Beyond Obedience: Brandom’s “Lost Chapter”

Early modern legal and political theory has a significant historical relationship to theological voluntarism that it would be important to understand. This also seems relevant to my recent work on Scotus (or vice versa).

A chapter of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust that was omitted from the final published version, and mainly traces antecedents of Hegelian mutual recognition in early modern social contract theory, first brought this issue to my attention. I will be devoting a few posts to it.

It seems indisputable that social contract theory has a genealogical relationship to theological voluntarism. But it is no secret that I prefer to ground mutual recognition in Aristotle’s ethical concept of friendship. Among other issues, social contract theories are tainted by an at best only partial emancipation from their voluntarist heritage. It is my contention that Kant and Hegel finally work free of this widespread voluntarist taint that Plato and Aristotle never shared, and this is one of the reasons why they are so valuable.

I was initially quite horrified to see what looked like a kind of historical valorization of voluntarism by one of my heroes. But although it does contain a few valorizing phrases, as I read it now, Brandom’s discussion really has more to do with the existence of counter-trends within trends than with a real endorsement. In any case, this additional complication deserves to be documented. For now I will skip over the first section, which offers a nice recap of his high-level view of Kant and Hegel, on which I have commented several times already.

“The traditional metaphysics of normativity that Hegel sees all subsequent forms of understanding as developing from the rejection of is the subordination-obedience model” (Pre-Hegelian Stages in the History of the Metaphysics of Normativity, p. 6).

Elsewhere, Brandom has referred to this as the authority-obedience model, but the meaning is the same. This bad model puts all authority on one (commanding) side, and all responsibility on the other (obeying) side. Brandom has championed the idea that authority and responsibility should instead be apportioned symmetrically. Aristotle would approve of this.

Obedience has no role in rational ethics. A rationally ethical person will normally obey the law, giving the benefit of the doubt to measures designed to promote safety and social peace. But her motivation for doing so is a general consent to the reasonableness of enacting such measures.

Aristotle’s highest moral ideal is the reciprocity of friendship. He further suggests that we extend the model of friendship to those who dwell in our city. In the same spirit, it could be extended further, and that is just what Hegel eventually did. The only reference to obedience in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the incidental mention of a sick person disobeying her doctors, in one of his examples.

However, in the development of the Latin tradition, obedience came to be designated as a virtue in its own right. In the early modern period, all virtue was sometimes reduced to obedience. This was reinforced by the concept of “positive” law, which is supposed to be obeyed merely because it is law, independent of whether the law is just or rational or not. This makes goodness a derivative property that follows from the meeting of obligations, rather than being based on independent criteria. An obligation of obedience to authority displaces proper human ends. Meeting such obligations becomes an end in itself.

“The distinguishing feature of this model is that the paradigmatic normative status, obligation, is taken to be instituted by the command of a superior. As an explicit metaphysics of normativity, the origin of theories of this sort is in theology, in a picture of God as the ultimate legislator, whose commands institute laws that his creatures are obliged to obey. The voluntarist wing of Catholic natural law theory represented by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham gave rise to Protestant natural law theorists who to one extent or another secularized and naturalized the approach. (I’ll say something further along about the significance for Hegel of the contrary intellectualist wing of the natural law tradition — paradigmatically Aquinas, but also Averroes — and of Suarez’s characteristic attempt at a synthesis of the two.) Grotius, Cumberland, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Thomasius, and Locke all understood the normatively binding force of laws, their capacity to oblige obedience, as rooted in the antecedent existence of a superior-subordinate relationship between the authoritative promulgator of the law and those responsible for obeying it” (pp. 6-7).

This emphasis on obedience to authority is a big part of what I mean by a “voluntarist taint”. For some, like Hobbes, this is not just a taint, but something wholeheartedly embraced.

