- 1 Rorty’s Introduction to the 1997 edition of EPM. Rorty ruefully notes that Sellars was not amused.
- 2 I have borrowed this from Bowie (2006), though unlike Bowie I do not emphasize the importance of mu (...)
Rorty claims to have once remarked to Sellars, “if a man be perverse enough to bind the spirit of Hegel in the fetters of Carnap, how shall he find readers?”1 If Sellars’s epistemology in his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is “the spirit of Hegel found in the fetters of Carnap,” then correspondingly, Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of the Phenomenology is ‘the spirit of Hegel bound in the fetters of Frege’. Yet whereas Sellars’s creative synthesis of Hegel and Carnap is implicitly at work in what he does and how he does it, Brandom’s synthesis is fully explicit: at every stage along the way he informs us how he is constructing a version of Hegel that can brought into productive conversation with a version of Frege. The result may be, like Kripke’s Wittgenstein, more Brandom than Hegel. Much as Kripke’s Wittgenstein has given us “Kripkenstein,” so too Brandom’s Frege-Hegel hybrid gives us “Fregel.”2
1As A Spirit of Trust is subtitled “A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology” we must ask: what does he mean by a “reading”? We are not being offered an interpretation that conforms to accepted standards of scholarship, not least of which because Brandom brings too much of himself – his concerns, problems, and voice – to the table. This is not at all a criticism; on the contrary, this is what must happen to make texts come alive in response to a historical situation alien to that in which the text was originally written. Re-investing old texts with new sensibilities alien to their own time and place is central to how the canon is re-written, expanded, and kept aware of the social milieu in which that canon is being taught, transmitted, learned, and appealed to. What Aquinas did to Aristotle to make him consistent with the truths of Catholic doctrine, Brandom does to Hegel to make him consistent with the methods of analytic philosophy of language.
2This brings us to the second point: what kind of reading is this? As I see it, there are two different themes at work here. The first is a realization that Hegel’s central concern, following Kant, is with what Westphal (2011) calls “cognitive semantics”: a description of the most generic features that a conceptual framework must have in order that it is possible for rational subjects to make assertions about how the world is and should be. The second is that the methods of analytic philosophy of language, above all those of Frege (but also Tarski, Dummett, Kaplan, Lewis, Quine, etc.) are the right tools for a “rational reconstruction” (as Brandom calls it) of Hegel’s project. In this sense, Brandom’s reading of Hegel is focused on Hegel’s semantics, by the standards of what 20th century analytic philosophy counts as semantics.
- 3 This does not show up in what Brandom discuses, but rather in what he ignores: Brandom’s Hegel has (...)
3The “rational reconstruction” that turns Hegel into Fregel is framed by what 20th century analytic philosophy has determined counts as rational, involving both inclusions and exclusions.3 While Brandom justifies this as (in his terms) a de re rather than de dicto reading (p. 308-9), Brandom’s own hermeneutic biases will be evident to philosophers familiar with traditions other than 20th-century Anglophone philosophy of language. Brandom’s Hegel is not the Hegel who inspired Marx or Dewey – one may not be able to see, from Brandom’s text, why Adorno was right to call Das Kapital “the phenomenology of anti-spirit.” But by excluding so much of Hegel, Brandom is able to highlight a line of thought that would be obscured by other considerations and interpretations: the conceptual interdependence of cognitive semantics and pragmatics for how we must think about the relationship between thoughts and things.
- 4 Brandom distinguishes himself from 19th century “all is Mind” Anglo-American idealism in part by in (...)
