What Meaning Is

Brandom has characterized the focus of his interests as the theory of meaning. Recent additions to his website include a fascinating 1980 typescript “Assertion and Conceptual Roles”. This early piece has a programmatic character. It goes even further than the 1976 dissertation in anticipating the leading ideas of his major works. (I will omit the also interesting mathematical-logical formalization that he experiments with here, but steers away from in Making It Explicit and A Spirit of Trust.)

While Brandom is resolutely modern in his identifications, this sort of investigation was pioneered by Aristotle. Meaning and truth are approached in terms of a kind of normative “saying” that is up to us. But the paradigmatic kind of saying is what Aristotle calls “saying something about something”, so it is not entirely up to us. Finally, the paradigmatic use of language is dialogical, imbued with a Socratic ethic of dialogue and free-spirited inquiry. And what we most fundamentally are is dialogical talking animals.

As Brandom puts it in the first sentence, “The paradigmatic linguistic activity is saying that-p, in the sense of asserting, claiming, or stating that-p for some declarative sentence p” (p. 1).

Today “declarative” is also an important if ill-defined concept in the theory of programming languages, where its use has a close relation to the logical use that is given ethical significance here. In that context, it is often glossed as focusing on the what not the how (or the end and not the means), although that is a simplification.

The deep issue underneath both these disparate cases is something like the meaning of meaning. In what follows, I think Brandom makes some real progress in clarifying what is at stake. It has both ethical and formal dimensions.

“Frege shows in the Begriffschrift that the ways in which sentences can occur as significant constituents of other sentences require us to distinguish the content of such an assertion (what is asserted) and the force of the assertion (the asserting of that content). For when a sentence appears as the antecedent of a conditional, it must have something, let us call it the ‘content’, in common with its occurrence as a free-standing assertion, or there would be no justification for detaching the consequent of the conditional when one is prepared to assert its antecedent. On the other hand, the asserting of the conditional does not include the asserting of the antecedent, since the asserter of the conditional might well take the former to be true and the latter to be false. It is a criterion of adequacy for any account of either of these features of declarative discourse that it be compatible with some correct account of the other” (ibid).

I had not realized that the Fregean distinction of Sinn (sense or force) and Bedeutung (reference) arose in this context of reference relations between parts of compound sentences. It seems likely that this point attributed to Frege was a source for Michael Dummet’s work on compound sentences in which one part refers to another, which Brandom had made significant use of a few years earlier, in the dissertation. Dummet was a leading Frege scholar.

It strikes me also that in a formal context, this inter-reference between components of compound sentences could serve as an inductively definable and thus paradox-free version of “self” reference. In a more discursive, less formal context, it recalls Kantian-Hegelian “reflection” and other interesting weakenings of strict identity like Hegel’s “speculative” identity or Ricoeur’s “narrative” identity. Instead of a formally strict and thus empty global self-reference, it is a matter of specifiable internal cross-reference.

Further below, Brandom will explicitly connect this with the theme of anaphora or internal back-reference that he later develops at length in Making It Explicit as a way in which identities are constituted out of difference. In the current text he will also relate it to the “prosentential” theory of truth. Prosentences like “that is true” are the sentential analogue of pronouns — they refer to sentences that express definite propositions in the same way that pronouns refer to nouns. Brandom is saying that concrete meaning involves both Fregean sense and Fregean reference.

“Exclusive attention to the practice of asserting precludes understanding the conceptual significance which such linguistic performances express and enable, while the complementary exclusion must cut off semantic theory from its only empirical subject matter, talking as something people do” (ibid).

Standard bottom-up compositional approaches to semantics focus exclusively on the “content”, and not on the related doing.

“[I]t might be tempting to think that such a theory offers special resources for a theory of asserting as representing, classifying, or identifying. It is important to realize that the same considerations which disclose the distinction of force and content expose such advantages as spurious” (ibid).

“There is no reason to suppose that the semantic representability of all sentences in terms of, say, set-membership statements or identity statements, reflects or is reflected in the explanatory priority of various kinds of linguistic performances” (p. 2).

“It then turns out that giving a rich enough description of the social practices involved in assertion allows us to exhibit semantic contents as complex formal features of performances and compound dispositions to perform according to those practices. In other words, I want to show that it is possible to turn exactly on its head the standard order of explanation canvassed above” (p. 3).

“To specify a social practice is to specify the response which is the constitutive recognition of the appropriateness of performances with respect to that practice…. But in the case of discursive practices, the constitutive responses will in general themselves be performances which are appropriate (in virtue of the responses the community is disposed to make to them) according to some other social practice. The appropriateness of any particular performance will then depend on the appropriateness of a whole set of other performances with similar dependences. Each social practice will definitionally depend upon a set of others” (p. 4).

This notion of practice is thus inherently normative or value-oriented. Brandom compares his holistic view of practices with Quine’s holistic view of the “web of belief”.

“Definitional chains specifying the extension of one practice in terms of its intension, and that intension in terms of another extension, and so on, may loop back on one another. We will say that any system of social practices which does so … is a holistic system…. Such a system of practices cannot be attributed to a community piecemeal, or in an hierarchic fashion, but only all at once.”

The key point about such a holistic system is that there are mutual dependencies between parts or participants.

“It follows that in systems containing essentially holistic practices, the norms of conduct which are codified in such practices are not reducible to facts about objective performances. The appropriateness or inappropriateness of any particular performance with respect to such a practice cannot ultimately be expressed in terms of communal dispositions to respond with objectively characterizable sanctions and rewards…. The norms themselves are entirely constituted by the practices of socially recognizing performances as according or not according with them” (p. 5).

“Facts about objective performances” have a monological character. In technical contexts this can be of great value. But ethical and general life contexts have an inherently dialogical or mutual character.

“A community ought to be thought of as socially synthesized by mutual recognition of its members, since a plausible sufficient condition of A‘s being a member of some community is that the other members of that community take him to be such…. This simple Hegelian model of the synthesis of social entities by mutual recognition of individuals has the advantage that it preserves the basic distinction between the individual’s contribution to his membership in a group and the contribution of the other members” (p. 6, emphasis added).

