Worldview, Lifeworld

I had expected to skip further ahead, but Habermas’s second chapter is also of great interest. He is digging deeper into the concept of criticizable validity claims in ordinary social situations, and what conditions they presuppose. In a way he is reaching for something like what I used to imagine a sociology of knowledge could be, but he connects it with linguistic pragmatics, speech act theory, argumentation theory, and linguistic philosophy in general, in a way that is quite original.

“The concept of propositional truth is in fact too narrow to cover everything for which participants in argument claim validity in the logical sense. For this reason the theory of argumentation must be equipped with a more comprehensive concept of validity that is not restricted to validity in the sense of truth. But it does not at all follow from this that we have to renounce concepts of validity analogous to truth, to expunge every counterfactual moment from the concept of validity and to equate validity with context-dependent acceptability” (Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1, p. 30).

Habermas wants to allow neither absolutism nor relativism, as is entirely appropriate. (Everything interesting is in between.)

In the early 20th century, Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge had a similar goal. Mannheim’s work was also based on an analysis of processes of modernization, but got caught up in allegations of relativism. Habermas aims to do better on this score. And at least in general terms, due in large measure to his inclusion of considerations from linguistic philosophy, I think he succeeds.

“We try to support a claim with good grounds or reasons; the quality of the reasons and their relevance can be called into question by the other side; we meet objections and are in some cases forced to modify our original position” (ibid).

To me, this is an articulation of what could be considered the fundamental principle of Socratic, Platonic, or ethical dialogue. It is also fundamental to Brandom’s enterprise. (In the near future, I’ll add a post on Brandom’s interesting discussion of Habermas.)

“The rationality of worldviews is not measured in terms of logical and semantic properties but in terms of the formal-pragmatic basic concepts they place at the disposal of individuals for interpreting the world” (p. 45).

Here, like Brandom, he is arguing that pragmatics comes before semantics in the order of explanation. But Habermas also has a substantial engagement with sociological and cultural-anthropological theory. He has lengthy discussions of Max Weber, but also substantially addresses Durkheim, George Herbert Mead, and Talcott Parsons. I put the same caveats on “formal-pragmatic” as I did on “formal concepts” above.

“From Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss, anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out the peculiar confusion between nature and culture” (p. 48).

This observation has great relevance to ordinary life. One of the things that culture prominently does is to appear to be natural.

“Validity is confounded with empirical efficacy…. Concepts of validity such as morality and truth are amalgamated with empirical ordering concepts, such as causality and health. Thus a linguistically constituted worldview can be identified with the world-order itself to such an extent that it cannot be perceived as an interpretation of the world that is subject to error and open to criticism” (p. 50).

This is how “ideology” works.

“Validity claims are in principle open to criticism because they are based on formal world-concepts. They presuppose a world that is identical for all possible observers, or a world intersubjectively shared by members. Such claims call for the rational response of a partner in communication” (ibid).

Here we again have the programmatic ideal of open discussion that Habermas shares with Rorty and Brandom. It is not quite clear what Habermas means by “formal concepts”. I am not sure why he specifies that the concepts must be “formal”, and I think Brandom would definitely dispute that they should be called that. But I have the sense that when he says “formal”, Habermas may just mean “subject to the give and take of reasons”. Habermas does not seem to share Brandom’s emphasis on material inference, so he may think of reasoning in general as “formal”.

“By contrast, mythical worldviews prevent us from categorially uncoupling nature and culture, not only through conceptually mixing the objective and social worlds but also through reifying the linguistic worldview. As a result the concept of the world is dogmatically invested with a specific content that is withdrawn from rational discussion and thus from criticism” (p. 51).

Habermas offers a more specific analysis of how what Brandom calls “traditional” normativity emerges.

“But an analogous mixing of domains of reality can be shown as well for the relationship of culture and internal nature or the subjective world…. Only against the background of a normative reality that has become autonomous, and measured against the criticizable claim to normative rightness, can intentions, wishes, attitudes, feelings appear as illegitimate or merely idiosyncratic, as nongeneralizable and merely subjective. To the degree that mythical worldviews hold sway over cognition and orientations for action, a clear demarcation of a domain of subjectivity is apparently not possible. Intentions and motives are just as little separated from actions and their consequences as feelings are from their normatively fixed, stereotyped expressions” (ibid, emphasis in original).

I found this eye-opening. He seems to be suggesting that normative reality becomes autonomous (i.e., subject to critical discussion) as a result of the same complex historical processes of economic/technical/instrumental rationalization that we elsewhere decry for their alienating effects. This raises the stakes quite a bit.

I also appreciate the three-way distinction between subjective, objective, and intersubjective.

“Mythical worldviews are not understood by members as interpretive systems that are attached to cultural traditions, constituted by internal interrelations of meaning, symbolically related to reality, and connected with validity claims — and thus exposed to criticism and open to revision…. Of course, this does not yet prove that the supposed rationality expressed in our understanding of the world is more than a reflection of the particular features of a culture stamped by science, that it may rightfully raise a claim to universality” (pp. 52-53).

Habermas notes that discussions of modernity and rationality are often taken to involve a Eurocentric prejudice, and clearly wants to avoid this.

“Worldviews store the cultural knowledge with the help of which a language community interprets the world” (pp. 56-57).

With my Platonic scruples, I would not call this kind of acculturation “knowledge”. It seems closer to the notion of Aristotelian ethos.

“Inasmuch as worldviews refer to totalities, we cannot get behind them as articulations of an understanding of the world, even if they can be revised. In this respect they are like a portrait that claims to represent a person as a whole. A portrait is neither a mapping that can be exact or inexact, nor a rendering of facts in the sense of a proposition that can be true or false. A portrait offers rather an angle of vision from which the person represented appears in a certain way. Thus there can be numerous portraits of the same person; they can make the character appear in quite different aspects, and yet they can all be experienced as accurate, authentic, or adequate…. Worldviews can no more be true or false than can portraits” (p. 58).