“Hobbes attributes God’s natural right to command obedience to his ‘irresistible power’ to punish disobedience. His ‘state of nature’ is identified precisely with the lack of natural social relations of ‘sovereignty and subordination,’ among humans, in which no-one owes obedience to anyone else because power to punish, from which the right to command obedience derives, has not yet been concentrated in a sovereign. Locke, too, thinks that ‘the inferior, finite, and dependent is under an obligation to obey the supreme and infinite.’ But he understands God’s authority to oblige and compel human obedience as consisting not only in his power to do so, but as rooted in another matter of objective fact: his status as our creator. A creator, he thinks, has a natural right to lay down laws creating obligations of obedience for his creations” (pp. 7-8).

Hobbes bluntly affirms political voluntarism and a Thrasymachan “might is right” doctrine as justification for absolute monarchy. Locke is more refined, but adding a creationist justification to a voluntarist justification is not particularly helpful.

“Cumberland offers a characteristically mixed account. He analyzes law into two components, the precept (the content enjoined or proscribed) and the sanctions provided for noncompliance. Possession of the power to punish disobedience is a non-normative matter. But God’s paradigmatic possession of normative authority as a superior to legislate for subordinates depends crucially on his benevolence towards those subordinates. It is his wishing them well (and knowing what is best for them) that is the basis of his normative status as superior in the sense of having the right to legislate. On the one hand, one can think of God’s (or a king’s) benevolence as a matter of objective fact. He either has the attitude of wishing the good for his subordinates, or he does not. On the other hand, the attitude of benevolence is itself a normative attitude: being motivated to act for their welfare, aiming at what is good for them” (p. 9).

The moment authority becomes even partially answerable to something like benevolence or a standard of reasonableness or justice, we no longer have pure authoritarianism or voluntarism. It is debatable whether we still have voluntarism at all if it is qualified in any way, since the distinctive mark of voluntarism is to explicitly allow or “justify” arbitrariness, which means anything at all. But whatever we call them, the existence of mixed forms needs to be recognized.

[quote from Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature (1672):] “the Obligation of a Law properly so called, which proceeds from the Will of a Superior,” (p. 9n).

Here we have the voluntarist calling card.

[Cumberland:] “the intrinsick Force of all those Arguments, with which the Legislator (God) uses to enforce Universal Benevolence, is, in my opinion, all that is meant by the Obligation of Laws: The Rewards annext to Universal Benevolence by the right Reason of Men, chiefly oblige, because they promise, beside the Favour of Man, the Friendship of the Chief of Rational Beings, GOD, the Supreme Governour of the World. The Punishments they inflict by the same Reason, are both Parts of the present, and most certain presages of the future, Divine Vengeance” (ibid).

Reward and punishment are sub-ethical motivations. But benevolence is a genuine ethical criterion.

[Cumberland:] “That the End of the Legislator, and also of him who fulfils the Law of Nature, is far greater and more excellent, than the avoiding that Punishment, or the obtaining that Reward, whence the Law receives its Sanction, and which is what immediately affects every Subject; though the Obligation of every Subject to yield Obedience be indeed, immediately, discover’d by those Rewards and Punishments. For the End, that is, the Effect directly intended by both, is the Publick Good, the Honour of the Governor, and the Welfare of all his Subjects” (ibid).

The public good and welfare are again genuine ethical criteria.

Brandom finds greater clarity in Samuel Pufendorf (1642-1694). The next section, to which I will devote a separate post, will go into more detail on Pufendorf as a precursor to Kantian ethics. We get just a taste of it here.

“Pufendorf, too, rejects Hobbes’s claim that the superior/subordinate status relationship that is the source of the normative force of obligations consists solely in the differential power of the one who is owed and the one who owes obedience” (p. 9).

Might does not confer right.

[quote from Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672):] “Neither strength nor any other natural pre-eminence is alone sufficient to derive an obligation on me from another’s will, but that it is farther requisite that I should have received some extraordinary good from him, or should have voluntarily agreed to submit myself to his direction” (pp. 9-10).

