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- Good afternoon, I'm Jay
Wallace, Professor of Philosophy
and Chair of the Howison Lectures
Committee at UC Berkeley.
I'm very pleased on behalf
of both the Howison Committee
and the Graduate Council
to welcome you to this year's
Howison Lecture in Philosophy.
Before I begin my introduction
of today's Howison lecturer,
I'd like to say a few
words about the occasion
that brings him here today.
The Howison Lectures were established
by friends of George Holmes Howison
in honor of his many contributions
to the University of California.
Howison was born in 1834.
Following college in Marietta, Ohio
shortly after the Civil
War, he moved to St. Louis
and became a member of that
city's philosophical society,
where he had an opportunity
to meet with influential
thinkers of the day,
including Ralph Waldo
Emerson and William James.
In 1884, after a six-year professorship
at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology,
Howison accepted an offer
to join the University of California
as founding member of the
Department of Philosophy.
This included an appointment
as Mills Professor of Intellectual
and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity,
which was the university's
first endowed chair.
With a strong, outgoing personality,
Howison made philosophy a factor
not only in the university
but in the surrounding community as well.
He took great interest in his students
and was influentially
involved in their lives.
He taught at the university until 1909
and died six years later at the age of 81.
Howison left all his
property to the university,
creating several endowments
that have supported
many important academic
endeavors on our campus.
In 1919, friends and formers
students of Professor Howison
established the Howison
Lectures in Philosophy
at the University of
California in his honor.
Those of you who have been
at Berkeley for some time
will know what a remarkable
legacy and memorial
this lecture series has become.
The list of past Howison lecturers
that's printed in your program
includes many of the most
important and influential thinkers
of the past century.
And the large audience that
these lectures routinely attract
even on a beautiful
Northern California day
is a testimony to the continuing
vitality at our university
of the subject that Howison
helped to introduce here.
We are greatly indebted
to Professor Howison,
to those who established this
lectureship in his honor,
and to the many other friends
whose generosity has done
so much to make Berkeley
a leading center for research
and teaching in philosophy.
And I will take this opportunity
to add as I do every year
that our capacity for gratitude
has not yet been exhausted
in case some of you might wish
to emulate Professor Howison
and his friends and former students
in supporting the study of
philosophy on our campus.
Our Howison lecturer for this
year is Professor Bob Brandom
who has established a towering reputation
as one of the most significant
and wide-ranging philosophers
of the present day.
Professor Brandom was an
undergraduate at Yale University
where he studied philosophy,
receiving the BA degree in 1977
with exceptional distinction in the major,
an honor that is bestowed
only occasionally
according to Yale College
to Yale students whose work
is, quote, extraordinary
even when compared to the
work of other students
who receive distinction.
He continued his philosophical studies
at Princeton University
where he held a Whiting
Fellowship from 1974 to 1976
and a Porter Ogden Jacobus
Fellowship in 1975 to '76.
He received the PhD from Princeton in 1977
with a dissertation
supervised by Richard Rorty
on practice and object.
Professor Brandom joined
the Distinguished Philosophy Department
at the University of Pittsburgh in 1976,
and expressing a kind
of institutional loyalty
that is rare in this era
of the academic free agent,
he has remained a member
of the Pittsburgh Department ever since.
His many contributions to
the excellent department
that has been his academic home
includes service as its
Chair from 1993 to 1997.
He was Distinguished Service
Professor of Philosophy
at Pittsburgh from 1998 to 2007,
and he now holds the title
of Distinguished Professor of Philosophy.
Professor Brandom is a
searching and systematic thinker
who has made prolific
and extremely influential contributions
to contemporary discussions
on a wide range of important issues.
The animating spirit of his work
is to understand language
and thought inferentially
in terms of what Wilfrid Sellars called
the game of giving and asking for reasons.
To be sapient on this approach
is essentially to be a participant
in a certain kind of social practice,
one whose participants keep score
on each other's commitments
and entitlements.
