvement begins with thoughtful criticism of what went before.

“[Spirit] must be, to itself, an object, but it must likewise immediately be a mediated object, which is to say, it must be a sublated object reflected into itself” (ibid).

“To sublate” translates German aufheben, a famous Hegelian term that means simultaneously to absorb and to transform (literally, “to on-lift”).

“Pure self-knowing in absolute otherness, this ether as such, is the very ground and soil of science, or knowing in its universality. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or demands that consciousness is situated in this element. However, this element itself has its culmination and its transparency only through the movement of its coming-to-be. It is pure spirituality, or, the universal in the mode of simple immediacy. Because it is the immediacy of spirit, because it is the substance of spirit, it is transfigured essentiality, reflection that is itself simple, or, is immediacy; it is being that is a reflective turn into itself” (pp. 16-17).

In a very characteristic gesture, he begins to point out that in human life, even mediation and immediacy don’t just stand alongside each other as statically independent opposites. Rather, we end up with all sorts of mixed forms of “mediated immediacy” and “immediatized mediation”. This interweaving is especially typical of what he calls “spirit”.

By “science”, once again, he means mediated rational understanding. “Absolute otherness” is the antithesis of the identity-oriented simplicity and rigidity of the point of view of ordinary consciousness. What we mainly encounter in life are mixtures of these two, with a tilt toward the ordinary. I’m inclined to think there could be no human experience at all without some admixture of otherness. A stronger otherness disturbs our complacency and takes us out of our comfort zone, but Hegel wants to gently suggest that this can be a good thing.

“However much the standpoint of consciousness, which is to say, the standpoint of knowing objective things to be opposed to itself and knowing itself to be opposed to them, counts as the other to science — the other, in which consciousness is at one with itself, counts instead as the loss of spirit — still, in comparison, the element of science possesses for consciousness an other-worldly remoteness in which consciousness is no longer in possession of itself. Each of these two parts seems to the other to be an inversion of the truth” (p. 17).

Here he acknowledges that what he is recommending must seem incredibly strange from the perspective of ordinary consciousness.

He continues, “For the natural consciousness to entrust itself immediately to science would be to make an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk upside down all of a sudden. The compulsion to accept this unaccustomed attitude and to transport itself in that way would be, so it would seem, a violence imposed on it with neither any advance preparation nor with any necessity. — Science may be in its own self what it will, but in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness, it presents itself as an inversion of the latter…. Lacking actuality, science is the in-itself, the purpose, which at the start is still something inner, at first not as spirit but only as spiritual substance. It has to express itself and become for itself, and this means nothing else than that it has to posit self-consciousness as being at one with itself” (ibid).

Hegel’s own favored attitudes, like rationality or “science”, are not exempt from the general requirement of development. To simply try to foist “science” or our favored view of rationality or the value of otherness on the public as ready-made conclusions differs little from attempts to socially impose any arbitrary prejudice. It is a means not at all suited to the ends of philosophy.

In speaking of “immediate self-consciousness”, he applies another paradoxical mixed form. The very essence of self-consciousness for Hegel is mediation, or the opposite of immediacy. But even the most highly mediated form can also be named, pointed at, presented, represented, or recalled in a more immediate way. Every level of development has its own characteristic reflection in relative immediacy.

He continues, “This coming-to-be of science itself, or, of knowing, is what is presented in this phenomenology of spirit” (ibid).

“Knowing, as it is at first, or, as immediate spirit, is devoid of spirit, is sensuous consciousness. In order to become genuine knowing, or, in order to beget the element of science which is its pure concept, immediate spirit must laboriously travel down a long path…. In any case, it is something very different from the inspiration which begins immediately, like a shot from a pistol, with absolute knowledge, and which has already finished with all other standpoints simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them” (pp. 17-18).

Immediate spirit is devoid of spirit in the deeper sense that travels down a long path. But still it contains a beginning.

“The aim is spirit’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience demands the impossible, which is to say, to achieve the end without the means. On the one hand, the length of the path has to be endured, for each moment is necessary — but on the other hand, one must linger at every stage along the way, for each stage is itself an entire individual shape” (p. 19).

Rational understanding has to grow organically — to be actively taken up and worked over by its participants — to realize its value. Once again, it is never enough to just present summary conclusions and expect the world to agree, no matter how right they are. A long, patient working out is essential to achieving the goal he has in mind.