“God, for instance, gave us an ‘extraordinary good’, performed a ‘special service’ by creating us, so this thought might be seen to be behind Locke’s invocation of the right of the creator. Or, as Cumberland has it, God showed us his benevolence towards us by not only creating us, but creating us in his image in the specific sense of making us like him at base universally benevolent. Here we see two rising themes challenging the grounding of obligation in prior objective relative statuses of superior/subordinate, calling forth command on the part of the superior and obedience on the part of the subordinate as the consequent appropriate practical acts or normative attitudes” (p. 10).

Here Brandom’s analysis is extremely valuable.

“One is the idea that the status of superior, having the right to command, to oblige those commanded to obey, has not only normative consequences, but also normative conditions. This is the idea that being a superior is a normative status that one must deserve (for instance, through the fact of service or an attitude of benevolence). This goes beyond the simple idea that authority is more than mere power. For that distinction can be made entirely on the side of the consequences of application of the concept superior. It is the claim that the circumstances of application of that concept are themselves normative in character. One has to have done well by the subordinates through performing a service, or at least had an attitude of wishing them well, that is, benevolence towards them. The second idea is the idea that the status of being a superior, in the sense of having a right or authority to impose obligations and command obedience (as opposed to the mere power to punish noncompliance) might be dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates: on their having agreed or consented to, or otherwise acknowledged that authority” (ibid).

If there is such a thing as a right to command others and not just a power to do so, that right is necessarily conditional and not absolute. This is related to the Enlightenment notion of government by consent.

“Both these ideas can be seen at play throughout early modern thinking about normativity. And they both stand in substantial tension with the traditional metaphysical picture of normative statuses of obligation as rooted in the prior existence of objective ontological relations of superiority and subordination, as epitomized by the neoplatonic scala naturae. The idea that beyond one’s power to enforce obedience, status as a superior with the normative authority to impose obligations is something one might or might not be entitled to — that the normative issues of one’s right to command or whether one deserves to do so are not settled just by how things non-normatively are — threatens to undermine the idea that all normative statuses can be understood to be instituted by the commands of superiors to subordinates. As Leibniz argues in his “Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf” of 1706, if it is acknowledged that besides power there must be reasons justifying commands for them to be legitimately imbued with the authority of a superior, understanding what entitles the superior to command as a normative status instituted by the command of a superior would create a circle ‘than which none was ever more manifest’ ” (p. 11).

Once the issue of entitlement to command is raised, it cannot be answered by simply appealing to another command.

“The subordination-obedience metaphysical model of normativity that explains the normative status of obligation on the part of the subordinate cannot be extended to explain the normative status of being entitled to the authority to command. If the concept of the status of superiority not only has normative consequences of application in the form of authority to impose obligations on subordinates, but also normative circumstances of application in the sense that the one who commands must be justified in doing so, must deserve, be worthy, or have a right to that authority, then some other form of normative status must be acknowledged that is not itself to be understood on the model of institution by the command of a superior. Leibniz, like Cumberland, looked to the attitude of benevolence. The thought that the relative statuses of superiority and subordination are themselves already fully normative statuses is part of what is behind the famous opposition between law and love (for example in the natural law tradition and in the Cambridge Platonists, respectively) as what is taken to be the most basic conception in early modern moral theory” (pp. 11-12, emphasis in original).

“The second idea is even more momentous. For it is the idea that the normatively significant status of having the authority to impose obligations (which according to the first idea also counts as a normative status in the sense that exhibiting it has normative conditions of desert, worth, or entitlement) is, or at least can be, attitude-dependent. Pufendorf’s invocation of ‘consent’ (or elsewhere ‘acknowledgement’) by the subordinate as a condition of the superior’s right to command marks a decisive change from traditional views. The idea that the normative statuses instituted by natural law might be dependent on normative attitudes is a distinctively modern one. Indeed, the core of Hegel’s understanding of the transition from traditional to modern selves, norms, and societies, as laid out in the Spirit chapter, should be understood to consist in a shift in the relative priority of normative statuses and normative attitudes…. The basic thought is that it is of the essence of traditional structures of normativity that normative statuses are conceived of as objective, in the sense that neither their content nor their binding force depends on anyone’s normative attitudes. Those normative statuses set the standard for assessments of the propriety of attitudes. The law is what it is, independently of what anyone thinks about it, and one is obliged to acknowledge one’s responsibility to its authority. The paradigmatic form of this traditional structure is what I have called the “subordination-obedience” model of normativity. In its classic form, being a subordinate or a superior is an objective normative status, and normative subjects are supposed to (are subject to a distinctive kind of criticism, including punishment, if they do not) acknowledge them by adopting practical attitudes of obedience and command” (pp. 12-13).