“On the other hand, worldviews differ from portraits in that they in turn make possible utterances that admit of truth…. Owing to their reference to totality, worldviews are indeed removed from the dimension in which a judgment of them according to criteria of truth makes sense; even the choice of criteria according to which the truth of statements is to be judged may depend on the basic conceptual context of a worldview. But this does not mean that the idea of truth might itself be understood in a particularistic way. Whatever language system we choose, we always start intuitively from the presupposition that truth is a universal validity claim. If a statement is true, it merits universal assent, no matter in which language it is formulated. The adequacy of a linguistically articulated worldview is a function of the true statements that are possible in this language system” (pp. 58-59).

Here he articulates a moral ideal of universality. While we must constantly be wary of premature claims to universality, really effective universality just is the valid generalization of shared understanding. If shared understanding is a good thing, then more or deeper shared understanding is a better thing.

“Worldviews are comparable only in respect to their potency for conferring meaning…. They open equally primordial possibilities of ‘making sense of human life’. They thereby structure forms of life that are incommensurable in their value. The rationality of forms of life cannot be reduced to the cognitive adequacy of the worldviews underlying them” (p. 59, emphasis in original).

“However, worldviews are constitutive not only for processes of reaching understanding but for the social integration and socialization of individuals as well…. This identity-securing knowledge becomes more and more formal along the path from closed to open worldviews” (p. 64, emphasis in original).

Again, I would not call it knowledge, but the point still stands. The way he uses “formal” here, in explicit association with openness, influences my reading of “formal” in the other passages.

“In discussing Weber’s sociology of religion in the next chapter, I shall attempt to make the development of religious worldviews comprehensible from the aspect of a development of formal world-concepts, that is, as a learning process. In doing so I shall be making tacit use of a concept of learning that Piaget expounded for the ontogenesis of structures of consciousness” (p. 67).

This ambitious goal of treating historical development as a learning process applies as well to Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom. Habermas more specifically connects it to Piaget’s work in developmental cognitive psychology and the concept of open systems, both of which broadly speaking are empirical rather than philosophical. Here some balance is needed. If taken too far or in the wrong way, belief in progress can turn into an apologetic for the status quo.

“The growing child works out for himself, equiprimordially, the concepts of the external and internal worlds in dealing practically with objects and with himself. Piaget also draws a distinction between dealing with physical objects and dealing with social objects, that is, ‘reciprocal action between a subject and objects and reciprocal action between a subject and other subjects’ (p. 68).

“Thus for Piaget there is cognitive development in a wider sense, which is not understood solely as the construction of an external universe but also as the construction of a reference system for the simultaneous demarcation of the objective and social worlds from the subjective world. Cognitive development signifies in general the decentration of an egocentric understanding of the world” (p. 69, emphasis in original).

The goal of reaching understanding is far more important than being “right” in a dispute.

Habermas has been criticized for his “cognitivist” approach to ethics. I think cognitivism in this sense boils down to the position that what is good cannot be determined in complete abstraction from what is true. Brandom and Habermas also assert the converse: that what is true cannot be determined in complete abstraction from what is good. I don’t see anything narrow about this.

“Every action oriented to reaching understanding can be conceived as part of a cooperative process of interpretation aiming at situation definitions that are intersubjectively recognized” (pp. 69-70).

Here we have shared understanding as an overarching moral goal.

“I can introduce here the concept of the Lebenswelt or lifeworld, to begin with as the correlate of processes of reaching understanding…. In their interpretive accomplishments the members of a communication community demarcate the one objective world and their intersubjectively shared social world from the subjective worlds of individuals and (other) collectives. The world-concepts and the corresponding validity claims provide the formal scaffolding with which those acting communicatively order problematic contexts of situations, that is, those requiring agreement, in their lifeworld, which is presupposed as unproblematic” (p. 70).

“The lifeworld also stores the interpretive work of preceding generations. It is the conservative counterweight to the risk of disagreement that arises within every actual process of reaching understanding; for communicative actors can achieve an understanding only by way of taking yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims. The relation between these weights changes with the decentration of worldviews. The more the worldview that furnishes the cultural stock of knowledge is decentered, the less the need for understanding is covered in advance by an interpreted lifeworld immune from critique and the more this need has to be met by the interpretive accomplishments of the participants themselves…. The more cultural traditions predecide which validity claims, when, where, for what, from whom, and to whom must be accepted, the less the participants themselves have the possibility of making explicit and examining the potential grounds on which their yes/no positions are based” (pp. 70-71).

As he says, lifeworlds in general have a conservative aspect. They serve stability, not novelty. But more specifically, he is emphasizing that based on a more detailed view, lifeworlds can also be placed on a scale of relative openness or closedness.

Here he begins to discuss mythical worldviews. Mythical worldviews, he maintains, are inevitably closed in this sense. Conversely, this seems to be the way in which potentially alienating modern abstraction also at the same time grounds discursive openness. Modernization is then conceived as a progress along this axis, toward greater discursive openness.

“To the degree that the lifeworld of a social group is interpreted through a mythical worldview, the burden of interpretation is removed from the individual member, as well as the chance for him to bring about an agreement open to criticism. To the extent that the worldview remains sociocentric in Piaget’s sense, it does not permit differentiation between the world of existing states of affairs, valid norms and expressible subjective experiences. The linguistic worldview is reified as the world order and cannot be seen as an interpretive system open to criticism” (p. 71).

Our lifeworld comprises everything that we take to be what Sellars and Brandom call “Given” (as in “the Myth of”). Like “consciousness”, lifeworld is another more specific name for appearance. Decentered understanding works by partially negating or qualifying the givenness of the “Given”.

“If we employ Piaget’s concept of decentration as a guiding thread in this way, in order to clarify the internal connection between the structure of a worldview, the lifeworld as the context of processes of understanding, and the possibilities of a rational conduct of life, we again encounter the concept of communicative rationality. This concept relates a decentered understanding of the world to the possibility of discursively redeeming criticizable validity claims” (p. 72).

Habermas’s communicative reason, it seems to me, is an interpretive paradigm of what I would call ethical inquiry, completely independent of the instrumental reason associated with efficient causes and efficient means of doing things.

I am pleased to see the use he repeatedly makes of the notion of “decentering”.