This vision, which draws
on sources as diverse
as Frege, Hegel, and the
pragmatist tradition in philosophy,
finds impressive expression
in Professor Brandom's
first and most influential
book, Making it Explicit,
which was published by Harvard
University Press in 1994
and which, despite its massive dimensions,
was immediately recognized as
one of the works of philosophy
that you had to read
if you were a serious
student of the subject.
The influence of this book
was also truly international
as I can personally attest
from my time as a professor and
frequent visitor in Germany,
where Professor Brandom is widely regarded
as the most significant
American philosopher
of his generation, if not this most
significant philosopher
(speaks in foreign language)
as they would say over there.
Making it Explicit is a truly
magisterial accomplishment,
the product of many years of
deep and systematic reflection.
The author of a work such as this
could have been forgiven
for resting on his laurels.
In the years since the appearance
of his first major work, however,
Professor Brandom has
continued to philosophize
at a remarkable pace,
producing several new
volumes in recent years,
including Articulating Reasons from 2000,
Between Saying and Doing from 2008,
and Reason and Philosophy from 2009.
The systematic contributions
contained in these
and other works by Professor Brandom
are nourished by his intensive engagement
with figures from the
history of philosophy,
and the fruits of this
engagement can be sampled
in two further volumes that
he's recently published,
Tales of the Mighty Dead from 2002
and Perspectives on Pragmatism from 2011.
He's been at work for many years
on a major study of themes
from the philosophy of Hegel,
which the philosophical
world is looking forward to
with eager anticipation.
Professor Brandom's accomplishments
have been extensively
and rightly acknowledged
in the larger world of the academy.
He was elected a Fellow
of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 2000,
and he's held fellowships
at the Stanford Center
for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences
and at All Souls College in Oxford.
He gave the prestigious
John Locke Lectures
in the University of Oxford in 2006
and the Woodbridge Lectures at
Columbia University in 2007.
He maintains a punishing travel schedule,
and his work has been featured
at multi-day conferences and workshops
in many different
countries around the world,
including, this is just
a small sample of them,
Latvia, Spain, Taiwan, Argentina, Germany,
and the Czech Republic.
He was awarded a Distinguished
Achievement Award
in the Humanities Award
from the Andrew Mellon Foundation in 2004.
In addition to today's lecture,
Professor Brandom will
be speaking tomorrow
in the Philosophy Department
on Modal Expressivism and
Modal Realism Together Again.
That will be at 4:10 p.m. tomorrow
in the Howison Library in Moses Hall.
His topic today is Reason, Genealogy,
and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity.
So please join me now in
welcoming Professor Brandom
to Berkeley as this
year's Howison lecturer.
(audience applauds)
- Well, thank you, Jay.
It's a pleasure to be back at Berkeley
where I have so many friends,
and it's an honor to be doing so
under the aegis of the Howison Lecture.
Hegel said, "To him who looks
on the world rationally,
"the world looks rationally back."
More than half a century
later, Nietzsche said,
"When you stare long into the abyss,
"the abyss stares back into you."
These paired (speaks in
foreign language) passages
express in gnomic aphorisms
sentiments that mark the
endpoint of a critical arc
of 19th century philosophical thought.
Hegel's sunny homily
epitomizes the optimism
of his version of the
Enlightenment rationalism
that flourished in the previous century.
Nietzsche's darker remark
foreshadows the pessimism
of a distinctive kind of nihilism
rooted in reductive naturalism,
which the events of the following century
would make both familiar and fitting.
Each of these successive 19th
century currents of thought,
one looking back to what
had already been understood
and one pointing ahead to
what had yet to be dealt with,
comes with a rationalizing
narrative of progress,
the first of disenchantment by reason,
the second of disillusionment with reason.
It was always essential
to the self-understanding of Enlightenment
that it see itself as
the advent of something
both genuinely new and
essentially progressive.