I would say this a little differently. What is important to the argument is that from a Kantian or Hegelian point of view, normative statuses are never simply given. They are always the result of an evaluation, though the quality of the evaluation may be better or worse. What is important to the argument is that normative statuses are the result of an interpretation.

“By contrast, it is distinctive of modernity to take normative statuses of authority and responsibility, entitlement and commitment, to be instituted by normative attitudes of acknowledging or attributing those statuses: taking or treating someone in practice as authoritative or responsible, entitled or committed. While Hegel insists that this modern model expresses a genuine and important truth about the metaphysics of normativity, in the end he sees both the traditional and the modern models of normativity as one-sided: the first as hyper-objective and the second as hyper-subjective. Just as traditional accounts failed to acknowledge the authority of attitudes over statuses, the responsibility of statuses to attitudes that the moderns had discovered, even the most sophisticated version of the modern understanding, Kant’s autonomy account, though it does also acknowledge the authority of statuses over attitudes, the responsibility of attitudes to statuses, which the tradition had appreciated, fails adequately to integrate the traditional and modern lines of thought. Hegel’s own social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is to give each its due” (p. 13).

Kant already aims at a kind of synthesis of these two perspectives. Hegel, according to Brandom, judges that Kant fails to achieve it, because Kant treats moral judgment only from the point of view of the individual.

“The vocabulary I am using to express these ideas is mine rather than Hegel’s. He does not use the terms ‘authority’ and ‘responsibility’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’, neither of which, he insists, can properly be understood independently of its relation to the other, both of which must be understood as themselves interdependent ‘moments’ in a more complex structure. Though he uses these central logical-metaphysical terms in many ways, I want to claim that the normative uses paraphrasable in terms of authority and responsibility are fundamental — their ‘home language game’. Nor does Hegel use the terms ‘status’ and ‘attitude’. These are the terms I am adopting to talk about what he discusses under the headings of what things are in themselves (Ansichsein) and what they are for themselves or others (Fürsichsein). The discussion in the previous chapter of understanding self-conscious selves as beings such that what they are in themselves is an essential element of what they are for themselves introduces the idea of a kind of normative status, being a self-conscious individual normative subject, that depends on (is responsible to) normative attitudes (the commitments one acknowledges by identifying with them). Though ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (also ‘for-an-other’) are central logical-metaphysical terms Hegel uses in many ways. For instance, in discussion [of] the Perception chapter, we saw them used to distinguish, roughly, intrinsic from relational properties. But I claim that their use to distinguish normative statuses from practical normative attitudes in the social recognitive metaphysics of normativity is fundamental — their ‘home language game’. This strategy of understanding ‘independence’ and ‘dependence’ in terms of authority and responsibility and ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’ (‘for-an-other’) in terms of normative statuses and normative attitudes lies at the core of the semantic reading of the Phenomenology I am offering here” (p. 14).

This is a good reminder that when Brandom speaks of attitudes, he means to express what for Hegel is part of a broader notion of what something is for itself, or for another. As Brandom points out, relational properties are another example of what something is “for” (in relation to) another. Hegelian self-consciousness is perhaps the most famous “for” relation. Its relational character is the simplest reason why self-consciousness is not properly speaking a (non-relational) thing, and why it should not be identified with any simple term like ego, which is again a non-relational thing. When we speak of attitudes in an empirical way, they may seem like non-relational, simple properties, perhaps of a psychological sort. On the other hand, the Avicennan intentions that are so important for Scotus and others do have an intrinsically relational character. But in all these cases, the meaning of “relation” (Latin relatio) in question is the Aristotelian category of (asymmetrical) pros ti (toward what). It is in view of this well-established and different older usage that Pierce avoids the term “relation” when speaking about the inherently symmetrical mathematical relations that he calls “relatives”.