“Perhaps we should talk instead of a balance among non-self-sufficient moments, an equilibrated interplay of the cognitive with the moral and the aesthetic-practical. But the attempt to provide an equivalent for what was once intended by the good life should not mislead us into deriving this idea from the formal concept of reason with which modernity’s decentered understanding of the world has left us” (p. 73).

This is a little ambiguous. I suspect he means both that we can no longer define the good life at all, and also more specifically that the good life cannot be derived from formal reason. I agree with the second, but I think it is still meaningful to talk about the good life, and that it has an important relation to informal practices of reason.

“A critique of this sort can indeed be based on the procedural concept of communicative rationality if it can be shown that the decentration of world understanding and the rationalization of the lifeworld are necessary conditions for an emancipated society” (p. 74).

I provisionally believe this is indeed what he aims to show.

Communicative Action

When it appeared, Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action was called the most ambitious study in social theory in recent memory. Its scope is far larger than I will address. Here my aim is only to capture a few top-level highlights from his first chapter that are relevant in an ethical context.

Habermas aims to develop a notion of communicative action that treats meaning as inherently social, thus overcoming the modern “philosophy of consciousness” that threatens to reduce everything to individual subjectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes that every saying is a doing.

“To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down…. Theories of modern empirical science, whether along the lines of logical empiricism, critical rationalism, or constructivism, make a normative and at the same time universalistic claim that is no longer covered by fundamental assumptions of an ontological or transcendental-philosophical nature” (vol. 1, p. 2).

I’m a little more hopeful that first philosophy is still a meaningful endeavor. Correlated with this difference, Habermas seems to regard Aristotelian first philosophy as inevitably foundationalist, whereas I think that is by no means the case. But this all has to do with what we mean by first philosophy. For example, Avicenna complains that Aristotle should have put the first cause at the beginning of the Metaphysics, rather than only arriving at it at the end. That is to say, Avicenna takes a foundationalist view of the first cause as the Necessary Being (God), from which all else follows. Aristotle instead takes a hermeneutic approach, starting with the concrete while cultivating a variant of what Paul Ricoeur calls the long detour. Habermas too speaks of hermeneutics in this context.

“[R]ationality has less to do with the possession of knowledge than with how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (p. 8).

“We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors ‘rational’, but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs. We can call apologies, delays, surgical interventions, declarations of war, repairs, construction plans or conference decisions ‘irrational’, but not a storm, an accident, a lottery win, or an illness” (p. 9).

One way to think of this is that rationality and irrationality (and normative properties in general) are properly said only of things that have intentional structure, which is something different from sensible form or gestalt.

Habermas examines in detail Max Weber’s early 20th century theory of modernity as an increasing, primarily economic but also scientific and technological, “rationalization” of society. He points out that Weber was actually highly critical of the effects of this rationalization. This kind of rationalization is exclusively concerned with what the Frankfurt school critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno called instrumental reason, which involves a calculating, utilitarian approach to the selection of means, while downplaying any evaluation of the goodness of ends. Horkheimer and Adorno were pessimists about modernity. In this regard, Habermas is much closer to Rorty and Brandom, in that all three are optimists about modernity.

Habermas sees a night-and-day contrast between instrumental reason and the communicative reason he is concerned to promote. In Aristotelian terms, instrumental reason treats everything in light of a degraded concept of efficient causality, as if that were the only thing that is relevant. Communicative reason on the other hand aims at shared understanding, and shared understanding implicitly tends toward universality.

“These reflections point in the direction of basing rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding…. A judgment can be objective if it is undertaken on the basis of a transsubjective validity claim that has the same meaning for observers and nonparticipants as it has for the acting subject himself. Truth and efficiency are claims of this kind. Thus assertions and goal-directed actions are the more rational the better the claim (to propositional truth or to efficiency that is connected with them) can be defended against criticism” (ibid).

“This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (p. 10, emphasis in original).

“It is constitutive of the rationality of the utterance that the speaker raises a criticizable validity claim for the proposition p, a claim that the hearer can accept or reject for good reason…. It is constitutive of the action’s rationality that the actor bases it on a plan that implies the truth of p…. An assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding about something in the world with at least one other participant in communication” (p. 11).

“Behavioral reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism, and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were the expressions of a subject’s capacity for action. But this is to speak of rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptiblity to criticism and grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able to provide reasons or grounds” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This recalls Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism argument.

To make assertions at all is to invite critical discussion. This is a very familiar point from Brandom. Brandom himself acknowledges significant influence from Habermas.

This kind of free inquiry is also exactly what Socrates was all about. Plato implicitly illustrates it time and again through abundant examples in his dialogues.

“The abstract concept of the world is a necessary condition if communicatively acting subjects are to reach understanding among themselves about what takes place in the world or is to be effected in it. Through this communicative practice they assure themselves at the same time of their common life-relations, of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. This life world is bounded by the totality of interpretations presupposed by the members as background knowledge. To elucidate the concept of rationality the phenomenologist must then examine the conditions for communicatively achieved consensus” (p. 13, emphasis in original).

Husserl’s notions of intersubjectivity and lifeworld were extensively developed in the socially oriented phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, to which Habermas makes reference.

“In the context of communicative action, only those persons count as responsible who, as members of a communication-community, can orient their actions to intersubjectively recognized validity claims” (p. 14).

Intersubjectivity — genuine sharing and community — also counts as an ethical ideal. Habermas advocates “dialogical” approaches instead of “monological” ones.

“But there are obviously other types of expressions for which we can have good reasons, even though they are not tied to truth or success claims” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

“Normatively regulated actions and expressive self-presentations have, like assertions or constative speech acts, the character of meaningful expressions, understandable in their context, which are connected with criticizable validity claims. Their reference is to norms and subjective experiences rather than to facts. The agent makes the claim that his behavior is right in relation to a normative context recognized as legitimate, or that first-person utterance of an experience to which he has privileged access is truthful or sincere. Like constative speech acts, these expressions can also go wrong. The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too” (pp. 15-16, emphasis in original).

He takes very seriously the notion of argumentation, discussing at some length the work of Stephen Toulmin. This approach dwells on the validity of arguments, rather than the deduction of conclusions from assumptions.