It defined itself by the contrast
between the light of reason
that it sought, developed, and celebrated,
and the darkness from
which Enlightenment arose,
and by which it was still surrounded
and would always be threatened,
the shadows of superstition,
prejudice, and dogmatism
cast by arbitrary despotic power
sedimented in the merely
traditional institutions
with which those habits
of thought connived
and in which they thrived.
The fundamental conceptual
innovation of the time
was not the focus on reason by itself.
Philosophy, whose avatar is Socrates,
had perennially championed reason.
Nor is it the mere association
of reason with freedom.
Know the truth and the
truth shall set you free,
the Christian tradition
in the person of John
had already taught.
What is wholly new in the
Enlightenment philosophy,
its characteristic insight
is its identification
of that transformative emancipatory power
with reason in its critical function.
The only authority it admits
as legitimate and legitimating
is the authority of the better reason,
that peculiar normative force
compelling only to the rational
that had so fascinated
and puzzled the Greeks.
And the Enlightenment
acknowledges no higher judge
competent to assess the
merits of competing reasons
than the natural light
which the capacities
of each individual
reasoning subject equip it.
That's why Kant says (speaks
in foreign language).
Dare to understand.
This is the motto of enlightenment
in his essay identifying enlightenment
as man's relief from his
self-imposed tutelage.
The advent of an age
in which individuals accept no authority
transcending their own capacity
critically to assess reasons
is for Kant, speaking here
for the whole Enlightenment,
nothing less than humanity's
coming to maturity.
This emancipation is to be effected
by the wholesale replacement
of the traditional model of authority,
which understands it exclusively
in terms of the obedience
owed by a subordinate to a superior,
by a model that understands authority
exclusively in terms of the
force of impersonal reasons,
assessable by all.
Reasons, for Kant, can
accordingly be identified
as freedom in the form of autonomy.
The authority of the
superior-in-power is abolished.
Authority resides only in
one's own acknowledgement
of reasons.
All the great philosophers
in the period from Descartes to Kant
were theorists of Enightenment.
Hegel, though, is the first
to take the advent of modernity,
for him, simply the single
most important thing
that's ever happened in human history,
as his explicit topic.
And further, he's the
first to appreciate it
not just as an intellectual phenomenon,
namely Enlightenment.
He was the first to
conceptualize the economic,
political, and social transformations
as all of a piece with
the intellectual ones.
For Hegel, reason shows itself
as having the form of
a vast metanarrative,
rationally reconstructing
the emergence of modernity
in all of its multifarious aspects.
That narrative is
progressive and triumphalist.
It's the emergence of reason as sovereign
both in individual subjective
self-consciousnesses
and in the social institutions
that they shape and that shape them.
It's also and essentially, as Hegel says,
the history of the progress of
the consciousness of freedom.
Here two strands of the
Enlightenment come together,
faith in the sovereignty of reason
and a narrative of the emerging
self-conscious realization
of that sovereignty,
which is the emancipatory power of reason.
Freedom takes concrete
form only in the practical,
including the institutional,
appreciation of the rational
nature of genuine authority,
the idea that reasons alone
are normatively authoritative.
This is reason's disenchantment
of the subordination model of authority
in favor of the model of autonomy
as consisting in acting for reasons.
This intoxicating identification
of freedom and the
authority of critical reason
is the beating heart of German Idealism.
In it, ideas that in
retrospect could be seen
to have been all along implicit
in Enlightenment rationalism
come to fully explicit
theoretical self-consciousness.
And it's in just such a
context, Hegel thinks,
that countercurrents of
thought become visible
as also having been all along implicit
in that same tradition.
In this case, a crucial
trajectory of 19th century thought
expresses the revenge of
Enlightenment naturalism
on Enlightenment rationalism.
The form that revenge takes is genealogy.
Genealogies directly
challenge the very idea
of the normative force
of the better reason,
which lies at the core
of the Enlightenment rationalist successor
to the traditional subordination
model of authority.
The principal practitioners
of the genre I'm calling genealogy
were the great unmaskers
of the 19th century,
above all, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud,
and closer to our own time,
we might add Foucault.