“Of course ancient and medieval philosophers acknowledged that there were some normative statuses that were instituted by practical normative attitudes. Having the authority or responsibilities exercised by one who holds some elected office, or those conferred by explicit legislation in cases where the aim of the legislation could obviously have been achieved in other ways are central among them. But the most basic norms, those defining the persons or normative subjects of positive laws, were not understood to be of this kind. The whole idea of natural law is intended to contrast with that artificial kind of law. The normative statuses articulated by natural laws are to be construed as necessary, as conceptually and metaphysically antecedent to and independent of the contingent attitudes, practices, and institutions of creatures of the kind whose nature they articulate” (p. 15).

The term “person” names a standing under Roman law. The reference to normative subjects here reflects Brandom’s main philosophical use of “subject”, which is normative and non-psychological, as is also true of his use of “intention” and “intentionality”. (This sharply distinguishes the latter from its Avicennan sense, revived by Brentano in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Brentano says that all psychological phenomena and only psychological phenomena are intentional.)

Next, Brandom devotes three paragraphs to medieval voluntarism and intellectualism. This is obviously a very limited engagement, but his concern is with tracing antecedents backward from Hegel. This is the farthest point he reaches, so it makes sense that it would be the least detailed part of the discussion. (In contemporary Hegel scholarship, it is Robert Pippin who has discussed Hegel’s relation to Aristotle in the greatest depth.)

“In this connection it is illuminating to consider the distinction within the natural law tradition between intellectualists and voluntarists. Intellectualists, paradigmatically among the Catholic theologians, Aquinas, held that the authoritativeness of commands issued by superiors to subordinates (expressions of the attitudes of those superiors) answered to (depended upon) reasons rooted in the same objective natures that determined their relative ‘primacy’ as superiors/subordinates. Even God, with the objective status of superior to all, is understood as constrained in the laws he lays down by the demands of reasons concerning the objective good of creatures with the natures with which he has endowed them. God’s unconstrained omnipotence is acknowledged by attributing to him the ‘absolute’ power to have created beings with different natures than the ones he actually created, but his ‘ordained’ power, given the natures he actually created, is understood as constrained by reasons provided by those determinate natures. He could not have made murder or (tellingly) adultery right. Even God’s normative attitudes, as expressed in his commands, in this sense answer to antecedent objective normative statuses” (pp. 15-16).

“By contrast, theological voluntarists, such as William of Ockham reject the constraint on God’s attitudes by reasons rooted in objective natures, as codified in Aquinas’s distinction between his absolute and his ordained power. What makes something right or obligatory (institutes those normative statuses) is just God’s normative attitudes towards them, his approval or commands. Those attitudes are not constrained by reasons stemming from any antecedent objective normative statuses. It is his will alone (which I am talking about in terms of his normative attitudes) that institutes normative statuses of obligation and permission. God could, if he so chose, have made murder and adultery right — though he did not in fact do so. The theological disagreement between intellectualists and voluntarists about the relationship between normative statuses stemming from objective created and creating natures and normative attitudes (obligation-instituting acts of divine will) is intimately entangled with the ontological-semantic dispute between realists and nominalists about universals. Ockham attributes no reality to kinds or natures over and above the reality of the particulars they group. Assimilating particulars by treating them as exhibiting a common universal or nature is itself an act of will, the expression of a practical attitude. The groupings are arbitrary in the original sense — the product of ‘arbitrium brutum’. Understanding universals, including kinds and natures, as the product of contingent activities of naming (hence ‘nominalism’) makes reasons deriving from those natures themselves attitude-dependent” (p. 16).

Brandom here treats will as a normative attitude. What it makes sense to treat this way is any particular, definite will, but not the famous or notorious faculty of unconstrained choice. It is assertion of the latter that defines voluntarism.