“Thus the rationality proper to the communicative practice of everyday life points to the practice of argumentation as a court of appeal that makes it possible to continue communicative action with other means when disagreements can no longer be repaired with everyday routines and yet are not to be settled by the direct or strategic use of force” (pp. 17-18).

“Corresponding to the openness of rational expressions to being explained, there is, on the side of persons who behave rationally, a willingness to expose themselves to criticism and, if necessary, to participate properly in argumentation” (p. 18).

“In virtue of their criticizability, rational expressions also admit of improvement; we can correct failed attempts if we can successfully identify our mistakes. The concept of grounding is interwoven with that of learning” (ibid).

“In philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims connected with norms of action, upon which commands or ‘ought’ sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a grounded consensus could in principle be be achieved among those involved. In my view, this follows with conceptual necessity from the meaning of normative validity claims” (p.19, emphasis in original).

“Anyone who systematically deceives himself about himself behaves irrationally. But one who is capable of letting himself be enlightened about his irrationality possesses not only the rationality of a subject who is competent to judge facts and who acts in a purposive-rational way, who is morally judicious and practically reliable, who evaluates with sensitivity and is aesthetically open-minded; he also possesses the power to behave reflectively in relation to his subjectivity and to see through the irrational limitations to which his cognitive, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical expressions are subject. In such a process of self-reflection, reasons and grounds also play a role” (p. 20).

“One behaves irrationally if one employs one’s own symbolic means of expression in a dogmatic way. On the other hand, explicative discourse is a form of argumentation in which the comprehensibility, well-formedness, or rule-correctness is no longer naively supposed or contested but is thematized as a controversial claim” (p. 22).

“We can summarize the above as follows: Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good reasons or grounds” (ibid).

“Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from explicit mistakes” (ibid).

“But if the validity of arguments can be neither undermined in an empiricist manner nor grounded in an absolutist manner, then we are faced with precisely those questions to which the logic of argumentation is supposed to provide the answers: How can problematic validity claims be supported by good reasons? How can reasons be criticized in turn? What makes some arguments, and thus some reasons, which are related to validity claims in a certain way, stronger or weaker than other arguments?” (p. 24).

“We can distinguish three aspects of argumentative speech. First, considered as a process, we have to do with a form of communication that is improbable in that it sufficiently approximates ideal conditions. In this regard, I tried to delineate the general pragmatic presuppositions of argumentation as specifications of an ideal speech situation. This proposal may be unsatisfactory in its details; but I still view as correct my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied insofar as he intends to enter into argumentation at all” (p. 25).

More generally, I think we can say that an ideal speech situation is characterized by dialogue under conditions of mutual recognition.

“Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force — except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for truth). From this perspective argumentation can be conceived as a reflective continuation, with different means, of action oriented to reaching understanding” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The fundamental intuition connected with argumentation can best be characterized from the process perspective by the intention of convincing a universal audience and gaining assent for an utterance; from the procedural perspective, by the intention of ending a dispute about hypothetical validity claims with a rationally motivated agreement; and from the product perspective by the intention of grounding or redeeming a validity claim with arguments” (p. 26).

Ethics of Communication

The work of Jürgen Habermas, whom I recently cited, has both significant points of commonality and significant points of contrast with that of Robert Brandom, who first opened my eyes to a sympathetic reading of Kant and Hegel. I’d like to explore how both of these can be related to the broad aims of Platonic dialogue. Eventually, I also hope to relate this all to the needs and circumstances of emotionally sensitive personal communication between individuals.

Most human sayings of things have ethical significance. Many if not most human conflicts are traceable to communication issues. Habermas is mainly interested in exploring this at a broad social and political level. At this point in my life, I mainly hope to have some positive impact on the micro level of personal relationships. But in the world, there are close connections between these, and it would be artificial to try to completely separate them.

Habermas combines a broadly Kantian, procedural and “cognitivist”, rules- and rights-oriented concept of morality with a post-Kantian concern for intersubjectivity. He combines serious attention to German and American sociology, law, and political science, with a sympathy for both American pragmatism and the social criticism of the Young Hegelians and the Frankfurt school. He has a rather old-school, negative view of Hegel, but defends the relevance and usefulness of the broader tradition of German idealism, construed in a way that is compatible with modern science.

Brandom explicitly credits Habermas as an early influence, but also finds great value and contemporary relevance in Hegel. Brandom and Habermas have each written some about the other. Like Brandom, Habermas is a strong defender of modernity, and of the core Enlightenment values of democratic freedom and equality.

Often cited as Habermas’s magnum opus is the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (German ed. 1981; English tr. 1984, 1987). Like Brandom, he regards the pragmatics (simply put, the use) of language as coming before semantics or the study of meaning. Habermas directly associates the pragmatics of language with justification and the giving of reasons.

Habermas and Brandom both connect linguistic pragmatics with American pragmatist philosophy, by recognizing that saying is a kind of doing. They both see meaning in terms of dialogue about reasons, which I think should also be strongly associated with Platonic dialogue.

The theory of communicative action is intended mainly as an explanatory theory dealing with questions of publicly addressable fact. It deliberately straddles the boundary between philosophy and social science.

Unlike Brandom, Habermas talks about a formal pragmatics, and a non-standard formal semantics (inspired by Michael Dummet’s argument that verification comes before truth, which also has affinities with constructive logic). Brandom applies a kind of Hegelian dislike of formalism in developing an account of material inference.

Habermas is also the leading promoter of what he calls discourse ethics, about which I’ll have more to say in upcoming posts. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (German ed. 1983, English tr. 1990) and Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (German ed. 1991, English tr. 1993) develop his more specific views on ethics and morality. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (German ed.1992, English tr. 1996) applies closely related principles at the level of politics and law. These are large and sophisticated developments, with many nuances that are not very amenable to haiku-like summary, but nonetheless, over the course of a few posts, I hope to capture an overview.

I see Platonic dialogue as a kind of ideal model for what Habermas calls communication, corresponding to what Hegel, Brandom, and Habermas all call mutual recognition. At the same time, the various prerequisites for good dialogue are constitutive for meta-level judgment about our practices of communication in life. This applies as much to overcoming misunderstandings between individuals in personal life, as it does to law and politics.