Here we have the first appearance of the great theme of mutual recognition in Brandom’s work. Brandom has dug deeply into this particular aspect of Hegel, making very substantial contributions of his own. In ethics, mutual recognition has roots in Aristotelian philia (friendship or love) and the so-called golden rule (do and do not do to others as you would have them do and not do to you). Brandom sees that Hegel treats mutual recognition not only as an ethical ideal but also as a fundamental explanatory principle.

“The crucial point is that the reflexive recognition (as social self-recognition) be an achievement requiring the symmetry of being recognized in a particular respect by those whom I recognize in that respect, and presupposing that my recognitions will be transitive…. A community is then any set P which is closed under transitive recognition…. [N]o one member is omniscient or infallible about such membership…, nor is it required that everyone recognize everyone else in the community” (p. 7).

The symmetry of recognizing and being recognized leads to the idea that authority and responsibility ought to be symmetrically balanced. This has tremendous implications.

“Asserting that-p is, among other things, to explicitly authorize certain inferences…. Saying this much does not yet say what the constitutive recognition of this authorizing consists in…. Our account of the authorizing of inferences will draw upon the second major feature of the social role of assertion” (ibid).

The idea of understanding acts of assertion principally in terms of an inferential constitution of meaning is transformative. Others have suggested or implied something like this, but Brandom expresses it with more clarity and thoroughness than anyone.

Reasoning is not a merely technical activity. The constitution of meaning has fundamental ethical significance.

“This second feature is noted by Searle when he says that an assertion (among other things) ‘counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs’. Leaving aside the representationalist expansion of the content ascribed, we can see in the use of the term ‘undertaking’ the recognition of a dimension of responsibility in assertion, coordinate with the previously indicated dimension of authority. In asserting that-p one is committing oneself in some sense to the claim that-p. What sort of responsibility is involved? The leading idea of the present account is that it is justificatory responsibility which one undertakes by an assertion. Justification and assertion will be exhibited as essentially holistic social practices belonging to the same system of practices, internally related to one another. So the recognitive response-type which is the intension of the social practice of assertion must include recognition of the assertor as responsible for justifying his assertoric performance under suitable circumstances…. Authority in this sense consists in the social recognition of a practice as authorizing others” (pp. 9-10).

“What is essential is that the relation between the intensions and the extensions of a family of social practices underwrite a relation of what we may call (extending the usual sense) anaphoric reference between various performances. The term ‘anaphoric’ is used to indicate that this ‘referential’ relation is internal to a system of social practices, where one performance refers to another as one word refers to another in A: ‘Pynchon wrote the book’ B: ‘But has he tried to read it?’, where the pronouns anaphorically refer to the antecedent terms ‘Pynchon’ and ‘the book’. No relation between discursive and non-discursive items is supposed. A prime use of this expressive resource of anaphoric reference to typed utterings is exhibited just below, as a feature of demands for justification” (p. 12).

In Making It Explicit, Brandom uses linguistic anaphora to explain the constitution of objects as objects. Here he gives it an even broader role. Anaphora or back-referencing is the birth of substance, solidity, and modality in meaning. Again the ethical dimension comes to the fore. Assertion as lived concerns neither naked Parmenidean being nor pure objective facts.

“The key to our attempt to offer sufficient conditions for assertion by specifying a class of systems of social practices is the relation of justification which a set of assertions can have to another assertion…. Both the dimension of authority and the dimension of responsibility will be explicated in terms of the recognition of justification. Each of the different types of assertion which play a role in the systems we will examine, free-standing assertions, assertions which are the results of inferences authorized by other assertions, and assertions which are part of the justification which another asserting made its asserter responsible for, each of these types of assertion incurs a justificatory responsibility itself and authorizes further inferences. The relevant responsibility is to produce (what would be recognized as) an appropriate justification, if one is demanded…. The utterance of a conventional request for justification addressed to a foregoing assertion is to be always appropriate, and not itself in need of justification. The cognitive significance of the linguistic practices we describe stems from this universal appropriateness of demands for further justification (as Sellars takes the ‘rational’ structure of scientific practice to consist in its being a ‘self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once’…. An utterance in the conventional style of assertions (utterances which undertake justificatory responsibilities and issue inference licenses whose contents vary as the content of the assertion vary) will constitutively be recognized as possessing that authority only so long as the conditional responsibility to justify if queried has not been shirked…. No more for this distinction than elsewhere in the social practice story need we appeal to intentions or beliefs of performers” (pp. 12-13).

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, other variants of this ethics of dialogue or dialogical ethics have been developed by Plato, Gadamer, and Habermas.

“For just as inference passes the authority of assertion one way along the anaphoric chain, it also passes the justificatory responsibility incurred the other way along that chain” (p. 14).

“The extended responsibility induced by the presentation of a justification is defeasible by the performance of a counter-justification, comprising further assertions…. The categories of justificatory and counter-justificatory performances are not disjoint” (p. 17).

“Each of these conditions codifies some aspect of our ordinary practices of giving and asking for reasons” (p. 18).

“[A] set of basic and extended repertoires related by an accessibility relation will be called a conceptual idiom…. It is in terms of these still rather particularized structures that we will define assertional contents or conceptual roles” (pp. 18-19).

Next in this series: Conditionals and Conceptual Roles

Reflection and Apperception

According to Robert Pippin, the most important feature of Kant’s theory of thinking, account-giving, and judging is that “judging is apperceptive” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 103). “Apperception” is a term coined by Leibniz. The “ap-” prefix etymologically suggests a redoubling of perception, or a “perception of perception”. Leibniz broadens its meaning to cover all forms of self-awareness. Aristotle’s surviving texts include only a few lines about the “common sense”, which both synthesizes inputs from different senses into perceptions of objects, and is the root of self-awareness. Kant’s first and third Critiques greatly expand on this.

Pippin quotes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception” (p. 102), commenting, “This is a new theory of judgment and accordingly grounds a new logic” (ibid). That judging is apperceptive is for Hegel a logical truth.