I believe Brandom is a truly great philosopher, but Aquinas and Ockham are mere cartoon figures here. Aquinas is indeed more “traditional” in some ways. But Aquinas recognizes the existence of rational ethics, independent of revelation. That to me is huge. Ockham, like Scotus, both makes radically voluntarist claims and endorses ethical criteria of right reason and good intent. I find the combination very confusing.

Later, Brandom mentions that Luther and Calvin were voluntarists. Nominalism also seems to have been strong in early Protestantism. I have no basis for arguing with any of that. But all this together is far from justifying a presumption that voluntarism per se must therefore be considered historically progressive. There are a great many other alternatives to voluntarism besides Thomism. And Thomism itself is far from monolithic.

(But Hegel himself valorizes Protestantism, and Luther in particular, and shares the Enlightenment disdain for scholasticism. But in Hegel’s day as in the Enlightenment, medieval philosophy was virtually terra incognita, especially in Protestant countries. This was true because printed books and pamphlets in vernacular languages had become predominant. Most works of medieval philosophy did not exist in print or in a vernacular language, but only as rare Latin manuscripts that hardly anyone studied, or even had access to. It is easy to be disdainful of what we only know from a caricature.)

The third paragraph devoted to this topic sums up the outcome.

“Divine command theorists understand the obligations — normative statuses obliging the adoption of normative attitudes of obedience — of us subordinates-because-inferiors as instituted by divine attitudes (expressed in commands, acts of will), even if the framework of relative normative statuses of superior-subordinate is understood as objective in the sense of attitude-independent. Where intellectualists see all attitudes as answering to attitude-independent statuses, voluntarist natural lawyers do not see the status-instituting attitudes of superiors as themselves constrained to acknowledge prior statuses. The voluntarists can be thought of as holding a variant of the traditional subordination-obedience model. But compared to the still more traditional intellectualists, they substantially inflate the significance of attitudes relative to statuses” (pp. 16-17).

He is right that both voluntarists and “intellectualists” in the middle ages largely adhered to the obedience model. But if all attitudes are attributed to the will, it is pretty much a tautology that voluntarism puts more weight on attitudes. The voluntarist refusal to acknowledge any constraint on the will is precisely what leads to arbitrariness.

The argument of Plato’s Euthyphro is not mentioned here. According to the internet, this objection to divine command theory is well known to contemporary scholarship. The so-called Euthyphro dilemma is widely regarded as the most serious issue that divine command theory has to face.

At the paragraph’s end is the sentence that I found really disturbing.

“In this sense, theological voluntarism in the Catholic natural law tradition represents the first stirrings of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses that would burst into full bloom among the early modern Protestant natural lawyers: the thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity. (Luther and Calvin were voluntarists.)” (p. 17).

Given Brandom’s sympathy for the classic American pragmatists’ “Whiggish” belief in progress, this “thin leading edge of the wedge of modernity” amounts to a claim that theological voluntarism should be seen as historically progressive. Fortunately, this weak link in this part of the argument is not essential to the larger point he is making. In particular, it does not affect the insightful reading of Pufendorf’s notion of the consent of the governed that is to follow.

“It is still a huge, distinctively modern, step from understanding the normative statuses of subordinates to be dependent on the normative attitudes of their superiors to seeing the normative status of being a superior (‘primacy’) as dependent on the attitudes of the subordinates. It is, of course, the driving idea of social contract theories of specifically political obligation. I quoted Pufendorf above rejecting Hobbes’s claim that objective matter-of-factual power over others could confer the status of superiority in the sense of the right to command attitudes of obedience, when introducing the notion of consent of the subordinates as an attitude that can institute the relative statuses of superior-subordinate. Pufendorf himself recognizes that a thought like this is also present already in Hobbes, quoting him as saying as saying ‘All right over others is either by nature or by compact.’ Pufendorf radicalizes Hobbes by rejecting the idea that power all by itself can confer right over others, insisting that only the combination of consent and power to punish confers such normative primacy” (pp. 17-18).

This notion of consent, of course, is foundational to modern democratic politics.