“In this movement… what still remains is the representation of and the familiarity with the forms” (ibid).

“The element thus still has the same character of uncomprehended immediacy, or, of unmoved indifference as existence itself, or, it has only passed over into representational thought. — As a result, it is at the same time familiar to us, or, it is the sort of thing that spirit has finished with, in which spirit has no more activity, and, as a result, in which spirit has no further interest” (ibid).

Familiarity is an issue because it leads us to take things for granted and become inattentive. Hegel contrasts all forms of static representation of knowledge with the kind of active coming-to-be of knowing he is aiming at.

He continues, “However much the activity, which is finished with existence, is itself the immediate, or however much it is the existing mediation and thereby the movement only of the particular spirit which is not comprehending itself, still in contrast knowing is directed against the representational thought which has come about through this immediacy, is directed against this familiarity, and it is thus the doing of the universal self and the interest of thinking” (ibid).

In more Aristotelian language, once an understanding is acquired, it becomes passively available for easy use. The mode of this availability and easiness is a kind of habit. Habits have a great utility for action and responding to the world, but in exercising a habit we are not learning anything new. The active becoming of knowing, on the other hand, demands continuous learning.

“What is familiar and well-known as such is not really known for the very reason that it is familiar and well-known. In the case of cognition, the most common form of self-deception and deception of others is when one presupposes something as well known and then makes one’s peace with it. In that kind of back-and-forth chatter about pros and cons, such knowing, without knowing how it happens to it, never really gets anywhere. Subject and object, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are, as is well known, all unquestioningly laid as foundation stones which constitute fixed points from which to start and to which to return…. Thus, for a person to grasp and to examine matters consists only in seeing whether he finds everything said by everybody else to match up with his own idea of the matter, or with whether it seems that way to him and whether or not it is something with which he is familiar” (p. 20).

“To break up a representation into its original elements is to return to its moments, which at least do not have the form of a representation which one has merely stumbled across, but which instead constitute the immediate possession of the self. To be sure, this analysis would only arrive at thoughts which are themselves familiar and fixed…. However, what is separated, the non-actual itself, is itself an essential moment, for the concrete is self-moving only because it divides itself and turns itself into the non-actual” (ibid).

Actualization as a process is not just the tranquil extension of what is already actual. The emergence of new actuality essentially depends on what is currently non-actual.

He continues, “The activity of separating is the force and labor of understanding, the most astonishing and the greatest of all the powers, or rather, which is the absolute power” (ibid).

Hegel is better known as a sharp critic of the limits of the understanding that divides and sees only fixed things. But here, against the Romantics he defends analytical understanding’s creatively disruptive role in unsettling our complacency.

He continues, “The circle, which, enclosed within itself, is at rest and which, as substance, sustains its moments, is the immediate and is, for that reason, an unsurprising relationship. However, the accidental, separated from its surroundings, attains an isolated freedom and its own proper existence only in its being bound to other actualities and only as existing in their context; as such, it is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thinking, of the pure I” (ibid).

Just as new actualization depends on what is non-actual, the complacency of substantial existence is only spurred to new learning by what first appears as accident.

“Spirit only wins its truth by finding its feet in its absolute disruption” (p. 21).

To “find its feet in absolute disruption” is to be at home in otherness.

He continues, “Spirit is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case when we say of something that it is nothing, or that it is false, and then, being done with it, go off on our own way on to something else. No, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it” (ibid).

“Negation” for Hegel is not the simple thing that it is in Boolean logic. Boolean negation is purely formal, and yields the exact opposite of its input. For Hegel, every manifestation of otherness is a sort of “negation”. Personally, I prefer the language of otherness. Thus I would say, “looking otherness in the face and lingering with it”. This involves looking beyond fixed thoughts and everything that has the form of givenness.

“[I]n modern times, the individual finds the abstract ready-made…. Nowadays the task before us consists not so much in purifying the individual of the sensuously immediate and in making him into a thinking substance… It consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal through the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts. However, it is much more difficult to set fixed thoughts into fluid motion than it is to bring sensuous existence into such fluidity” (ibid).

Ready-made abstractions are the bane of deeper understanding. It is far easier to announce that we ought to overcome them than to actually succeed in doing so.