Brandom on Reason and Authority

Brandom respectfully takes issue with his teacher Richard Rorty’s claim that all talk about an ultimate objective reality — or objective truth — should be rejected as authoritarian. He uses Hegel to answer Rorty.

“Authoritarianism is an attitude toward the relation between normative statuses and critical practices of giving and asking for reasons. It consists in practically or theoretically taking it that there can be genuine authority without a corresponding critical responsibility to give reasons entitling one to that authority” (Robert Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation, p. 63, emphasis in original).

“Rorty takes it that Kant was right to draw from his distillation of the insights of the Enlightenment the lesson that genuine norms essentially involve liability to rational criticism, to demands for reasons justifying and legitimating claims to authority…. Seeing norms as instituted (solely) by power relations… (‘might makes right’) is authoritarianism” (p. 64).

As I have pointed out, Plato and Leibniz anticipated Kant and Hegel in explicitly rejecting this kind of authoritarianism. Gwenaëlle Aubry has extensively documented the lengths to which Aristotle went to avoid grounding normativity in power.

Brandom notes that Rorty goes on to argue that “The idea that inanimate objects and objective states of affairs can exercise representational authority over the beliefs of those who can engage in critical rational challenges and defenses is a remnant of fetishistic authoritarianism” (p. 65).

Brandom rejects this last claim, as do I (see Things in Themselves; Essence and Explanation).

He says, “I argue for two claims. The first is that the considerations and commitments that shape the final, anti-authoritarian argument of Rorty’s… are among the central concerns Hegel addresses in his Phenomenology. The second is that Hegel there assembles and deploys conceptual resources that suffice to disarm Rorty’s anti-authoritarian arguments against the legitimacy and ultimate intelligibility of the concept of representation” (pp. 65-66).

“I think Rorty accepts the first point, and that is largely why he saw Hegel (at least, in a Deweyan, suitably naturalized form) as representing a way forward for philosophy…. But I do not think he was ever in a position to appreciate the second point (p. 66).

“Hegel takes over from Kant the insight that what distinguishes us sapient, discursive beings from the merely natural ones is the normative character of the space in which we live, and move, and have our being. Geist [spirit or ethical culture], Hegel’s focal concept — what the [Phenomenology] is a phenomenology of — is the whole comprising all of our implicitly norm-governed performances, practices, and institutions, the explicit theoretical expressions of them that constitute our normative self-consciousness, and everything that those normative practices and institutions make possible” (pp. 67-68).

“We are what things can be something for, which is to say that we are conscious beings. Hegel understands the origins of this capacity to lie in our nature as organic, desiring beings…. For something is food for the hungry animal who eats it, but is actually food… only if it in fact satisfies hunger. Hegel takes this possibility of practically experiencing error… to be the organic origin of consciousness” (p. 68-69; see also For Itself).

“We are, further, essentially self-conscious beings. That is, what we are for ourselves is an essential component of what we are in ourselves” (p. 69; see also Consciousness and Identity).

The qualifier “essential component of” is extremely important. To simply equate what we are in ourselves with what we are for ourselves would be subjectivism.

“As I am characterizing Hegel’s thought, his idea is that social pragmatism about norms is the master idea of modernity, and the Enlightenment is the explicit theoretical consciousness of this change of practical attitude. Rorty, Dewey, and Hegel are at one on this point, different as their expressions of it might seem” (pp. 72-73).

Brandom connects Hegel’s ethical ideas about mutual recognition with John Dewey’s characteristic concern for democratic values, as discussed by Rorty. The mere phrase “social pragmatism” sounds a bit shallow, but at this point Brandom has already given his own capsule history of pragmatism and described Dewey’s social and political concerns, so he is using it as a sort of extreme shorthand.

“My overall contention here is that because Rorty’s grasp of the social and historical articulation of normativity that Hegel discovers remains at a highly abstract and programmatic level, he does not understand how the more detailed structure Hegel discerns provides the resources to respond to Rorty’s anti-authoritarian critique of the ultimate intelligibility of representational norms. The rational criticizability of normative statuses can be seen to be built into them when we appreciate the social and historical fine structure of the process by which they are instituted by normative attitudes” (p. 73, emphasis added).

Brandom in effect argues that mutual recognition in Hegel is not only ethical, but that it also conditions knowledge and first philosophy.

Hegel on Ethics and Religion

Hegel had complex views on the relation between ethics and religion, and his thought on these matters evolved over time. As a teenager, he was impressed by writers of the German moderate Enlightenment, and immersed himself in the literature of classical antiquity. He graduated from the Lutheran seminary at Tübingen (where his roommates were the future philosopher Schelling and the future poet Hölderlin), but was reportedly very critical of the way theology was taught there.

Hegel’s earliest work is principally concerned with religious and social themes. He develops a critique of what he there calls “positive” religion, which he sees as putting excessive emphasis on particular representations, doctrines, and institutional forms. As a source for spiritual renewal, at this stage he looks mainly to the classical Greeks. He does not yet share Schelling and Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for Kantian philosophy. But a bit later, he begins to engage with Kant, and to move away from his earlier more unconditional classicism. In the works of this period, he interprets the teachings of Jesus as anticipating Kantian ethics, while also emphasizing love as a fundamental motivator. Now he begins to interpret Christianity and Kantian philosophy as the two main elements of a major historic spiritual advance beyond what was achieved in classical Greek culture.

I take the Phenomenology of Spirit to contain the best statement of Hegel’s mature views in this area, and will save that for last here.

His later lectures on the philosophy of history are very accessible, but in some ways extremely misleading. In general, Hegel popularizes and simplifies a lot in his lectures. And while today his so-called Philosophy of History is the best known example of this old genre, it is very much a genre piece. “Philosophies of history” particularly dedicated to valorizing the contributions of the nascent German nation had become commonplace in Germany since the late 18th century. University professors were civil servants who were expected as a condition of their employment to contribute to what might uncharitably be called propaganda supporting German nationalism and its state-sponsored religion. The most notorious characteristics of Hegel’s Philosophy of History in fact have much more to do with this obligatory social context than with the distinctive philosophy that Hegel develops mainly in the Phenomenology and the Logic.