4A decisive step taken at the outset of SoT is what Brandom calls “semantic descent.” The thought here is that we should read Hegel’s philosophical categories, and above all the categories of Verstand and Vernunft, as metalinguistic concepts. They do not have their own free-standing intelligible content; rather they are ways of talking about ordinary, empirical-level concepts like “dog” and “tree.” This does not mean, importantly, that Brandom’s Hegel abjures metaphysics entirely. It is to say, instead, that Brandom reconstructs Hegel’s rehabilitation of metaphysics, in response to Kant’s critique of metaphysics, as itself a semantic thesis. We cannot have determinate thoughts about things if we have no possible cognitive grip on determinate things in themselves. The concepts of thoughts and things are, in Brandom’s idiom, “reciprocally sense-dependent” – one cannot have the concept of one without having the concept of the other. We would not be entitled to regard ourselves as having determinate thoughts at all – thoughts with content or sense (Sinn) – if we could not have any cognitive awareness or grip on determinate things in themselves.4 Nevertheless, in denying that Hegel’s overarching philosophical project has its own intelligible content independent of empirical concepts, Brandom’s Hegel may seem quite different from the versions of Hegel that have shaped much of 20th century Continental philosophy.
5As with Brandom’s other magnum opus, Making It Explicit (1996), the account of Hegel depends on a system of fine-grained distinctions. For this reason, understanding Brandom’s Hegel means understanding the distinctions and how they are employed. (Fortunately, there is a helpful chart on p. 266.) The most basic distinction is between semantics and pragmatics: the content of assertions and their force. On the semantic side, Brandom retains the Fregean distinction between sense and reference but develops a fascinating Hegelian (Fregelian?) criticism of Frege’s version of this distinction. (I shall return to this below.) On the pragmatics side, Brandom builds upon his distinction from MIE between normative statuses and normative attitudes. Normative statuses fall into two camps: authority (the status of making a move in the space of reasons) and responsibility (the status of accepting that a move has been made). Normative attitudes fall into two camps: acknowledgment (1st person attitudes) and attributions (2nd and 3rd person attitudes). All of these are reciprocally sense-dependent, meaning that one cannot fully grasp one without the other; authority and responsibility are reciprocally sense-dependent; acknowledgment and attribution are reciprocally sense-dependent; and normative statues and normative attitudes are reciprocally sense-dependent. The project of Brandom’s Hegel is to demonstrate the interlocking sense-dependence of these distinctions through the insufficiency of any semantics which lacks them. The demonstration of this insufficiency is the succession of shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology.
6In these terms Brandom diagnoses the main pathology of rationality as authority without responsibility, what Hegel calls independence or mastery. In Fregelian terms, the fundamental problem with the command-obey model of discursive interaction is essentially normative-pragmatic: the master is conceptualized as having full authority with no concomitant responsibility, the servant is conceptualized as having full responsibility with no concomitant authority, and these are deeply incoherent concepts. It is the need to accept the interdependence of authority and responsibility that drives the dialectic past the master/servant relationship towards a more egalitarian and inclusive community based on an adequate semantics.
7This in turn raises the question: what is the criterion of a sufficient semantics, such that we can know whether a semantic theory is sufficient or insufficient? As Brandom sees it, thought must be determinate: there must be specific content, at least potentially discernable to us as finite thinkers, about what we are asserting and negating when we endorse and deny. The determinacy of reference depends on the determinacy of sense. Without determinateness, we do not have sense or meaning at all; there would be no intelligible distinction between sense and nonsense. What Brandom’s Hegel urges, then, is that we should accept the progressive explication of the conditions of thought and action developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit in order for us to understand how there can be determinate thoughts about determinate things at all in the first place. This is, no doubt, a demanding claim; but A Spirit of Trust is a demanding book.
8In a short critical notice, it is impossible to do justice to Brandom’s monumental work. Instead I shall focus on two specific themes that, I believe, illustrate the general character of Brandom’s book and make it a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophy. The first is how Brandom constructs his Aufhebung of Hegel and Frege; the second is his engagement with the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
- 5 Brandom does not specify what would count as a psychological theory of concepts, so it is not clear (...)
- 6 However, to preserve the sort of modest realism that passes as mere common sense in Anglophone phil (...)