“Hegel sees a paradigm of the shift from traditional to modern modes of thought in what became the popular contrast between status-based ‘divine right of kings’ political theories and the attitude-based consent theories epitomized by Thomas Jefferson’s resonant words in the American Declaration of Independence (paraphrasing Locke in his “Second Treatise of Civil Government” of 1690): ‘…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ According to this line of thought, the distinction between possessing matter-of-factual power and exhibiting the normative status of just power is a matter of the attitudes of the subordinates subject to that authority to oblige obedience” (p. 18).

Spirit of Trust

“At the very center of Hegel’s thought … is a radically new conception of the conceptual…. This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological” (Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, p. 2).

“[W]hat confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in…. [M]eaning is to be understood in terms of use” (p. 3).

“Hegel thinks that we cannot understand [the] conceptual structure of the objective world … except as part of a story that includes what we are doing when we practically take or treat the world [in a certain way]” (pp. 3-4). “[I]n knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts…. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness” (p. 5).

“In reading [Kant and Hegel] it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts…. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what these metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (pp. 5-6).

“The process of experience is accordingly understood as being both the process of applying determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of instituting those determinate conceptually contentful norms. It is the gradual, progressive finding of what the content has been all along” (p. 6).

“So [Hegel] takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness … is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does” (p. 7). “We can understand [the metaconcepts] in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts” (p. 8).

“The second master idea of Kant’s that inspires Hegel’s story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially normative character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He sees them as exercising a special sort of authority: the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake commitments as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm” (p. 9).

“But concepts are now understood as ‘functions of judgments’. That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against)…. Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons…. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us” (ibid).

“That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject as representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to what thereby counts as represented by it” (p. 10).

“What one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications would be reasons for or against” (ibid).

“I have already gestured at Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence…. Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction of two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant’s normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes’s ontological distinction with a deontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities” (p. 11).

“Kant’s insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity” (ibid).

“[Hegel’s] generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive social structure: when they take the form of mutual or reciprocal [gegenseitig] recognition” (p. 12).

“[N]orms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners’ attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessment of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes” (p. 13).

“But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel’s invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently” (ibid). “In Hegel’s terms, what a self-consciousness is in itself (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is for itself and what it is for others” (p. 14).

“Which others matter for the institution of a subject’s normative statuses is determined by the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social ‘substance’ is synthesized by mutual recognition…. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitude of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel’s version is second-personal, perspectival ‘I’-‘thou’ sociality, not first-personal, ‘I’-‘we’ sociality” (pp. 13-14).

” ‘Dependence’ and ‘independence’, when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel’s way of talking about normative statuses of responsibility and authority, respectively” (p. 14).

“But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them…. Hegel balances Kant’s insight that judging and acting presuppose the availability of determinately contentful norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes — and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin” (pp. 15-16).

“As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Piercean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel’s much more sophisticated account” (p. 16).

“Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of making those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances…. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of finding out more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate…. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of Vernunft that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other” (p. 17).

“Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit…. This account of expression in terms of recollection grounds an account of representation in terms of expression” (p. 18).

“Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel’s phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of Geist when norm-instituting recognitive practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging recollective practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is forgiveness, the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious trust” (p. 19).

“Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models” (p. 21).

“It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of what he calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ are to be found in Hegel’s Sense Certainty chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgement of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of ‘Hegel, that great foe of immediacy’. By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel’s ‘mediation’)” (pp. 21-22).

“One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible” (p. 23).

“What self-conscious individual normative subjects are ‘for themselves’ and ‘for others’ are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of acknowledging responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of attributing responsibility or authority to others, respectively…. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject’s attitude of acknowledging responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the attributing of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses” (p. 24).

“One of the principal lessons of the discussion of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and vice versa. It is that X’s authority always involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence” (pp. 24-25).

“The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of pure independence (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, inter alia, Hegel’s argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the authority the Master claims” (p. 25).

“The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal order under which its members fall…. Self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted…. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences” (p. 26).

