Georg Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract

The Anglophone philosophical world is currently riding a swelling wave of enthusiasm for a big, dense, blockbuster of a book by the previously unknown Jena philosopher, Georg Hegel. His Phenomenology of Spirit, originally in German, now available also in English, picks up and weaves together in a surprising and wholly original way a large number of today’s most fashionable ideas. Although he never comes right out and says so, I take it that the main topic the book addresses is the notion of conceptual content. I say ‘‘main’’ topic—and even that with trepidation—because along the way, Hegel discusses practically everything: history, politics, art, literature, religion, psychology, sociology, natural science, and on and on. One of the masterful features of this magnum opus is the convincing way in which the arguments and considerations he brings to bear, in the course of articulating criteria of adequacy for an adequate semantics (which he thinks is inseparable from an adequate pragmatics), reverberate and ramify throughout our understanding of human culture generally. Part of the foundation of the edifice on offer here is an appreciation of the essentially normative character of intentionality. This is a lesson we learned already from the later Wittgenstein, who made us sensitive to the issue of how a mental state such as an intention, or a speech act such as a request, could somehow reach out to all possible sequelae to settle which of them would count as being an appropriate response in the sense of fulfilling that intention or request (when the mother asks someone to ‘‘teach the children a game’’ and he responds by teaching them to bet on dice, she says ‘‘I didn’t mean that kind of game.’’ And what she says is true, even though she didn’t explicitly think about the matter). Hegel associates the point with Kant. He sees the axis around which Kant’s thought revolves as being the idea that what distinguishes the judgments and actions of sapient creatures from those of less capable animals is that they are acts that subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. This deontological criterion of demarcation of intentionality (the sense of ‘‘consciousness’’ Hegel addresses) puts the question of how to understand conceptual normativity at top of the philosophical agenda. Though he attributes this question to Kant rather than Wittgenstein, Hegel offers an answer that owes more to Wittgenstein. For he insists that the kind of normative statuses that matter for intentionality—what we are responsible for, or committed to, what we have invested our authority in—are one and all social statuses. In this, he concurs with the Wittgensteinian tradition that emphasizes social practices (‘‘uses, customs, institutions’’) as providing the context within which alone we can understand the normative significance even of such mundane items as signposts. But where Wittgenstein is suspicious in principle of philosophical theorizing, Hegel is an ambitious, constructive system-builder (perhaps in this difference lies part of the explanation of his otherwise unaccountable failure to acknowledge this distinguished antecedent of Hegel’s views, in favor of earlier precursors). Hegel’s idea is that normative statuses are instituted by reciprocal recognition, a particular structure of normative attitudes. Recognizing someone is attributing normative statuses: taking or treating that individual as responsible, committed, entitled, or authoritative. Hegel thinks that actually to be responsible, committed, entitled, or authoritative is to be recognized as such by those one recognizes R. Brandom (&) Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Ms. Kathy Rivet, 1001 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA e-mail: rbrandom@pitt.edu