9In an important sense, analytic philosophy was born out of Frege’s rejection of psychologism (Kusch 1995). Thoughts – determinate senses or Sinne – are not psychological entities and have nothing to do with any empirical science. Brandom retains this anti-psychologistic bias (for the most part) but argues that the right version of anti-psychologism for semantics is not Frege’s but Hegel’s. As Brandom sees it, the crucial move that underpins Hegelian semantics is a non-psychological theory of concepts.5 By construing conceptual content in terms of incompatibility, Brandom helps himself to the idea that conceptuality is modality: modal relations are conceptual relations and conversely. Hence we are to see the same conceptual content at work in both alethic modal claims about what cannot be the case and in deontic modal claims about what should not be the case: it cannot be the case that H2O does not boil at 100 degrees Centigrade (ceteris paribus), and no one should believe that H2O does not boil at 100 degrees Centigrade (ceteris paribus). Alethic modal claims and deontic modal claims are reciprocally sense-dependent; one cannot be fully cognitively aware of either without the other.6
10The sense/reference distinction is, of course, Fregean, but Brandom’s is not, or not wholly so. Brandom’s audacious innovation here is to show how Frege’s sense/reference distinction is not just Kantian, but Kantian in the wrong way: it is Kantian in the sense that renders it vulnerable to a Hegelian critique. The spirit of this gesture – turning Hegel’s critique of Kant against Frege insofar as Frege is Kant’s 20th century heir – is certainly not unfamiliar to students of Wittgenstein or Sellars. But unlike Wittgenstein or Sellars, Brandom shows in painstaking detail how to develop a Hegelian critique of Frege through a close reading of Phenomenology of Spirit. The crux of this reading is that Frege, like Kant, is a philosopher of Verstand, where Verstand (and Vernunft) are understood as metalinguistic categories, or ways of thinking about empirical, ground-level concepts. Verstand articulates sense and reference as static or fixed, and precisely because of it, cannot account for how embodied beings in space and time arrive at their awareness of senses and references. Just as Hegel thought that Kant was dogmatic (in denying of the possibility of knowledge of things in themselves), Brandom thinks that Frege is dogmatic (in affirming that cognitive awareness of Sinne has nothing to do with human sociality or history).
11By contrast, the metalinguistic category of Vernunft is dynamic and historical: the determinacy of sense and reference is not given or fixed but negotiated and re-negotiated both synchronically and diachronically. Just as we 21st century scientists and philosophers hold that the terms “phlogiston” and “ether” have senses but no referents, our successors will decide the referents of our discourse. It will be their rational reconstruction of our linguistic practices – a process that Brandom calls “recollection” – that determines whether or not our terms really had referents or only senses. Thus the very distinction between sense and reference is essentially and ineliminably social and historical: our own understanding of which terms have sense and reference depends on our ongoing social interactions that are historically shaped and mediated. The process of realizing that determinacy is necessarily dynamic and progressive is the process of making determinate content become for us what it has always been in itself. The argument for understanding the sense/reference distinction in the Fregelian framework of Vernunft depends on observing the insufficiency of any semantics that tries to make good on the Fregean framework of Verstand.
12I want to turn now to Brandom’s engagement with three of the most important post-Hegelian thinkers who are associated (rightly or wrongly) with criticisms of the Enlightenment: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the trio that Ricœur called “the masters of suspicion.” In Brandom’s reconstruction of the Phenomenology, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud enter the philosophical scene quite far along in the unfolding of Fregel’s semantics and pragmatics. We have, at this point, discovered that determinate content is intelligible only in light of normative statuses (authority and responsibility) and normative attitudes (attribution and acknowledgement). But we have not yet determined the exact relation between normative statuses and normative attitudes. Here lies a puzzle: which of them has priority over the other? Are normative statuses fixed and given in advance of the attitudes taken toward them? Or are attitudes prior, and statuses the result of our self- and other-directed attributions and acknowledgments?
- 7 One reason why this is puzzling, perhaps ironic, is that the valet reduces all heroic deeds to egoi (...)