“Thoughts become fluid by pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizing itself as a moment, or, by pure self-certainty abstracting itself from itself — it does not consist in only omitting itself, or, setting itself off to one side. Rather, it consists in giving up the fixity of its self-positing as well as the fixity of the purely concrete…. Through this movement, pure thoughts become concepts, and are for the first time what they are in truth: self-moving movements” (pp. 21-22).

In Hegel’s usage, a “concept” is not a fixed thought but an active rational disposition. Further, he suggests that real immersion in active thought implicitly involves letting go of a fixed presupposed self separate from the activity of thinking. At the same time thoughts, instead of being identified with inert fixed contents, become “self-moving movements” (see Ideas Are Not Inert).

“[I]t ceases to be the type of philosophizing which seeks to ground the truth in only clever argumentation about pros and cons or in inferences based on fully determinate thoughts and the consequences following from them. Instead, through the movement of the concept, this path will encompass the complete worldliness of consciousness in its necessity” (p. 22).

The “complete worldliness” of consciousness is the overcoming of the habitual duality of consciousness and object in which consciousness “sets itself off to one side” from everything else.

“Consciousness knows and comprehends nothing but what is in experience, for what is in experience is just spiritual substance, namely, as the object of its own self. However, spirit becomes the object, for it is this movement of becoming an other to itself…. And experience is the name of this very movement in which the immediate, the non-experienced, i.e., the abstract (whether the abstract is that of sensuous being or of ‘a simple’ which has only been thought about) alienates itself and then comes around to itself out of this alienation” (pp. 22-23).

“The inequality which takes place in consciousness between the I and the substance which is its object is their difference, the negative itself. It can be viewed as the defect of the two, but it is their very soul or is what moves them” (p. 23).

Here inequality manifests otherness. Notably he refers to it “taking place” rather than simply existing.

Even the core defect of the standpoint of ordinary consciousness — its duality, in which consciousness stands “off to one side” of its objects — in its capacity as a source of unrest already points beyond itself, kicking off the whole long movement that the Phenomenology aims to characterize.

“However much this negative now initially appears as the inequality between the I and the object, still it is just as much the inequality of the substance with itself. What seems to take place outside of the substance, to be an activity directed against it, is its own doing, and substance shows that it is essentially subject” (ibid).

Unqualified “substance” in Hegel’s sense really encompasses everything there is, even though we imagine that we are somewhere off to the side. Thus the apparent duality between us and substance that we think about turns out to be internal to substance itself. What seemed to be “our” separate activity turns out to be equally the activity of substance that is no longer “just” substance. The substance that is thought of loses its fixity and becomes an active thought.

“Why bother with the false at all?…. Ordinary ideas on this subject especially obstruct the entrance to the truth…. To be sure, we can know falsely. For something to be known falsely means that knowing is unequal to its substance. Yet this very inequality is the differentiating per se, the essential moment. It is indeed out of this differentiation that its equality comes to be, and this equality, which has come to be, is truth. However, it is not truth in the sense that would just discard inequality, like discarding the slag from pure metal, nor even is it truth in the way that a finished vessel bears no trace of the instruments that shaped it. Rather, as the negative, inequality is still itself immediately present, just as the self in the true as such is itself present” (pp. 23-24).

Hegel’s usage of “knowing” is much more inclusive than the strict Platonic or Kantian sense that I have been recommending here.

Here we reach another delicate point. What is false, he is saying, is not purely and simply false, because it also creates the unrest that is the impetus for further development. But this is very easily misunderstood, and can lead to complete nonsense.

To avoid this kind of misunderstanding, he continues, “For that reason, it cannot be said that the false constitutes a moment or even a constitutive part of the true. Take the saying that ‘In every falsehood, there is something true’ — in this expression both of them are regarded as oil and water, which cannot mix and are only externally combined. It is precisely for the sake of pointing out the significance of the moment of complete otherness that their expression must no longer be employed in the instances where their otherness has been sublated. Just as the expressions, ‘unity of subject and object’ or of ‘the finite and the infinite’, or of ‘being and thinking’, etc., have a certain type of clumsiness to them in that subject and object, etc., mean what they are outside of their unity, and therefore in their unity, they are not meant in the way that their expression states them, so too the false as the false is no longer a moment of truth” (pp. 24-25).