What they unmasked were
the pretensions of reason.
Kant had rigorously
enforced the distinction
between reasons and causes,
criticizing Locke for
producing what he called
a mere physiology of understanding
rather than a proper epistemology
by running together issues of
justification and causation.
We must separate, he insisted,
the quid juris, the question of right,
from the quid facti, the question of fact.
The first is a matter of the
evidence for our beliefs,
the second of their
matter-of-factual causal origins.
When the great genealogists dug down
in the areas of discourse they addressed,
they found causes underlying the reasons.
Their enterprise can be rendered
in relatively moderate terms.
What they diagnosed were
systematic distortions
in the structure of communication,
as Habermas puts it.
For Marx, the distorting
causes were economic classes.
For Nietzsche, they were
expressions of the will to power.
For Freud, they were such
things as lingering echoes
of the child's role in the family romance.
On the moderate
understanding of genealogy,
those causal factors shape the reasoning
of those subject to them,
operating behind their backs,
so that their own thoughts and actions
cannot be transparent to them.
This way of thinking about things
at least leaves open the possibility
of emancipatory critical discourses,
which would make explicit those
distorting causal factors,
so breaking the hold
they have on reasoners
and moving them towards the ideal
of rational self-transparency.
But I'm gonna be concerned here
with a more radical challenge
genealogy can be seen to make
to the Enlightenment's idea of reason.
For one can take it that what
the genealogists dug down to
is not just causes distorting our reasons,
but causes masquerading as reasons.
When what we fondly believe
to be reasons are unmasked,
all that remains is
blind causal processes.
These processes have taken
on the guise of reasons,
but in fact yield nothing
more than rationalizations.
Genealogy in its most radical form
seeks to dispel the illusion of reason.
Now as I shall use the term,
genealogical explanations
concern the relation,
genealogical explanations
concern the relations
between the act or state of
believing, on the one hand,
and the content that's
believed, on the other.
A genealogy explains
the advent of a belief,
in the sense of a believing,
an attitude, in terms of
contingencies of its etiology,
appealing exclusively to
facts that are not evidence,
that do not provide
reasons or justifications
for the truth of what's believed.
In this sense, when it
occurs to the young person
that he's a Baptist
because his parents and
everyone they know are Baptists
and that had he been born
in a different community,
he would with equal conviction
have held Muslim or Buddhist beliefs,
that's a genealogical realization.
And as is evident already
in this mundane example,
the availability of a
genealogical explanation
for a constellation of beliefs
can have the effect of
undercutting its credentials
as something to which one
is rationally entitled.
The genealogy asserts counterfactual
or subjunctive conditionals
linking the possession of certain beliefs,
attitudes of believing,
to contingent events
whose occurrence does not provide evidence
for the truth of what's believed.
If the believer had not
had a bourgeois upbringing,
were not driven by (speaks
in foreign language),
or had not had that childhood trauma,
she would not have had the beliefs
about the justice of labor
markets, Christian ethics,
or conspiracy theories that she does.
None of those events, upon
which the genealogist asserts,
the holding of the beliefs in question
are counterfactually dependent, however,
provide evidence for what's believed.
For the particular
vocabularies they address,
all of Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud offer natural histories
of the advent of beliefs, believings,
couched in those vocabularies,
ones to which the rational
credentials of the beliefs,
what's believed, are simply irrelevant.
Natural, causal processes
of belief formation
are put in place of rational ones.
To him who looks on the world reductively,
the world looks reductively back.
This movement of thought, too,
comes with its native metanarrative
of progress and understanding.
The earlier replacement
of theological necessity
with rational necessity
as the fundamental explanatory category
is disenchantment of the world by reason.
The replacement of rational
necessity with natural necessity
is disillusionment with reason.
From the genealogical point of view,
the Enlightenment apotheosis
of reason just substituted
one ultimately supernatural
delusion for another.
The Enlightenment was
right to be impressed
by the rise of the new science,
to see it as requiring a
thoroughgoing transformation
of our understanding of
our relations to our world.