Therefore, for Hegel “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations (B132). Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive (which is in effect what the B132 passage claims). And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness.”

“Virtually everything in [Hegel’s] Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (p. 103).

He quotes Hegel, “The concept, when it has progressed to a concrete existence which is itself free, is none other than the ‘I’ or pure self-consciousness” (p. 104).

I like to turn this last point around, and say that self-consciousness, the pure ‘I’, for Hegel is none other than the concept — not a static self-image, but a pure reference to the active taking of things to be thus-and-such. My individual essence as a “rational” animal is constituted by all that I care about and hold to be true, as confirmed in my actions and follow-through, not by what I happen to believe about myself.

What Pippin calls the “very peculiar” sense in which apperceptive judging inherently involves reflection and self-reference seems completely normal to me. My self-consciousness straightforwardly consists of what I actually care about and hold to be true, not some abstract “consciousness of consciousness”, in which ordinary consciousness would be its own object. It is not mere organic consciousness or “awareness”, but self-consciousness — Kantian discursive “taking as” — that is inherently reflexive.

This is a relational reflexivity that does not presuppose a substantial “self”, only a kind of “adverbial” self-reference. Takings have reasons, which in turn have other reasons. When all goes well, the reasons mutually support one another, and there is no infinite regress. This results in what Kant calls a unity of apperception, which is a truer, deeper self than any self-image we may have, and indeed not an image at all — and not something presupposed or achieved once and for all, but something we must constantly aim for anew, even when we did just achieve it.

We are the sum of our takings. Meanwhile, what we take to be the case — and what we take to be important or good — is not necessarily what we say it is, but what our actions and follow-through imply.

Shine and Reflection

Hegel introduces reflection in by contrasting it with immediacy and simple being.

“The truth of being is essence.”

“Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is a mediated knowledge, for it is not to be found with and in essence immediately, but starts off from an other, from being, and has a prior way to make, the way that leads over and beyond being or that rather penetrates into it. Only insofar as knowledge recollects itself into itself out of immediate being, does it find essence through this mediation” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book II, p. 337).

Knowledge “does not stop at the immediate”. The perspective of “Being” for Hegel is a mere starting point that turns out to be unsustainable on its own terms. Being by itself is not sufficient to make anything intelligible. Essence on the other hand begins to give us truth.

He goes on to say what essence is, in terms of reflection. This is initially introduced in rather classic Hegelese:

“For essence is an infinite self-contained movement which determines its immediacy as negativity and its negativity as immediacy, and is thus the shining of itself within itself. In this, in its self-movement, essence is reflection” (p. 345).

Each part of this actually makes sense, if you think in terms of reflection from the start and treat immediacy as derivative, which is just what Hegel ends up recommending here. Reflection is Hegel’s model for “good” infinity.

The metaphorical “shining” above is wordplay on Schein, Hegel’s term for a kind of appearance, which di Giovanni renders as “shine”. Kant had spoken of the Schein or illusion produced by pure reason outside the realm of experience. As an appearance-like thing, shine is contrasted with essence. For Hegel, essence is to be found nowhere else than within shine, but the articulation of essence involves a selectivity, distinction, and elaboration within shine that the logic of being (based as it is on a principle of indifference) is unable to support.

“Shine is the same as what reflection is; but it is reflection as immediate. For this shine which is internalized and therefore alienated from its immediacy, the German has a word from an alien language, ‘Reflexion’.”

“Essence is reflection, the movement of becoming and transition that remains within itself, wherein that which is distinguished is determined simply and solely as the negative itself” (ibid).

Hegel introduces talk about “the negative” as a reminder that higher thought requires moving beyond pre-given or “fixed” concepts. This “negative” has virtually nothing to do with classical negation in formal logic.

“In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other” (ibid).

Being is supposed to be a stable foundation, but for Hegel any true stability of intelligibility cannot come from a foundation in mere fixity. At this level, any determinateness and any intelligibility really depend not on being as such, but on relation and relatedness that is external to the supposed foundation.

He continues, “Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only in self-referring” (ibid).

Here he explicitly connects negativity with reflection and self-reference, vocabulary I find far more illuminating.

Reflective judgment works in part by a sort of hall of mirrors effect, in which the back-and-forth of reflection effectively moots the question of which was the original of the images. All that remains is a new level of variegated and articulated whole. Hegel is saying something like essence is the equilibrium resulting from the back-and-forth of reflection. This is how intelligibility originates. Relations are prior to any notion of being that is not utterly indeterminate.

The following passage, read slowly and carefully, elaborates this identification of the Hegelian negative with self-reference and reflection. It portrays reflection as bootstrapping itself.

“The self-reference of the negative is therefore its turning back on itself; it is immediacy as the sublating of the negative, but immediacy simply and solely as this reference or as turning back from a one, and hence as self-sublating of immediacy. — This is positedness, immediacy purely as determinateness or self-reflecting. This immediacy, which is only as the turning back of the negative into itself, is the immediacy which constitutes the determinateness of shine, and from which the previous reflective movement seemed to begin. But, far from being able to begin with this immediacy, the latter first is rather as the turning back or as the reflection itself” (p. 347).

He says quite clearly that immediacy is only the semblance of a beginning.

“Immediacy comes on the scene simply and solely as a turning back and is that negative which is the semblance of a beginning, the beginning which the return negates” (ibid).

He explicitly recalls the Kantian background here.

“Reflection is usually taken in a subjective sense as the movement of judgment which transcends an immediately given representation and seeks more universal determinations for it or compares it with such determinations. Kant opposes reflective and determining judgment (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, pp. xxiiiff.). He defines judgment in general as the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determining. But if what is given is only a particular, for which it is up to the judgment to find the universal, then the judgment is reflecting. Here, too, reflection is therefore a matter of rising above the immediate to the universal. On the one hand, the immediate is determined as particular only by being thus referred to its universal; for itself, it is only a singular or an immediate existent. But, on the other hand, that to which it is referred, its universal, its rule, principle, law, is in general that which is reflected into itself, which refers itself to itself, is the essence or the essential.”