“The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel … thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes …), which can be variously specified” (p. 27).

“Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility…. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense acknowledges responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, attribute responsibility and hold the agent responsible…. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for the others….Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way” (ibid).

“As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of what was done that only become available retrospectively” (p. 28).

“A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances (pp. 28-29).

“Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transition began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineament of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. ‘Geist’ is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification” (p. 29).

“The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as an objective feature of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. [Normativity] is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery…. In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave” (ibid).

“What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his Spirit chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term ‘trust’ [Vertrauen]” (p. 30).

“It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of Geist in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel’s pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust — a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32).

Ethical Meaning of Autonomy

The significance of the autonomy of reason defended by Kant and Hegel is primarily ethical. It is not a claim about the power of epistemology or ontology to know the truth. The autonomy of reason stands for free inquiry about ethics and normativity, in contrast to the authoritarianism of what Brandom calls the “command/obedience” model of normative authority. This has nothing at all to do with excessive knowledge claims or objectification, or with what Derrida called logocentrism. Instead it’s about reasonableness and respect for people. (See also New Biography of Hegel.)

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example.

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant.

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed.

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist.

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism.

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

Responsibility as Two-Sided

It is all too easy to judge others — to hold them unilaterally responsible for what we deem to be wrong. The saying “Judge not lest ye be judged” recognizes that there is something wrong with this.

I wanted to say a bit more about Brandom’s account of responsibility as inherently two-sided. This is related to the very simple — if uncommon — idea that there should be a correlation between the degree of one’s responsibility for something and one’s authority over it. This means that in ethical terms, no one has a monopoly on authority over anything, and no one is responsible for something without having some authority over it. Two-sided responsibility comes hand in hand with the sharing of authority.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel develops an allegory of the softening of the heart of a hard-hearted judge. For Brandom in A Spirit of Trust, this allegory serves as a kind of climax of Hegel’s monumental work.

Traditional views commonly define morality in terms of obedience or conformity to authority. What we should do is simply given to us from an external source. Brandom calls this the authority-obedience model.

At least from the time of Socrates, those concerned with ethics have recognized that mere obedience or conformity is at best only a very rudimentary level of ethical development, and therefore the same must apply to naked authority.

In diametric opposition to the authority-obedience model, Kant famously emphasized autonomy as a necessary basis of morality. For Kant, we are only truly moral insofar as we genuinely think our judgments through for ourselves, rather than relying on external authority.

While fully endorsing Kant’s rejection of the authority-obedience model, Hegel criticized the Kantian alternative of autonomy as one-sidedly individualistic. It would be a bit arrogant to claim that we really did think everything through all by ourselves. Moreover, there is a kind of symmetry in the all-or-nothing attitudes of the authority-obedience model and the autonomy model. It would be more reasonable to acknowledge that most things in life depend partly on us and partly on something or someone(s) outside of us.

As Brandom reconstructs Hegel’s argument, Hegel wants to say that genuine moral responsibility is always two-sided. The hard-hearted judge in the allegory, moved by a lawbreaker’s sincere confession, confesses in turn that she too is not without fault. I think this applies even more clearly to conflicts and people’s judgments of one another outside a judicial setting.

The point is not at all to obliterate distinctions or impose an artificial equivalence between the actions of the participants. It is rather just to recognize that nothing of this sort is ever completely unilateral, and then to systematically take heed of this in real life.

Kierkegaard

Known as the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) was an unconventional Danish religious and literary figure who promoted a severe and radically irrational notion of faith. His most famous notion is that of a “leap” of faith. In Fear and Trembling, he opposed faith to ethics in very strong terms, discussing at length the biblical story of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, and unequivocally taking the side of sheer obedience to divine command over all ethical considerations. This kind of fideism is pretty much anathema to me (see Rational Faith; Theology; Euthyphro).

Kierkegaard originated many completely undeserved negative stereotypes of Hegel. Even during the time I was much engaged with the French anti-Hegelians, reading Kierkegaard’s attacks always made me want to defend Hegel.