But from the genealogical point of view,
it was insufficiently radical.
It naturalized and so
disenchanted the world,
but it didn't disenchant us.
The Enlightenment conception
of individual knowers and agents
who brought about and
were in turn transformed
by the convulsions of modernity
retain a spark of divinity
in the form of the faculty of reason.
The genealogical movement of
thought teaches by contrast
that the subjects and their relations
to the objects they know about and act on,
no less than those objects themselves,
must be thoroughly naturalized.
But then what about the normative force
of the better reason?
Is it, too, just an illusion
arising from the play of natural forces?
Or can it somehow be
understood in terms of them?
Can we really understand
the natural science
that's the source of our
genealogies of our believings
itself entirely in
naturalistic terms, must we?
In its most radical form,
the genealogical thought
is that if we can understand
the etiology of our believings
and our preferrings, intendings, and so on
in terms of causes that do
not provide reasons for them,
then talk of reasons is
shown to be out of place,
not only superfluous,
but actively misleading.
This metanarrative of genealogy
as unmasking illusions of reason
depends on the disjunction
causes or reasons
being exclusive, its
forcing a choice on us.
Genealogy, in other words,
turns Kant's distinction
between causes and reasons back on itself.
It becomes a snake that poisons itself
by biting its own tail.
Now Marx and Freud
offer local genealogies.
That is, they offer genealogical analyses
only of a specific range
of discursive practices,
the use of only some vocabularies,
the vocabulary of political economy
or the vocabulary one uses to explicate
and make intelligible one's
psychological motivations.
Though Nietzsche's most detailed stories
are also of this local
kind, he points the way
to the possibility of a more
global genealogical lesson,
that a suitably thoroughgoing
reductive naturalism
might undercut the rational credentials
not just of some parochial
region of our belief,
but of the whole realm.
The very idea of reason as
efficacious in our lives
would be called in question
by globalizing the genealogical enterprise
to extend it to all discourse.
In this form, genealogy would
be what Tennyson called,
"the little rift within the lute
"that by and by shall make the music mute
"and ever widening slowly silence all."
This global geneological challenge
would come to be expressed explicitly
in various forms in the 20th century,
but the neo-Kantian Windelband
could already find it
implicit in the aspirations
of his 19th century historicist opponents.
And it's this broader idea
that I want to consider.
Globalized genealogical
arguments take a common form.
They present causal etiologies
of states and events of believing,
thought of as episodes
in the natural world,
as rendering superfluous and
irrelevant appeal to reasons
that normatively entitle believers
to the contents believed.
The thought is that all
the explanatory work
can be done by causes
with no work left to be done by reasons.
And as a second, subsidiary task,
one then explains the motives for which
and the structures by which
believers and theorists conceal
from themselves and from others
the underlying causal
processes of belief acquisition
under an obscuring veil
of what then show up
as mere rationalizations.
All the great genealogists
of the 19th century
particularly relished
offering such metagenealogies.
That's how they unmask our
conception of ourselves
as rational animals as
nothing more than an illusion
that puffs up and comforts animals
with the sort of natural needs
and interests that we have.
Our need for that swaddling illusion
reveals us to be in essence
not, as we're pleased to think,
autonomous rational animals,
but merely needy, insecure,
rationalizing animals.
At this level of generality,
the genealogical challenge to reason
has the form of a
naturalistic reductionism
about the essentially normative
force of the better reason.
I think it's illuminating to
compare this global challenge
with the more focused version
that Gilbert Harman addresses
to specifically moral normativity.
He argues that the best explanation,
indeed, a complete explanation,
of why people have the moral
normative attitudes they do,
why they treat some acts as morally right
and others as morally wrong,
need appeal only to
other normative attitudes
of their own and others.
It need not appeal to norms
or values in the form of facts
about what is actually
morally right or wrong.
He contrasts this situation
with that concerning our
attitude towards electrons,
the best explanation
of which, he takes it,
must include reference
to facts about electrons
and our interactions with them.