Here he is employing an Aristotelian “said in many ways” distinction to avoid confusion and nonsense. It remains the case that everything for Hegel being more than it “just” is requires a great wakefulness on the part of the reader, to avoid slipping into just the kind of nonsense he is warning about.

Incidentally, he suggests that “otherness” is a better alternative to talk about the unity of subject and object, finite and infinite, being and thinking, etc.

Wrapping up this part of the argument, he continues, “The dogmatism of the way of thinking, in both the knowing of philosophy and the study of it, is nothing but the opinion that truth consists either in a proposition which is a fixed result or else in a proposition which is immediately known…. [E]ven bare truths… do not exist without the movement of self-consciousness…. Even in the case of immediate intuition, acquaintance with them is linked to the reasons behind it” (p. 25).

Activist Reason?

We are still in the middle of the “Reason” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology. From “observing” Reason we now move to “active” Reason. In the immediate context Hegel here seems to have in mind neither activity in an Aristotelian sense nor a Reason he really wants to endorse, but instead a sort of political “activism” driven by negative, “hard-hearted” emotion. This particular kind of “activist” attitude turns out really not to be very reasonable in its pursuit of “reasonableness”.

In the bigger picture though, we have finally reached the threshold of ethics. Harris in his commentary anticipates that this will eventually lead to a “Happy Consciousness of the Ethical Substance” (Hegel’s Ladder II, p. 7), in contrast to the Unhappy Consciousness of the Unchangeable. But for now we are still at the very beginning of this movement. As anyone following the development will have come to expect by now, there will still be many twists and turns to come, and many more false starts to overcome.

As Harris puts it, in Observing Reason we ended up with “the embodied mortal self that knows that it is free” (ibid). Having patiently followed the development so far, we already have a much less one-sided view of this freedom. Hegel often makes simple, unqualified remarks of this sort about both Freedom and Necessity that can easily be misunderstood if taken in isolation; in reality he sharply rejects both voluntarism and determinism. Here I think the “knowledge” he charitably ascribes at this stage is really akin what he elsewhere calls (a merely subjective) “certainty”. It does contain a very important grain of truth, though.

According to Harris, “The observing self was immediately identical with its observed knowledge. Self-Actualizing Reason is a higher mode of Self-Consciousness; it knows that the objective world is there, but it is there to be transformed. Selfhood is not to be found in the world, but expressed there; Reason is not to be observed, but made. This making is an interaction, because the immediate object of this self-conscious activity is another self (and is soon to be recognized as a world of other selves)” (ibid). But “The active self has to learn how to recognize itself in the other” (p. 8).

Expanding on Hegel’s reference to Goethe’s Faust, Harris uses the literary character of Faust to illustrate this stage. “Faust is quite aware that everyone recognizes his rational status; and he recognizes theirs, likewise. He is not in any danger of getting into a life and death struggle, and he does not keep serfs in fear of their lives. But the self-realization of others is not his concern; and the first lesson that life teaches him is that that is a mistake” (ibid).

Hegel here refers back to the unalienated character of traditional Sittlichkeit or “ethical life”. Harris notes that many readers have misunderstood Hegel as simply advocating communal values over the individual. He says the Greek polis or city-state with its large reliance on custom and tradition did not in fact realize Hegel’s Ethical Substance, but was only a kind of ethical “thing”, even though Ethical Substance implicitly had to be there already, in the form of the Greek people.

Moving on, “The ‘active Reason’ that we are actually observing… is the Self-Consciousness that has emerged from the ‘night of the supersensible Beyond into the daylight of the present'” (p. 16). “Neither the natural nor the rational self-consciousness has any memory of a ‘Paradise Lost’ that is to become ‘Paradise Regained'” (p. 18). The self-consciousness that we are observing has to begin again “from nothing” (p. 19).

But “Like the freedom of the Lord in the world of the natural self, the higher freedom of Reason now exists (paradoxically) only in order to organize the life of natural necessity” (ibid). The rational self “lives in a world of utilities” (p. 18). At this stage “The social substance is selbstlos [selfless]; ‘selfhood’ belongs only to the individuals who have their careers to make, and their family fortunes to maintain” (p. 19). This is the modern world of civil society.

“Faust’s lesson is about human relations. He has to learn from actual experience that his own rational self is constituted by its relations with others” (p. 21).

What Hegel calls the attitude of “Active Reason” here seems to have more to do with a desire to impose a personal conception of “reasonableness” on the world and others whom we encounter than with “reasoning”.