13Fregel sees the dialectic of the hero and the valet in these terms: the valet or Kammerdiener is one who reduces normative statues to normative attitudes, whereas the hero upholds the independence of statues from attitudes. But in a puzzling twist, it is the masters of suspicion who are cast as the valet (p. 560-5).7 The reasons for this casting (or mis-casting) are not entirely clear, but it has something to do with how each of them offers a causal explanation for why we are beholden to the norms we espouse, which is to say, our norms are not fully under our control. We have less autonomy than we think we do; the norms we identify as ours, that we take ourselves to be responsible to, are mere appearance – shadows cast by some non-normative reality which is, however, amenable to causal explanation.
14Unlike other productive oppositions in the Phenomenology, the critique presented by the masters of suspicion is refuted rather than sublated – we are told that the reciprocal sense-dependence of normative statuses and normative attitudes upholds the hero and refutes the valet, because the valet attempted a reductive explanation of impersonal ideals to personal motives. While this much may be true as a reading of the Phenomenology, casting the masters of suspicion as heirs to the valet unfairly blunts the force of their critiques. This matters for the viability of Fregelian semantics because the determinacy of senses and referents is conceptualized, using the metalinguistic category of Vernunft, as essentially historical and social. For Fregel, the recollections that gather together what has been said and construct it in terms of what should have been said are necessarily progressive – they are acts that transform contingency into necessity. But who is empowered to make this determination? Who is included in the community of speakers who attribute to themselves the authority to determine the meaning of the past? There are deep questions about power, dominance, and violence that are posed (in quite different and not obviously compatible ways) by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. By casting them as the valet, whose critique is more refuted than sublated, Fregel prevents a challenge from being raised as to the sufficiency of Vernunft for semantics.
- 8 Fregel’s “postmodern” age of trust has nothing to do with the postmodernity of literary criticism, (...)
15The complex relation between normative statuses and normative attitudes also has, for Fregel, a historical dimension that maps neatly onto the familiar succession: premodern, modern, and postmodern forms of life. The premodern shape of a world is exemplified by Fregel’s Antigone, in which the conflict between Creon and Antigone is described in terms of an opposition between incompatible normative statuses (the wrongness of honoring a traitor, the rightness of burying a brother) that have determinate content fixed in advance of attitudes taken towards those statues. Thus the premodern stage is the stage of heroism and of tragedy. This gives way to the modern form of life, in which the dependence of normative statuses on normative attitudes is discovered, and this enables the discovery of genuine autonomy: that we are genuinely committed to those norms only which we accept as expressing our choices as to what we shall be committed to. This modern form of life is the age of individualism, and also perhaps (depending on how one reads the masters of suspicion) of cynicism. But what we discover in the Phenomenology is that the independence of normative attitudes from normative statuses is just as unintelligible as the independence of normative statues from normative attitudes. The recognition of the constitutive interdependence of normative statues and normative attitudes (“reciprocal sense-dependence”) ushers in the postmodern age, or what Fregel calls “trust” – although it must be stressed that this is “postmodern” only in the sense that it sublates the opposition between antiquity and modernity as Fregel understands them.8
16I would like now to raise the following question: if A Spirit of Trust is the spirit of Hegel bound in the fetters of Carnap, for whom is it written? To what extent does its forbidding length (almost 800 pages) and writing style impose such a high burden that very few will have both sufficient training and sufficient time to read it? While professors at highly prestigious departments will certainly find time to read it, the same might not be said of the vast bulk of professional philosophers: those with high teaching loads, demanding service commitments, and/or complicated personal lives. There is, in other words, scope for a hermeneutics of suspicion with regard to Spirit of Trust as a speech act in itself with regard the material community in which this speech act takes place. I suggested above that Fregel neutralizes the masters of suspicion by miscasting them as the Kammerdiener, and thereby evades the question as to whether their hermeneutics of suspicion might undermine the entire project of recollection. A structurally similar problem afflicts the text qua speech act as a whole: it is presented to us as if the space of reasons is unaffected by capital, desire, and power. Though A Spirit of Trust articulates a postmodern ethical community structured by relations of trust and care, it ignores the material barriers and political exclusions that prevent such a community from being actualized – even with regard to the book’s intended audience.