“But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determinations, but reflection in general. It is clear that the reflection to which Kant assigns the search of the universal for a given particular is likewise only an external reflection which applies itself to the immediate as to something given. — But the concept of absolute reflection, too, is implicit in it. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began; the immediate, therefore, to be a nothingness which is posited in its true being only by the turning back of the reflection from it, by the determining of reflection. Therefore, that which reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but rather its true being” (p. 350).

Here we are far indeed from early modern representationalism and its “given” objects, traces of which Hegel still finds in Kant. Yet nothing could be more contrary to this point of view than subjective arbitrariness. The process of the back-and-forth of reflection generates shareable rational objectivity out of practical distinctions of value. And reflection does not live within the confines of one person’s head. Hegel emphasizes the continuity of the inner and the outer, and elsewhere explicitly proposes mutual recognition as the ground not only of ethics but also of knowledge.

Reflection and Higher-Order Things

It is in discussing reflection that Hegel implicitly introduces what might be called higher-order “things”.

In mathematics, multiple simultaneous dimensions give rise to “higher order” terms. Higher-order terms may evaluate to a constant value or a first-order function in particular cases, but when they do, they intrinsically provide rationale for the shape of the constant value or simple function that is not available by inspecting the constant value or simple function alone.

The multiple “dimensions” or analytically distinguishable iterations of self-reference in Hegelian reflection, I would suggest, can be similarly considered as giving rise to higher-order terms. A general slogan for Hegel’s Logic might be, higher-order terms have explanatory priority over simple ones. To explain a simple term, look for the higher-order term(s) that comprehend it.

No simple term or assertion is self-explanatory. But the self-referentiality of higher-order terms begins to capture some actual explanation, which is then internal to the term in question.

A Logic of Being?

We’ve reached part 2 of Robert Pippin’s important Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Despite recently mentioned peripheral caveats, I’m enormously impressed with the way he makes sense of Hegel’s Science of Logic, possibly the most difficult philosophical work ever written.

He now begins a high-level survey of the three separate “logics” Hegel develops. It is essential to Hegel’s scheme that the first two will be regarded as failures in the explanation of what is involved in making things intelligible. For Hegel, failures of thought play an essential, irreducible role in the attainment of new insights. The perspectives achieved by thought are not “refuted” by other perspectives external to those achieved; instead, the achieved perspectives metaphorically “discover” their own inability to solve their own problems.

We’ve already seen the first move of the first of these failed accounts of what it is to be intelligible, the logic of being.

Hegel uses the further development of this account as a vehicle for discussing the Kantian categories of quantity and quality. If his first point was that being qua being is utterly sterile because intelligibility depends on the ability to make definite determinations, the elaboration begins to show the relational character of all determination, and at the same time the failure of any simple assertion of properties of things (“judgment”, in the severely truncated early modern form that reduces it to predication) to adequately make those things intelligible.

Pippin does not go into detail on Hegel’s lengthy discussion of quantity and quality, so for instance there is no more mention of the issue about good and bad infinity, though this is where Hegel treats it. Pippin reserves the most space for the final logic of the concept that is supposed to be successful, and gives the least to the logic of being, which according to Hegel is the least adequate.

In discussing the logic of being, Pippin is mainly concerned to extract takeaway points relevant to understanding the high-level “movement” of Hegel’s logic as a whole. I have been highlighting his suggestion that this notorious “logical motion” is teleological in a genuinely Aristotelian sense, rather than being either deductive, or somehow univocally driven forward by contradiction. It is all oriented toward the merely hypothetical necessity of what is required if we aim to reach a deeper truth. Pippin is at pains to point out that for Hegel as for Aristotle, every teleological actualization involves contingency.

“The idea is to begin with the thought of anything at all, in its immediate indeterminacy, simply being, Sein. But the thought of anything at all is not the thought of anything…. Nothing is excluded, so nothing is included…. It is a failed thought, not the thought of this failure or even just the enactment of the failure. This is the beginning of everything of significance in the Logic; it (the thought of Sein being nothing other than Nichts [nothing]) is the reflective relation to what is being thought that is inseparable from anything possibly being thought. It is thought’s apperceptive moment…. Just thereby, thinking is thinking its failure to be thinking, not thinking of a strange object, Nichts. It is only in this sense that the first moment has a second moment, a realization of what thinking must be to be thinking of anything” (p. 186).

“Such a reflective determination reveals both that such putative immediate indeterminacy must itself already be a determination, and that such a putative content, anything at all in its immediate indeterminacy, has not been transformed, has not ‘become’ Nichts, but that it always already was” (p. 187).

“Hegel here is doing something like making a case for, or at least in some way showing us, the apperceptively discursive nature of any possible discursive intelligibility. This also means that in judging anything, I am always also implicitly holding open the possibility of the self-correcting of judging…. Or, any judgment always implicitly applies, is implicitly applying, the concept of judgment to itself” (p. 189).

That apperceptive judgment always implicitly applies the concept of judgment to itself follows from its apperceptive, reflective nature. To be apperceptively reflective is to be self-referential, Pippin has been saying.

“As Kant insisted, in any such case I must be able to ‘stand above’ what I judged and what I now judge correctly and take the latter to be a correction of the former in order for it to be that, a correction. Otherwise, there is just a succession of episodes. This is why he could say that the understanding, the power of claiming, is the synthetic unity of apperception (in the same way, I am ultimately claiming in this book, Hegel is claiming that what he calls the concept is the synthetic unity of apperception)” (ibid).

“This also means, as we have been stressing, that given certain concepts of the power of knowing — say, a knowing that must be indeterminate and immediate, a ‘resolve’ to begin with such a notion — we already have thereby the concept of the object of such pure knowing, Being. If we are talking about a case of knowing, as we are, the two are, must be, inseparable…. There is no question, here or anywhere in the Logic, of the need to ‘move’ from the order of knowing to the order of being. If that were claimed to be necessary, how would we have begun with a case of knowing?” (pp. 189-190).