Overly simplified formulations in the philosophy of history lectures are the main source for very common but deeply mistaken claims that Hegel sees world history as straightforwardly governed by a single linear and universal teleological unfolding (e.g., of “the realization of the consciousness of freedom”) that is either ordained by God, or itself constitutes God. As someone very interested in the details of Aristotelian teleology, Kantian “internal” teleology, and Hegel’s use of them, I see such a simplistic and overly strong historical teleology as completely incompatible with the principles Hegel defends in his main philosophical works.

Hegel does indeed see genuine progressive development within history, and not a mere succession of accidents as Aristotle was more inclined to do, but contrary to the common stereotype, this does not constitute or correspond to a global development of “History”, as if Hegel thought that History were itself an independent thing in its own right in the Aristotelian sense. History is just a summation of many largely independent developments, a very weak form of unity. Even in the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel points out what he considers to be instances of retrograde development — from better to worse — such as the transition from the Greek world to the Roman world.

If history for Hegel had the strong unity claimed by the stereotype, this would be logically incoherent. But for Hegel himself it poses no problem, because he has no commitment to such a strong unity. He emphasizes that the independence of Aristotelian independent things is not absolute, but he agrees with Aristotle that it is with the independent things that we should be principally concerned, in our attempts to understand history as in anything else.

In the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel is polemically concerned to contrast the modern “German world” — as the embodiment of freedom, genuine community, and progress — with the old “Roman world” of imperial absolutism, bureaucratic administration, and negation of the individual. Martin Luther is presented as the original hero of the German world, and Kant as his successor. Luther’s founding gesture is interpreted as the assertion of the priority of individual conscience over institutional authority, and thus as consistent with moderate Enlightenment.

Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion also aim primarily at an edifying popular presentation. There he among other things gives a sympathetic account of core elements of common Christian doctrine and symbolism, and eventually argues for the superiority of offenbare or “revealed” religion over other forms that he discusses with more limited sympathy. But at the same time, he seems to radically reverse the traditional understanding of revealed religion. For Hegel, offenbare means out in the open, intelligible in the light of day, not anyone’s private preserve. These again may seem to be compatible with the traditional meaning. But the kind of unconditional authority traditionally claimed for revelation is effectively ruled out by Hegel, who considers all appeals to unconditional authority to represent a low state of ethical development.

In some measure, what Hegel means by offenbare was Luther’s point too. Luther did after all translate the Bible to German so that more people could read it for themselves, and advocated that they do so. But for Luther, the text of the Bible is simply given to us by God as literal truth. He promotes a new direct authority of the literal text in the common tongue as a replacement for the mediating institutional authority emphasized by the Catholic Church. But for Hegel, no truth in the full sense of the word can depend on authority for its validation; the authority of a text can only derive from judgments about the content it articulates; and all such judgments could in principle be contested anew. Truth is a matter of intelligibility that should be understandable by anyone, never the special province of some particular authority. Hegel sees that behind emphasis on divine authority — as opposed to, say, goodness or love — lie strong claims on behalf of some human authority.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology, these issues are touched upon from multiple points of view. What corresponds to the later Roman world is particularly associated with the religious point of view of what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness, which emphasizes the extreme transcendence of an eternal and infinite monotheistic God, while devaluing worldly life. In general, Hegel’s portrayal of this kind of religion is unfavorable. Yet the unhappy consciousness is also said to have a progressive aspect, insofar as its new notion of the infinite God potentially leads to a questioning of the ultimateness of all finite representations, and thereby also to a questioning of any representation that is supposed to be simply given to us. Hegel explicitly suggests that the development of “negative” theology in the new monotheistic setting of the later Roman world leads in principle to the questioning of finite representations.

Later in the Phenomenology, Hegel at length and in several stages criticizes what happens when purely individual notions of Reason are applied to these matters. First comes the naive activist who unilaterally judges everything in the world by her own principles, and finds the world to be lacking. In part this has to do with uncharitable interpretation, even though there also really are plenty of things that are wrong with the world. But the main problem with this point of view is its complete lack of Socratic self-questioning. It focuses simply on the vigorous assertion of one’s own conclusions. Though this does involve a glimmer of self-consciousness, it is only a glimmer. The essentially reflective character of what Hegel means by self-consciousness is fundamentally lacking.

Much later still comes the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, which has a much more reflective character, and recognizes that it is bound by duties. But this moral self is still limited to a strictly individual point of view on what ought to be universal. Hegel thinks that ultimately, even the best — most sincere and open-minded — unilateral moral judgment by an individual involves an untenable hubris (the excessive pride commonly highlighted in Greek tragedies). As Brandom points out, one of the great lessons of the Phenomenology overall is that moral judgment should not be unilateral — anyone judging someone else must also confess and ask for forgiveness. This should in turn make us more forgiving of others. For Hegel, moral judgment is the province of participation in the universal community of rational beings, under conditions of mutual recognition. Only thus can individual and narrower community prejudices be overcome.

In between, Hegel discusses the relations between Enlightenment and faith. Here he is mainly concerned to defend faith against overly broad or unilateral Enlightenment critiques that, e.g., simply identify religion with superstition or a conspiracy of priests and kings, as if it had no relation at all to ethics.

Toward the end of the Phenomenology, as a resolution of the issues he has pointed out with the alleged self-sufficiency of the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, he develops an account of the essence of religion as having to do most fundamentally with promoting mutual recognition in a community. As I put it before, religion and the notion of something greater than ourselves for Hegel play an essential role in keeping individual conscience honest. This applies not only to some ideal philosophical religion we might imagine, but also to concrete, imperfect historical religion in real communities. Hegel now suggests that in this way, even concrete historical religion, in spite of its reliance on particular representations, helps us to overcome the limitations inherent to the individual moral self.

In a final turn, Hegel argues that religion and philosophy are in a way concerned with the same subject matter. The difference is that religion as usually understood assumes and works from particular representations of what is universal, whereas philosophy for Hegel aims to approach the universal in a universal way, and in this sense constitutes the “truth” of religion. To approach the universal in a universal way for Hegel necessarily involves beginning from the concrete. But it also involves letting the thought of that concrete actively explicate itself through reflection, rather than attempting to ground it in something said to be simply given to us, or to be justified by pre-existing authority.