Active Reason’s first approach to morality is grounded in a crusading form of personal conscience that Hegel calls the Law of the Heart. Purely in its own name, it passes judgment on the world and everything in it. It finds that something is wrong with the world, and sets out naively to make things right. This can quickly go overboard. Harris here speaks of “an insane crusade to bring the false Heart into subjection” (p. 23). Hegel himself refers to the Law of the Heart as a “frenzy of self-conceit” (quoted, p. 32). The Heart concludes that “The world is mad, and the madness is induced and sustained by the selfish interests of its rulers. The fault lies… with certain bad apples” (p. 42). Hegel thinks this kind of personally blaming attitude inevitably goes wrong.

Rousseau had used the term “Law of the Heart” to express a positive ideal. Hegel’s overwhelmingly negative discussion can thus be read as implicit criticism of Rousseau, but he also uses the term to characterize the attitude of some Romantic literary characters.

A “second inversion” of active Reason takes the form of a certain abstract modern notion of “Virtue” like that promoted by Robespierre and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, where everyone is called upon to unconditionally subordinate themselves to the needs of the social order. This takes us from an error of one-sided individualism to an error of one-sided collectivism.

What would deserve to be called ethical Reason does not appear fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. For Hegel it is always a matter of human practice. These unbalanced early stages of human Reason’s self-actualization reflect its immaturity at this point, but (according to Hegel, if we take a long view) constitute necessary stages in its process of learning.

Next in this series: Real Individuality?

Hegelian Semantics

Brandom begins his second Brentano lecture saying, “On the ground floor of Hegel’s intellectual edifice stands his non-psychological conception of the conceptual. This is the idea that to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence (his “determinate negation” and “mediation”) to other such contentful items. The relations of incompatibility and consequence are denominated “material” to indicate that they articulate the contents rather than form of what stands in those relations. This is his first and most basic semantic idea: an understanding of conceptual content in terms of modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion” (p. 39).

I think Aristotle and even Plato would have agreed with all of this: both the nonpsychological nature of concepts and the fundamental role of modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion in determining meaning. But the Latin medieval to European early modern mainstream was in this regard much more influenced by the Stoic explanation of meaning by representation, and by the “psychological” cast of Augustine’s thought.

Brandom goes on to characterize Hegel’s position as a “bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism”, carefully unpacking each part of this dense formula. The two modalities in question are the two fundamental ways in which things have grip on us: the “bite” of reality and the moral “ought”. Brandom holds that there is a deep structural parallel or isomorphism between these two kinds of constraints that affect us. Further, the isomorphism is also a hylomorphism in the sense that the two modalities are not only structurally similar, but so deeply intertwined in practice as to be only analytically distinguishable. Concepts and normativity are interdependent. Finally, it is through concepts and normativity that all our notions of the solidity of reality are articulated.

This kind of conceptual realism in Hegel is complemented by what Brandom calls a conceptual idealism. “At the grossest level of structure, the objective realm of being is articulated by nomological relations, and the subjective realm of thought is articulated by norm-governed processes, activities or practices. It can be asked how things stand with the intentional nexus between these realms. Should it be construed in relational or practical-processual terms?” (p. 43). “Hegel takes there to be an explanatory asymmetry in that the semantic relations between those discursive practices and the objective relations they know about and exploit practically are instituted by the discursive practices that both articulate the subjective realm of thought and establish its relations to the objective realm of being. This asymmetry claim privileging specifically recollective discursive practices over semantic relations in understanding the intentional nexus between subjectivity and objectivity is the thesis of conceptual idealism.” (p. 44).

Plato had talked about recollection in a mythical or poetic way in relation to paradoxes of learning. Hegel’s more “historiographical” recollection is also related to a kind of learning, but Hegel specifically stresses the importance of error as the stimulus to learning. Brandom says there is both a “subjunctive sensitivity of thought to things” (ibid) and a “normative responsibility of thought to fact. What things are for consciousness ought to conform to what things are in themselves.” (p. 45). This translates into a central obligation to repair our errors, and for Hegel the specific way to do this is through a recollective account of what was right in our previous stance; how we came to realize that it went wrong; and what we did to fix it.