He concludes that we do not in the end
have reason to believe in the existence
of moral norms, reasons, or values,
as we do for the existence of electrons.
A global version of this argument
addressed to the norms of
reason rather than of morality
would contend that a complete explanation
for people taking or treating some claims
as reasons for others need
appeal only to their attitudes
of taking or treating some
claims as reason for others,
not to any facts about what
really is a reason for what.
Propositional attitudes,
paradigmatically beliefs
would be treated just as features
of the natural history
of creatures like us,
and hence as explicable entirely in terms
of other such features, in
this case, further attitudes.
Now I think that there's a
structural defect that afflicts
global reductive genealogical
stories of this kind.
They depend on what I'll
call semantic naivete.
Semantic naivete consists
in taking for granted
the conceptual contents of the attitudes
whose rational relations to one another
one wants to dissolve genealogically.
If the attitudes in question
are not thought of as
propositionally contentful,
then the issue of rational
normative relations between them,
of some of them as providing good reasons
entitling or committing one
to others, doesn't even arise,
as it does not for whirlpools,
thunderstorms, supernovae,
and other natural occurrences
into whose causal
antecedents we might inquire.
The question I see as
posing a counterchallenge
to genealogical challenges
to the very idea of reason
is whether and how one is to understand
the contentfulness of beliefs
apart from their situation in
a normative space of reasons.
The overall point is that
epistemological claims,
including skeptical geneological ones,
have semantic presuppositions.
I'm gonna argue that the soft underbelly
of genealogical skepticism about reason
is its implicit commitment
to naive semantics.
When we look at things more closely,
we'll see that the underlying
issue concerns the relation
between contingencies governing attitudes,
what applications of concepts are taken
or treated as correct
according to the prevailing reasons,
and norms to which those
attitudes are subject.
Observations about the attitudes
provide the basis for the
genealogical challenge
to the intelligibility of the norms.
The particular form of semantic
naivete I will identify
as crucial to this debate
turns out to be an assumption
about the relations
between semantic attitudes
and semantic norms
that's common both to
Enlightenment rationalism
and to genealogical challenges to it.
The thinker who diagnoses
this shared presupposition,
contests it, and offers a
constructive alternative
is Hegel, whom I will argue
both anticipates and responds creatively
to the genealogical currents
of thought he inspired
and in many ways made possible.
Now I've described genealogical challenges
to our understanding of
ourselves as rational
both as rooted in Kant's distinction
between reasons and causes
and as expressing the revenge
of that distinction on itself.
This is, of course, a
very crude formulation.
To refine it, we need to fill in
some of the Kantian background.
Kant brought about a revolution
in our understanding of the mind
by recognizing the essentially
normative character
of the discursive.
In a decisive break with
the Cartesian tradition,
he distinguishes judgments
and intentional actions
from the responses of
non-discursive creatures
not ontologically, by
their supposed involvement
with an ultimately spooky
kind of mental substance,
but deontologically, as
things their subjects
are in a distinctive way responsible for.
What we believe and what we do
express commitments of ours.
They're exercises of a kind of authority
distinctive of discursive creatures.
Responsibility, commitment, authority,
these are all normative statuses.
Concepts, which articulate
discursive acts of judging
and intentionally doing,
Kant says, are rules.
They're rules that determine
what we've made ourselves responsible for,
what we've committed ourselves to,
what we've invested our authority in.
Appreciating the rulishness,
the normative character of the mind,
this is Kant's normative turn.
Practically, what we're responsible for
and committed to doing in
investing our authority
in how things are or
ought to be, Kant thinks,
is having reasons for those commitments.
What our concepts are rules
for doing is reasoning.
It's the concepts
articulating the contents
of our judgments and intentions
that determine what count as reasons
for and against thinking
or acting that way,
what would entitle us to do so
or justify us in taking on commitments
with those conceptual contents.
For Kant, as discursive creatures,
we live and move and have our being
in a normative space of reasons.