This intimate connection between the form of knowing and the object of knowing is Hegel’s alternative to the difficult “transcendental deduction” by which Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason aims to establish that the categories of thought really are relevant to experience. Pippin suggests that Hegel generally reinterprets Kantian dualities as cases of Aristotelian hylomorphism, and notes that even Kant occasionally makes remarks tending in this direction. In this particular case, reinterpreting the duality as a hylomorphism eliminates the “gap” between thought and being that in Kant creates the need for the transcendental deduction.

I confess, though, that it was not obvious to me that we had begun with a case of knowing. I have trouble identifying any kind of failed thought or thought that fails to have a content with knowing; I am not used to recognizing the possibility of an empty “knowing”.

But we are at least implicitly talking about an instance of thought here, even if it is a degenerate instance. Pippin is arguing that even that failed, empty thought must still be self-referential, just in being a case of thought in Hegel’s sense at all. By virtue of its form as thought or apperceptive judgment, it is already reflectively turned back on itself. I think Pippin is suggesting that that turning back on itself counts as a kind of knowing at the meta level, even though the thought failed at ground level.

“[T]here is no objection in Kant or among the relevant post-Kantians, in their denial that thinking is a kind of perceiving or primarily receptive, to the general form of such claims as ‘I know it because I saw it’, especially because that is the invitation to establishing that it can be seen by anyone…. But for thinking as such, there is nothing like: ‘I know that is the essence because I had an essence-intuition…'” (p. 190).

I am more reserved about claims like “I know it because I saw it”. Plato would not accept this as an instance of knowledge, and I am inclined to follow suit. I would say, “I believe it with confidence because I saw it”. But Pippin makes a good point here about the implicit invitation to treat this as the claim that it could be seen by anyone.

As I have noted before, what I prefer to call belief and others call a form of immediate, noninferential empirical “knowledge” are not just arbitrary assertions. Though we arrive at such beliefs “spontaneously” (in the ordinary sense, which is nearly the inverse of the Kantian sense), after the fact it is always possible to ask about the reasons for them.

I am claiming that after the fact, it should always be possible to express something of why we believe what we do. “Because I saw it” is not a reason, but a reiteration that it appeared that way to me. Intrinsically, it has no more value than “because I said so”. The kind of reasons that can be provided in this case will be persuasive (or, in Aristotle’s usage, “probable”) to some degree or other, but also potentially refutable. Typically they will take the form of more detailed claims about what we saw.

“Fichte insists on the same point that is made in the first move in the Logic… by pointing out the difference logically between ‘A’ and ‘A = A’. For the latter, we need… an ‘I’ that is ‘= I’…. But this identification is something done, a Tat [deed], the equivalent here of ‘bringing contents to the unity of apperception’ in Kant’s account, an active unifying necessary for the I to be continuously that I in experience” (p. 191).

As Aristotle pointed out, merely saying something (“A”, “Being”, or whatever) is not yet saying something about something, which turns out to be the minimal condition for truth or falsity. This formulation points to some kind of self-relatedness in the attitude toward content that seems to be a minimal condition for any kind of assertion. This self-relatedness in the content of assertions seems to be related to the inherent self-referentiality of thought for which Pippin is arguing, as if the one were a sort of hylomorphic reflection of the other.

I used to misunderstand the above argument of Fichte as additionally requiring the existence of an “I” like a rabbit out of a hat, but again we are only dealing with hypothetical necessity here. If I want to be able to conclude “A = A”, then I need to be able to apply the same identification “A” twice within the context of one judgment. That the two identifications of “A” must be combined within the context of one judgment is the sole import of Fichte’s “I = I”. If there is any existence of an I involved here, it is by hypothesis.

Pippin stresses that although Hegel speaks of logical “movement” in temporal metaphors, each part of the “movement” has always already occurred. Once again, Hegel is not talking about what drives the course of events, but something like the conditions of possibility of the constitution of intelligibility and normativity.

He goes on to discuss more problems related to immediacy, and the transition to the logic of essence, each of which I’ll address separately.

Next in this series: Problems of Immediacy

Being the One Acting

Another passing doubt in my reading of Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows came up when he said something along the lines of “I know I am the one acting because I am the one acting”. This certainly captures an intuitive feeling that I have too, but on reflection it seems to rely on what I would call an appearance of inner sense.

With Aristotle I call all inner immediacy an appearance of inner sense. Then my Platonic instincts say that no appearance qualifies as knowledge.

Does Pippin mean to suggest that Hegel — “that great foe of immediacy” — believes in a sort of immediate self-knowledge of individuals via the identification of thinking and being? But he pointed out that Hegel’s German selbst is strictly an adverbial modifier that has no dual usage as a substantive noun, the way “self” does in English. What he wrote in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy seems at odds with this as well.

Pippin has argued that thought for Hegel is inherently self-referential. I think I want to affirm this, but the relational “self” of self-referentiality and unity of apperception is not the immediately contentful, more noun-like empirical “self” of me and mine (see The Ambiguity of “Self”), which I think we experience through the medium of Aristotelian/Kantian imagination rather than thought. Pippin’s remark with which I began seems to blur the line between transcendental self (-referentiality) and empirical self. The relation between transcendental and empirical “self” is one of neither isomorphism nor hylomorphism, I want to say. Something like what Plato called “mixing” does seem to occur in experience, but how to characterize it is a very difficult question.

Aristotle used episteme (knowledge as rationally articulable) and gnosis (direct personal familiarity) in contrasting ways, but it is common to see them both rendered to English as “knowledge”, as if they were interchangeable. With Hegel too we have to be careful, because multiple German words get translated by English “knowledge”.

Next in this series: Passive Intellect?

Apperceptive Judgment

What Hegel calls “the concept” is not a simple content to be grasped, as if it were already completely formed as what it will turn out to be, and all of that in advance of and independent of the activity of judgment. Rather, it emerges out of the activity of judgment in the space of reasons. It also turns out to have an inherently normative character.

Pippin quotes Kant: “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception…. I do not mean to say that these representations necessarily belong to one another in the empirical intuition, but rather that they belong to one another in virtue of the necessary unity of the apperception in the synthesis of intuitions” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 102).