“The normative standard of success of intentional agency is set by how things objectively are after an action. The idea of action includes a background structural commitment to the effect that things ought to be as they are intended to be. Conceptual idealism focuses on the fact that all these alethic and normative modal relations are instituted by the recollective activity that is the final phase of the cycle of cognition and action” (ibid).

“Conceptual realism asserts the identity of conceptual content between facts and thoughts of those facts. (Compare Wittgenstein: ‘When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this—is—so.’ [PI§95]) Conceptual idealism offers a pragmatic account of the practical process by which that semantic-intentional relation between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves is established. Pragmatics, as I am using the term, is the study of the use of concepts by subjects engaging in discursive practices. Conceptual idealism asserts a distinctive kind of explanatory priority (a kind of authority) of pragmatics over semantics. For this reason it is a pragmatist semantic explanatory strategy, and its idealism is a pragmatist idealism. The sui generis rational practical activity given pride of explanatory place by this sort of pragmatism is recollection” (pp. 45-46).

Brandom says that Hegel’s notion of experience has two levels, corresponding to two top-level kinds of concepts he distinguishes: ordinary practical and empirical concepts, and meta-level philosophical, categorial or “logical” concepts.

“The master-strategy animating this reading of Hegel (and of Kant) is semantic descent: the idea that the ultimate point of studying these metaconcepts is what their use can teach us about the semantic contentfulness of ground-level concepts, so the best way to understand the categorial metaconcepts is to use them to talk about the use and content of ordinary concepts… The pragmatic metaconcept of the process of experience is first put in play in the Introduction, at the very beginning of [Hegel’s Phenomenology], in the form of the experience of error. It is invoked to explain how the consciousness-constitutive distinction-and-relation between what things are for consciousness and what things are in themselves shows up to consciousness itself. Hegel assumes that, however vaguely understood it might be at the outset, it is a distinction-and-relation that can at least be a topic for us, the readers of the book” (pp. 47-48).

The most naive human awareness already implicitly recognizes a distinction between appearance and reality. “The question is how this crucial distinction already shows up practically for even the most metatheoretically naïve knowing subject. How are we to understand the basic fact that ‘…the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all’… Hegel traces its origin to the experience of error” (p. 48).

“Hegel finds the roots of this sort of experience in our biological nature as desiring beings…. What a creature practically takes or treats as food, by eating it, can turn out not really to be food, if eating it does not satisfy the hunger that motivated it…. This sort of experience is the basis and practical form of learning” (p. 49). This is “the practical basis for the semantic distinction between representings and representeds, sense and referent” (pp, 49-50).

“[A]n essential part of the acknowledgment of error is practically taking or treating two commitments as incompatible. Such genuinely conceptual activity goes beyond what merely desiring beings engage in. The origins of Hegel’s idea here lie in Kant’s earlier broadly pragmatist account of what knowing subjects must do in order to count as apperceiving” (p. 50).

“Hegel breaks from the Kantian picture by adding a crucial constraint on what counts as successful repairs…. Successful repairs must explain and justify the changes made, in a special way” (p. 52). This takes the form of a historical recollection. “To be entitled to claim that things are as one now takes them to be, one must show how one found out that they are so. Doing that involves explaining what one’s earlier views got right, what they got wrong, and why…. This is the progressive emergence into explicitness, the ever more adequate expression, of what is retrospectively discerned as having been all along implicit as the norm governing and guiding the process by which its appearances arise and pass away” (p. 53). “Recollection… turns a past into a history” (p. 54).

All this serves as an explanation of how we come to have representations that actually refer to something, in terms of how we express our concerns. “In general Hegel thinks we can only understand what is implicit in terms of the expressive process by which it is made explicit. That is a recollective process. The underlying reality is construed as implicit in the sense of being a norm that all along governed the process of its gradual emergence into explicitness” (p. 56).

“Kant had the idea that representation is a normative concept. Something counts as a representing in virtue of being responsible to something else, which counts as represented by it in virtue of exercising authority over the representing by serving as a standard for assessments of its correctness as a representing. It is in precisely this sense that a recollective story treats the commitments it surveys as representings of the content currently treated as factual” (p. 58). Brandom says that Hegel reconstructs in expressive terms what the representationalists were right about, while strongly contrasting this way of thinking with representationalism.