In more traditional language, I am tempted to say this amounts to treating something like a negative theology that nonetheless does not turn its back on the world as taking precedence over all positive theology that presupposes particular representations. Negative theology and its analogues hold that no positive assertions we are capable of formulating about the divine should, strictly speaking, be held to be true, but that the divine can nonetheless be approached by saying it is not this, and it is not that. Giving precedence to this over the positive theology that presupposes particular representations has generally not been regarded as an orthodox position (unless perhaps we consider certain schools of Buddhism), but it is one whose possibility is suggested by the very existence of something like a negative theology.

Historically, anything like a negative theology has usually been associated with very strong insistence on the transcendence of the divine. If by analogy we apply the term to Hegel (which to my knowledge he never did himself), it must be with the proviso that for him its object would not be a transcendence, but rather something like the ultimate ethical intelligibility of life (which, we might say in an Aristotelian way, of all things properly knowable by us “most deserves to be called divine”), viewed as compatible with the recognition that many things in life are not as they ought to be, and need to change.

Normative Attitudes

Robert Brandom sees Kant and Hegel as both working to reconcile the modern notion that normative statuses depend on normative attitudes with a genuine bindingness and objectivity of normativity. The key point that he associates with modernity is the idea that normative statuses are not somehow pre-given. As I would put it, the normative statuses of things depend on complex reflective judgments involving many elements.

Brandom’s language about attitude-dependence is intentionally broad enough to encompass all the forms of modern subjectivism, which is the opposite evil to traditional groundings of normative statuses in pure deliverances of authority. At its most primitive level, it expresses the idea that everyone judges for herself, which is indeed a popular sentiment in modern culture. Expressed this way, without qualification, it makes it impossible to separate right from wrong. Brandom seems to want to say that even this vulgar subjectivism or voluntarism is historically progressive compared to the traditional “authority-obedience model”; I tend to think they are equally bad.

The real positive lesson that Brandom extracts from this, though, is something to the effect that everyone deserves a seat at the table in inquiries about the good. He does not himself support the view that everyone gets to judge everything for herself.

Indeed he points out that the very best version of this individualist view — Kant’s theory of the autonomy of moral subjects — is criticized by Hegel as one-sidedly individualistic. Kant complements autonomy with a strong emphasis on respect for others, but according to Brandom, Hegel also thinks that Kant effectively treats both autonomy and respect as principles that themselves do not depend on any normative taking of things to be such-and-such; i.e., at a meta-level Kant still treats autonomy and respect as the same kind of givens that he recommends we avoid depending upon in all our particular judgments. With his theory of the coming-to-be of genuine objective oughts through processes of mutual recognition, Hegel is able to show a genesis of autonomy and respect, as themselves instances of the same kind of normative taking involved in particular judgments.

I’m not completely happy with Brandom’s choice of the thin term “attitude” in this context. I would prefer to say, for example, that normative statuses depend on reflective judgment. Attitude by itself says nothing about its derivation; an attitude just is what it is, and might be entirely arbitrary. But I suspect that Brandom implicitly has in mind something like a complex propositional “attitude”. Then on his view of what it is to be a proposition, necessarily we are in the space of reasons, and subject to all of its dialogic give and take, just by having such an attitude.

Empathy and Mutual Recognition

On a purely universal ethical level, it seems to me that empathy is to “double empathy” as respect for others is to mutual recognition. This is a lesson for all humans. Life is a two-way street.

“Mind reading” — the attribution of mental states to people — is not particularly empathetic or respectful. When I empathize with you, I don’t claim to read your mind. I pay attention to you in your particularity, without imposing my view of you on you.

Kantian respect for others is better served by not imputing mental states to people. The imputation of mental states tends to be presumptuous, and that can make it invasive.

What really matters for ethics are our commitments as evinced by words and deeds, not our supposed mental states. Our deeper intentionalities and spirit are embodied in the nuances and context of our “outer” words and deeds. What are often taken as clues to supposed mental states, such as facial expressions and vocal intonations, are superficial, ephemeral, and unreliable in comparison with these.

Explicit words should be questioned mainly when they seem to be out of sync with our deeds. Things like the spontaneous facial expressions and vocal intonations of others affect us psychologically, but that is as much a matter of our psychology as of the other person. The bottom line is that by themselves, these are not decisive evidence of what anyone’s attitudes truly are. Evidence of a person’s commitments and character comes from looking at the bigger picture of everything they say and do.

We all have the experience of fleeting feelings that we do not act on, but that momentarily affect us. Our spontaneous physical mannerisms may reflect these. Insofar as it is practically necessary to make judgments about people, we should judge them based not on superficial and ambiguous signs of the fleeting impulses they experience, but rather on the nuances and context of what they deliberately do.

For example, I work very hard not to show impatience with exasperating but ultimately harmless little behaviors of people I care about, but a flicker of impatience may nonetheless show on my face. In this kind of circumstance, I think someone deserves to be given credit for the deliberate choice not to make an impatient remark, rather than to be judged for a facial expression that was not a deliberate act.

The bigger picture is far more important than what is immediate. And we should not assume that other people’s subjective experience (or its relation to physical expression in the moment) is analogous to our own.

Empathy as an Ethical Stance

Ethically, empathy belongs in the same space as Aristotelian friendship, in which the friend is as another self; and with the golden rule; Kantian respect for others; and Hegelian mutual recognition. It is a prescription for non-egotism and avoidance of self-centeredness. Nothing is really more important than genuinely caring for others, which must include listening to them, and not simply doing or telling them what we think is right for them.

There is a fine line between making and asserting our own independent judgments of what is right — which every ethical being needs to be able to do — and imposing them on others. Empathy is what helps us navigate these gray areas.

I personally see a complementary principle that helps complete this. That is that we should in general as much as possible mean what we say, and say what we mean. I see this partly as a matter of personal integrity, and partly as a way of helping others understand us as best possible, when they may not themselves see things as we do. This can also be understood as a kind of more specific empathy for the listener on behalf of the speaker.