As a first approximation, “apperception” here means something like apprehension of intelligible meaning. For Kant, “the basic feature” of the “general or content-less logic as rules for valid judgings and inferrings” is that “judging is apperceptive” (p. 103).

The significance of this will become a bit clearer further below. Hegel will go further than Kant in construing apperception in a purely “logical” (as opposed to psychological) way.

“Kant was well aware that with this notion of apperceptive judging he was breaking with the rationalist (and Lockean) notion of reflection as inner perception, and as we shall see, Hegel’s language is everywhere carefully Kantian in this respect” (p. 112).

(Aristotle too carefully distinguishes thought from inner sense, rather than identifying them as Descartes and Locke do.)

Pippin quotes Hegel: “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the ‘I think’, or of self-consciousness” (ibid).

This suggests a three-way mutual explication of the essence of the concept, unity of apperception, and self-consciousness. Self-consciousness for Hegel turns out to be not a separate substantive “subject” distinct from its “object”, but rather an essential adverbial property of self-reference that is intrinsic to the thinking of every concept (see The Ambiguity of “Self”).

From Hegel’s perspective “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations…. Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive…. And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness…. Virtually everything in the Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (ibid).

Judgings as activities are “necessarily and inherently… self-referential”. The suggestion seems to be that apperception and self-consciousness consist in complex self-referential judgings, rather than anything resembling perceptive receptivity or simple consciousness. “Reflexivity” for Hegel is an elemental property of judgments as judgments, not a global property of consciousness. To assert the inherent self-referentiality of judging activity is quite different from asserting the sort of inherent reflexivity of consciousness that Descartes and Locke presuppose.

“[W]e have to be clear that this has nothing to do with inner perception or the mind observing itself” (p. 105).

“There must be some way of saying that the self-conscious dimension of thought and action is a matter of the way a claim is made or an action undertaken. To adopt the formulations used by Ryle in accounting for many similar phenomena, they are accomplished ‘self-consciously’, rather than accompanied by or even identical with another act of consciousness” (p. 106).

“There is a self-referential component in any judgment or action too (‘I think this, I act thus’), but it can be misleading to think that this is the same problem as ‘how does the first-person pronoun have sense, and thereby pick me uniquely out’. As we shall see, it is misleading because it suggests a punctuated moment of awareness” (p. 107).

“Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (ibid).

In support of this he quotes Hegel: “[I]n this original deed there is not yet the representation of the ‘I’…. [T]his objectifying deed, liberated from the opposition of consciousness [between subject and object], is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed” (ibid).

It seems to me that apperception thus implicitly becomes the middle term of a syllogism: self-consciousness is apperception; apperception is not a kind of consciousness; therefore (contrary to what the formation of the word suggests) self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness, but something “else”.

I take consciousness to be a form of presentation in what Aristotle calls imagination, and self-consciousness to be the form of the self-referential character of judgment or apperception. Outside the context of the Logic (e.g., in the Phenomenology), self-consciousness has an inherently social or intersubjective dimension; in both the Phenomenology and the Logic it has a normative dimension. Human as opposed to purely animal experience is always a mixture of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness”.

“I know what I am doing not by identifying myself with the one acting, but by being the one acting. So how can such a Two also be One? We are in the middle of everything of significance in Hegel’s Logic, not to mention Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Schelling’s early idealism…. This unusual identity is constitutive of ‘theoretical thought’ as such” (pp. 108-109).

“This too is important to state carefully. Hegel scholars often assume that Hegel inherits ‘identity philosophy’ from Schelling, and that it means ‘the identity of subject and object’. They then formulate various implausible versions of such an identity, such as that true reality is divine thought thinking itself, that objects are moments of this thought’s ‘intellectual intuition of itself’. But the Logic is not committed to anything remotely like this” (p. 109).

Rather, the identity Hegel is principally interested in is that “the thought (belief, assertion) of some content… is at the same time the thought of the reasons that are required for such an ‘answer'” (p. 110, emphasis added). This what it means to say that thought is inherently self-referential.

This helps to explain why it is true that “It is a condition of use of a concept that the use is subject to a norm of correct and incorrect use, and that norm is internal to the concept…. Such capacities as judgment and self-consciousness are called into play in a way that can be redeemed if challenged, for example” (p. 106).

Pippin elaborates, “being committed to the truth of a proposition, I am just thereby committed to the denial of everything inconsistent with it. The latter is not a separate inference I draw, on the basis of my first commitment. It is a dimension of the content of my first commitment. This is not to say I must be conscious of these implications and incompatibilities, but just that I could not be thinking of that content were I not able to be responsive to such considerations. This is all so just as someone’s believing something and her thought that it is something right to believe ‘are the same reality‘” (p. 112).

The idea that a proposition should be identified with the distinctions and entailments that it presupposes and that follow from it — rather than with a simple Boolean value of true or false, as in mainstream 20th century logic — has been developed with extraordinary thoroughness by Robert Brandom in Making It Explicit, which Richard Rorty credited with ushering in a new “Hegelian” stage of analytic philosophy.

“[N]o one could be said to ‘just’ assert, or just believe, or just act. Any such undertaking, if self-conscious, must be potentially responsive to the question of ‘Why?’; that is, to reasons. (An assertion is such a responsiveness; the latter is not a secondary or even distinct dimension of the former.)” (ibid).

This formulation that an assertion is such a responsiveness — which relies on the essential self-referentiality of judgment that Pippin is arguing for here — seems in a way more radical than the way Brandom puts it. For Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel, the concomittant commitments are material inferences, and there is a sort of Kantian imperative that we ought to show such responsiveness to everything with a material-inferential connection to our assertions. According to Pippin’s Hegel, the concommitant commitments are not inferences at all but integral to the true identity of the assertion, and we would not really have made an assertion at all if we did not show responsiveness to them. But they ultimately agree that we ought to show such responsiveness — that addressing the concomittant commitments of our assertions is not something we could legitimately choose to ignore — and that this has something to do with the very nature of assertion-making.