“Hylomorphic conceptual realism then underwrites the idea of the categorial homogeneity of senses as graspable thoughts and their referents (what they represent) as correspondingly conceptually contentful, statable facts. This makes intelligible the idea that thoughts are the explicit expressions of facts. They make explicit… how the world is” (p. 60).

“The plight of finite knowing and acting subjects metaphysically guarantees liability to empirical error and practical failure. The experience of error is inescapable. What I earlier called the ‘false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends’ of inquiry can be retrospectively edited out of the sanitized, Whiggish vindicating recollective narrative, but they cannot be avoided going forward.

“Why not? In short because the rational, conceptual character of the world and its stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency are equally fundamental primordial features of the way things are” (pp. 61-62).

“For Hegel, the experience of error requires not just the revision of beliefs… but also of meanings” (p. 62). “The manifestation of stubborn, residual immediacy in thought is the inevitability of the experience of error…. [T]he ineluctability of error and the realistic possibility of genuine knowledge [both] express valid perspectives on what is always at once both the experience of error and the way of truth. The important thing is not to seize exclusively—and so one-sidedly—on either aspect, but to understand the nature of the process as one that necessarily shows up from both perspectives” (p. 63).

“One of Hegel’s animating ideas is that the independence of immediacy (its distinctive authority over structures of mediation) is manifested in its role as a principle of instability, as providing a normative demand for change, for both rejection and further development of each constellation of determinate concepts and commitments articulated by them. The independence of mediation (its distinctive authority over immediacy) is manifested in all the retrospective recollective vindications of prior constellations of commitments as genuine knowledge, as resulting from the expressively progressive revelation of reality by prior claims to knowledge.” (pp. 64-65).

“The forward-looking obligation to repair acknowledged incompatibilities of commitment acknowledges error and the inadequacy of its conceptions. The backward-looking recollective obligation to rationalize as expressively progressive previous, now superseded, repairs and recollections institutes knowledge, truth, and determinate concepts whose incompatibilities and consequences track those articulating (in a different modal key) the objective world…. The recollective process is also what Hegel calls ‘giving contingency the form of necessity.'” (p. 65).

“The key in each case is to understand [truth and error] not as properties, states, or relations that can be instantiated at a single time, but as structural features of enduring experiential processes” (p.66).

This is to move from what Hegel calls Understanding to what he calls Reason. Understanding focuses on the fixity of concepts; Reason also has regard for their malleability. To think of experience as asymptotically approaching objective facts and relations belongs to the Understanding that disregards the mutation of meanings.

“The world as it is in itself as distinct from how it is for consciousness is not a brute other, but in that distinctive sense the product of its own recollective activity in experience” (p.72).

Aristotelian Demonstration

Demonstration is literally a showing. For Aristotle, its main purpose is associated with learning and teaching, rather than proof. Its real objective is not Stoic or Cartesian certainty “that” something is true, but the clearest possible understanding of the substantive basis for definite conclusions, based on a grasping of reasons.

Aristotle’s main text dealing with demonstration, the Posterior Analytics, is not about epistemology or foundations of knowledge, although it touches on these topics. Rather, it is about the pragmatics of improving our informal semantic understanding by formal means.

For Aristotle, demonstration uses the same logical forms as dialectic, but unlike dialectic — which does not make assumptions ahead of time whether the hypotheses or opinions it examines are true, but focuses on explicating their inferential meaning — demonstration is about showing reasons and reasoning behind definite conclusions. Dialectic is a kind of conditional forward-looking interpretation based on consequences, while demonstration is a kind of backward-looking interpretation based on premises. Because demonstration’s practical purpose has to do with exhibiting the basis for definite conclusions, it necessarily seeks sound premises, or treats its premises as sound, whereas dialectic is indifferent to the soundness of the premises it analyzes in terms of their consequences.

We are said to know something in Aristotle’s stronger sense when we can clearly explain why it is the case, so demonstration is connected with knowledge. This connection has historically led to much misunderstanding. In the Arabic and Latin commentary traditions, demonstration was interpreted as proof. The Posterior Analytics was redeployed as an epistemological model for “science” based on formal deduction, understood as the paradigm for knowledge, while the role of dialectic and practical judgment in Aristotle was greatly downplayed. (See also Demonstrative “Science”?; Searching for a Middle Term; Plato and Aristotle Were Inferentialists; The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle; Belief; Foundations?; Brandom on Truth.)