Empathy and Psychology

The English term “empathy” is of recent origin; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was introduced only in 1909. But the idea is clearly present from ancient times, e.g., in Aristotle’s idea that a friend is for us like “another self”. At the end of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel speaks of the softening of the hard heart of someone in the position of judging someone else, and more generally he proposes a sort of Kantian universalization of the Aristotelian ethical stance of friend toward friend, in his notion of mutual recognition.

Reflecting contemporary attitudes, the Wikipedia article on empathy is dominated by mentions of various psychological research. In general, I feel deep ambivalence about psychology as a discipline. It deals with matter of vital importance and sometimes affords valuable practical insights, but psychological theories often seem to me to afford narrow or partial insights into the complexity of human being that their proponents don’t recognize as narrow or partial. Psychology and psychiatry are dominated by an uneven mixture of empiricism and “common-sense” views of human subjectivity, only rarely leavened by engagement with philosophical approaches to the subject matter. What philosophy does get a hearing is most often a sort of popularized existential phenomenology, not the sort advocated here.

(Insofar as so-called anti-psychiatry advocates a more deeply philosophical approach to subjectivity, I am sympathetic, but here too the proponents often engage in unsound over-generalization. As many issues as there are with the medicalization of “mind”, therapy can still have real value for helping people, and research continues to uncover new and interesting results. We just have to be wary of overstated theoretical claims.)

I think about empathy mainly in an ethical rather than psychological way. Interactions between ethics and psychology (indeed, between ethics and empirical disciplines in general) are tricky. From an ethical standpoint, we need to take relevant empirical information into account, but in a thoughtful and practical way, without putting the results on a pedestal, and especially without over-generalizing.

Empathy is a very important value to me. In personal life, I tend to err in the direction of trusting too much and sharing too much. It is an important principle to me to give people the benefit of the doubt until they prove they don’t deserve it. I sometimes give too many chances, because I’d rather err in a kind-hearted way than in a hard-hearted way.

Much of the psychological literature on empathy treats it as a faculty or skill, and as part of a kind of social normalization. Unlike the standard caveat that normativity in ethics has nothing to do with mere social conformity, in the institutional context of psychology and psychiatry, “normality” is typically judged by empirical statistical criteria. What is “normal” in this sense is purely a matter of fact, which nothing to do with what is really good or best. But many people assume that what is empirically “normal” somehow has a normative status anyway.

It is likely that there are low-level neurological functions that may facilitate things like empathy, but that does not mean that empathy is reducible to these functions. So-called mirror neurons, initially discovered in monkeys, are specialized neurons that fire both when we do something and when we observe someone else doing the same thing. This could be seen as contributing to our partial tendency to spontaneously identify with others, but the initial finding only concerned externally observable motor functions, not deep feeling.

Again, from an ethical point of view, what is most important is not what the psychologists call “empathic accuracy”, but rather how much weight we give to empathy as a value in our lives. And from my more specific Aristotelian-Hegelian point of view, how much weight we give to empathy as a value is to be discerned primarily from our doings rather than from our self-reports. The “common sense” bias of empirical psychology shows up in the assumption that we can get accurate views of people’s character by simply scoring their responses to survey questions. People’s self-reporting does tell us something, but not the whole story.

How much weight people really give to empathy as a value also should not be judged by the incidental features of immediate social interaction. Someone may be a poor “mind reader” and socially somewhat clueless, yet care about others more deeply than those who are better mind readers, and manifest that in deeds when it really matters. But many people quickly judge others based on superficial aspects of immediate interaction. (See also “Mentalizing” vs Emotional Empathy.)

For Itself

Hegel’s distinctive phrase “for itself” (für sich, literally “for self”) always seemed a little mysterious to me. It seems to refer to a self-aware being’s taking itself to be this or that, following a more or less Kantian model of judgment. That part is clear enough. But what in the world is something like “the concept in and for itself”?

Once again, the simple Kantian/Hegelian notion of reflection sheds a great deal of light on this. It applies on two levels.

First, there is a purely relational one that applies to anything that may be conceived as having characteristics that are mutually related to one another. These in turn may be construed in terms of a kind of self-relatedness of the underlying thing. In this sense, “for itself” would apply to things that have self-relatedness. This means practically everything, except perhaps some abstractly simple things like points in geometry.

Second, there is the level of self-relatedness that is internal to a reflective judgment or unity of apperception, and to the value-oriented self-consciousness arising from mutual recognition. Self-consciousness is not a detached spectator beholding multifarious relations, but has its very being within and amidst all those relations. We might say, then, that in this context the relations themselves are “self-conscious”. Similarly, concepts involved in reflective judgment are in a way necessarily “self-conscious” concepts.

In a way, our essence as human beings is the integral whole that results from — or is teleologically aimed at by — the self-consciousness of our concepts. This whole would be the totality of our commitments — everything we hold to be good, true, or beautiful.

For Hegel as for Aristotle, what count as “our” commitments and “our” concepts are not just whatever we assert are ours. The measure of what commitments and concepts are truly ours lies in what we do in life. And what we really did in any particular case is not just what we say we did or meant to do, but also what others can observe and evaluate.

In this way, to be “for oneself” is simultaneously to be for others, because what counts as one’s deed — and ultimately as oneself — is partly up to all those others who experience us. This doesn’t mean we are not entitled to make contrary assertions of our own that may be right; maybe in some particular case, the others affected by our deeds are prejudiced. For Hegel, the bottom line is that everyone affected gets a hearing in such cases, and the outcome — what is ultimately right — is not subject to a predetermined formula, but rather follows from all the fine details of each case. This is characteristic of the openness by which Kant first distinguished reflective judgment. It is also characteristic of Aristotelian practical judgment.

To be “for itself” or “for oneself” is to be a subject of reflective judgment. For humans, it is also to be a subject of mutual recognition.

At least in the first instance, “subject” here need not imply a self-conscious subject, just a thing with properties with which the judgment is concerned. But perhaps the human case suggests something about how a self-conscious subject could be thought of as a special case or elaboration of a simple Aristotelian “subject” or underlying thing.

What distinguishes Aristotle’s view of the higher levels of subjectivity (and, I think, Hegel’s too) from typical modern ones is that self-consciousness inheres not in the subject per se as a special kind of entity, but rather in the activity of reflection (contemplation, thought thinking itself, deliberation) in which the subject is involved.