“And it is at least plausible to say that the greater the extent of such potential responsiveness (or said another way, the greater the self-understanding), the ‘freer’ the activity, the more I can be said to redeem the action as genuinely mine, back it, stand behind it. We thus have formulated what [Sebastian] Rödl rightly identifies as the heart of German Idealism, the principle ‘that self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one'” (pp. 113-114).

Statements like “self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one” used to give me no end of trouble, because I assumed they were meant to assert the sovereignty of a Subject (i.e., in this case that the Subject is self-conscious; the Subject has free will; and the Subject is the seat of reason). What I eventually realized through the closer study of Kant and Hegel is that I was assuming dictionary meanings of self-consciousness and freedom that are not applicable, and that Hegel and even Kant are much less “subject-centered” than common readings make them out to be. A strong concern for subjectivity need not be identified with the assumption of a sovereign Subject.

Because what Hegel means by “concept” is so fundamental to understanding the Logic and so far from the way it is commonly understood, Pippin repeats an earlier message in different words:

“[C]oncepts are determinate only by virtue of their roles in judgment, the ‘bringing to the objective unity of apperception’, in Kant’s definition” (p. 115).

“So a concept like ‘essence’, for example, can be said to be delimitable as just that concept by virtue of its possible uses in various contrasts to ‘appearance’ or by virtue of its negation (in the grand structure of the [Science of Logic]) of the concept ‘being’, or its role in distinguishing accidental from essential predicates. These are all roles in judgments (and are thereby tied to judgmental roles in inferences). Any of these uses, though, involves any such claim in a network of justifications, a normative order. The application of any such concept in judgment, since apperceptive, self-consciously applied, must be, just thereby, responsive to its possible misapplication, and the question of the general contours of its correct use implicates any one notion in the normative proprieties governing many others. Hence, as we shall see, the course of the ‘movement’ of the logic” (ibid).

“A proper understanding of the self’s relation to itself in thinking, the form of any conceiving and thereby any concept, and thereby any inferential relation, is also the core meaning of what Hegel calls the ‘infinity’ treated by speculative philosophy” (p. 118).

“This is yet again not an easy thought: some sort of self-relation that is not a two-place relation, but something like a circular structure, in which the self’s self-relation never terminates in a distinct object or determinate posit, but in so attending, returns to itself as a relating…. This is ‘infinity’ in the proper sense, Hegel tells us frequently, and… ‘Self-consciousness is thus the nearest example of the presence of infinity'” (p. 119).

My current impression is that what Hegel calls the “good” infinite has something to do with what I would tentatively call relational structures with cyclic dependencies, and he thinks we can and do implicitly use something like this in life, without getting stuck in what could be a mathematically infinite cyclic traversal of the structure. (That something like this is at least conceivable is anecdotally supported by the existence of computable and hence in that sense “finite” implementations of infinitely extensible data structures.) The more usual notion of infinity — at root mathematical, a paradoxical “value greater than any definite value” — Hegel derides as “bad” infinity, regardless of whether it is potential or actual (which was a key distinction for Aristotle). (See Hegel on Reflection for a somewhat better account of this issue.)

Hegel in effect seems to ask us to suspend the assumption that standard mathematical infinity is what infinity is, and to step back to the more general idea of the non-definite. Further, he identifies the contrasting term of finitude specifically with a non-relational view of things, as being whatever they are even in complete isolation from one another, so his condemnations of finitude are not at all condemnations of the view of things as finite in the sense of depending on other things. Pippin earlier even suggested that some kind of notion of things depending on other things for their intelligibility is the main source of the famous and difficult-to-understand “motion” in Hegelian logic.

“Discriminating what belongs together with what, what is connected to what in a temporal order, knowing that the successive perceptions of a house do not count as the perception of a succession in the world, requires an apperceptive unity; it does not just happen to consciousness” (p. 121).

“Without this ability to distinguish how things are from how they seem to me, there would be as many ‘I’s’ as associated seemings, and no unity of self-consciousness. Or, achieving the unity of self-consciousness is differentiating seeming from being” (p. 122).

Pippin returns to his larger argument about the Kantian basis of what Hegel is doing.

“The attempt has been to understand the Kantian claim about apperception as a logical, not psychological claim, and this goes some way toward understanding the link between this reflexive character of judging as the essence of intelligibility and ‘the intelligibles’. If it is possible to establish that certain a priori judgments have… objectivity, but without Kant’s limitation thesis, restricting that thesis to possible objects of sense experience (phenomena, not noumena), we will have a way into Hegel’s claim that logic can be understood as metaphysics. Our claim about Kant was that even for him, this relation to objects is not established by the imposition of subjective form onto received sensory material. Kant’s position is not ‘impositionist’ in this sense, and both he and Hegel are following the nonimpositionist, more Aristotelian (hylomorphic) line” (p. 125).

He includes several more quotes from Kant and one from Beatrice Longuenesse that offer hints in this more Aristotelian direction, then says, “We need only remember that for Hegel this is the core of Kant’s own position once we give up any notion of separable contributions from sensibility and understanding, and give up referring to pure forms of intuition as species-specific…. If we do, we get the careful statements about the identity within difference of concept and being in and for itself with which we began” (p. 126).

He returns to the more basic point that “There is no indication that Hegel thinks that being or God has an apperceptive discursive intellect and that we are manifestations of it. We are manifestations of the finitude of Verstand [understanding] and the possibility inherent in Verstand of the transcendence of such self-imposed finitude” (ibid).

In referring to “self-imposed” finitude, I think Pippin means the viewing of concepts as independent, isolated objects or fixed representations, rather than as pure moments in the traversal of the relational network of the space of reasons.

“[W]e need a kind of stereoscopic vision to keep in mind two aspects of this issue that Hegel keeps stressing…. The first is that conceiving is an activity and concepts are ‘moments’ of this activity. This is something stressed in a different way when Hegel tells us that concepts are not things, objects. The second is that… such activities are not actions, doings, and that Kant’s position, when properly understood (and so not as Kant understood it), should not be taken as a part of a two-step or impositionist account of such activity” (p. 127).

That activity is not reducible to punctual actions is a thesis I have been pursuing in an Aristotelian context.

“Hegel says that (Kant’s) objective or transcendental logic ‘replaces’… general metaphysics or ontology. Logic so construed also takes account of and replaces special metaphysics, the a priori doctrines of the soul, the world, and God” (p. 128).

Once again, Hegel’s “logical” alternative to rationalist metaphysics and psychology does not presuppose any fixed concepts. Pippin returns to this to avoid misunderstanding, because he has been emphasizing the non-psychological character of apperceptive judgment for Hegel.

“If we think, as some do, of Hegel’s Denkbestimmungen [thought determinations] as something like Fregean thoughts, objective in a Platonic sense, as abstract entities, then what I am quoting [to the effect that the “objective” part of Hegel’s logic is the true critique of such determinations] is very puzzling. Hegel certainly knows that Kant’s transcendental logic is in some sense or other a logic of subjectivity” (p. 129).

The distinction that is beginning to be made explicit here is between subjectivity in general and specifically psychological subjectivity. This will allow Hegel to develop a “subjective” logic that has nothing to do with psychology.

By analogy, Pippin notes that “Frege interpreters argue that there is no reason to go as far as the historical Frege did (a form of Platonism) to differentiate objective thought from mental episodes, private associations, etc.” (ibid).

“In a claim we shall have to return to and investigate, [Hegel] repeats often that the true critical question is not whether subjective forms of thought have any objective purchase, but whether the concepts of a logic ‘in and for themselves’ provide what they are supposed to provide: what is required for successful conceptual determination…. Kant did not sufficiently investigate what these pure concepts are; he did not pursue the question of their ‘nature’ and their very possibility” (p. 130).

Broadly speaking, the answer will be that concepts are not Platonic forms but get their meaning from their uses, as normatively evaluated in the space of reasons.

“Commentators are sometimes so eager to observe the spirit of this sort of critique of Kantian ‘subjectivism’ that they assume that the Logic is something like the ‘pure’ manifestation of the objective dependence and implication relations among ‘pure essentialities’, thoughts in the objective sense, logical entities that are in those relations in ways that have nothing to do with anyone ‘thinking them'” (p. 131).

The delicate point here is that we can take the activity of thinking into account by treating it as its own “subject”, rather than attributing it to a separate Subject.

“But the apperceptive or inherently reflexive determination of conceptual content… is no more external than the ‘I think’ is external to a content thought. Judgment and the consciousness of judgment are one act. No content represents anything except as thought/judged” (ibid).

Recalling the syllogism I constructed above from Hegel’s statements — which concluded that what he calls self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness — I think Pippin should have said “self-consciousness” rather than “consciousness” in the above. “Self-consciousness” for Hegel is normative and non-psychological. What he calls “consciousness” (the aspect of immediacy and of presentation in the form of objects) does have a psychological character. In real life, we encounter mixtures of the two.

“The movement of pure thought is like the movement in a proof, on the assumption that the moves are inferences a thinker, on pain of contradiction, must make, and not merely formal-structural functions, as in a symbolic logic” (p. 132).

A proof involves not just a sequence of propositions but a sequence of judgments or assertions. Frege explained this difference in terms of an additional dimension of “assertoric force” alongside his Platonic view of concepts and propositions. For Pippin and Brandom, the consideration of assertoric force is where normativity enters into logic.

“[I]t is also question-begging to assume that anyone who makes the assertoric force inseparable from the logical structure of a unit of meaning (as Hegel unquestionably does) is thereby guilty of psychologism, or of relying on some ‘experiential’ standard of adequacy. Even Frege was willing to make the question of assertoric force a part of ‘logic’ in his own terms” (ibid).

Hegel takes assertoric force into account by treating it normatively rather than psychologically. Meanwhile, the movement of judging activity that is the bearer of Hegel’s notion of truth must also be distinct from the mere inspection of logical structure.

“[O]bjects moving about [in Hegel’s Logic]… is a mystification. At any rate, I have no idea what it would be to ‘observe’ one thought-object developing into another. (We don’t observe what happens when one step in a proof ‘becomes’ another; the inference has to be drawn, and drawn for a reason.) Such an objectivism makes it almost impossible to understand what Hegel calls the Logic‘s inner ‘drive’…, and it especially does not take account of the claim that conceptual form is itself apperceptive, that ‘the truth is self-consciousness’ (pp. 133-134).

“Essentialities do not move or establish relations with other essentialities…. A proposition cannot be the bearer of truth, does not even represent any state of affairs, except as judged, and therewith the identity of the acts of thinking involve[s] a wide variety of other commitments at the same time…. (I mean such things as being committed to the denial of all judgments inconsistent with the one that one asserts as true, and this not as a second act of thought.) By contrast, the basic unit of intelligibility for Hegel is not an internally complex object, even if in relations with other objects, but as he says in many ways and many different times, a result, the accomplishment of the ‘active universal’, which activity is judging…. The mode of logical connection is inseparable from the mode of connecting. They are co-constituting” (pp. 134-135).

Objective “thoughts” in Hegel’s sense are not just pure Platonic essentialities but judgments that have a shareable meaning and that inherently invite normative evaluation.

“Said another way, a strong way of insisting that Hegel’s new ‘metaphysics’ is a logic, none of this has anything to do with what anything is made of, consists in, with the furniture of the universe. What we want to know… about these concepts is their ‘logic’, how they function with account-givings governed by the norms of explanatory satisfactoriness and truth” (p. 137).

“This means that any concept of thinking and of the content of thought involves normative proprieties, exclusions, and implications, without which any thinking a thought could not be the thinking and the thought that it is. These normative commitments are independent of what a thinker might herself be able to acknowledge, but they cannot be denied on being noticed, on pain of incoherence, of not thinking anything at all” (ibid).

Thus apperception — or what we might call “pure” as opposed to empirical subjectivity, which need not be tied to an assumed separate Subject, but only to some judging activity — for Hegel is purely “logical” (having to do with the determination of meaning). It is independent of anything psychological, and at the same time it is inherently normative.

Next in this series: Negation and Negativity