After Descartes, the
challenge was to find a place
for mental stuff in a natural
world of physical stuff.
After Kant, the challenge
became finding a place for norms
in a natural world.
Descartes had been roundly criticized
for his dualism of minds and bodies.
The danger is that the result
of Kant's revolutionary insight
into the normativity of intentionality
would be to replace that dualism
with a dualism of norm and fact.
Now I take it that a
distinction becomes a dualism
when it's drawn in terms
that make the relation
between the distinguished items
ultimately unintelligible.
I'll argue that the collision
between the possibility
of global genealogies
and understanding ourselves as rational
depends on a set of assumptions,
which I'm gonna gather together
under the rubric of semantic naivete,
that would turn Kant's
distinction into a dualism,
but also that those
assumptions are optional
and indeed incorrect.
I'll argue further that Hegel,
intense and insightful
reader of Kant that he was,
already understood all this
and offered a constructive alternative
that can provide a way forward for us
in thinking about these issues today.
Kant's normative turn
expressed an insight in
discursive pragmatics,
our understanding of what we're doing
in judging and acting intentionally.
He also moved beyond the
Cartesian tradition he inherited
in seeing that its characteristic
epistemological concerns
raised a more fundamental
semantic question.
His idea here was that
if we properly understood
what it is for our thoughts
to be representations
in a sense of so much as
purporting to represent something,
the epistemological skeptical question
of what reason we have to think
that they ever correctly
represent something
would be revealed on semantic
grounds to be ill-posed.
Hegel saw, however, that as penetrating
as these archaeological
semantic excavations were,
Kant failed fully to
appreciate and address
a crucial semantic question
raised by his original
normative pragmatic idea.
Kant correctly saw that judging
and acting intentionally
are exercises of authority
that come with correlative
responsibilities,
commitments to having reasons for
and acknowledging consequences
of those undertakings.
Kant already understood concepts
as functions of judgment
in the sense of rules that determine
what would count as a reason
for applying those concepts in judgment
and what the further
consequences of doing so are.
In a strict sense, all Kantian
rational creatures can do
is apply concepts in judging and acting.
So those discursive activities
presuppose the availability
of the concepts they deploy.
But that presupposition raises in turn
the question faced by Kant's
rationalist hero Leibniz.
Where do those concepts come from?
How do we get access to them?
Once the discursive
enterprise is up and running,
new concepts can be formed downstream
from applications of old ones,
e.g., by Kant's judgments of reflection.
But what's the origin of
the concepts that make
empirical and practical
discursive activity possible
in the first place?
Hegel reads Kant as
having a two-stage story.
Transcendental activity
is the source of the conceptual norms
that then govern empirical
discursive activity.
The empirical self accordingly
always already finds itself
with a stock of determinate concepts.
The transcendental processes
by which discursive norms are instituted
are sharply distinguished
from the empirical processes
in which those discursive
norms are then applied.
In the 20th century, Rudolf
Carnap provides an index example
of this Kantian two-stage
semantic-epistemic explanatory strategy.
In his version, the two stages correspond
to beginning by fixing meanings
and only then going on to fix beliefs.
The first semantic stage
is selecting a language.
The second epistemic stage
is selecting a theory,
a set of sentences
couched in that language
that are taken to be true.
His student Quine objected to Carnap
that while this two-stage
procedure makes perfect sense
for formal or artificial languages,
it makes no sense for natural languages.
All speakers do is use the language,
Kant would say, to make judgments.
That use must somehow determine
both what their expressions mean
and which sentences they take to be true.
In the vocabulary I
use to talk about Kant,
the use of language to express judgments
must be understood as effecting both
the institution of conceptual
norms and their application.
Two-stage stories about
the division of labor
between semantics and epistemology,
that is, about the relation
between conceptual contents
and their application in judgment,
are committed to semantic purity.
This is the view that the
contents concepts possess
are not at all affected by
the use of those concepts
in making judgments, in
believing a particular subset
of the universe of believables.
That's the point of having
a first semantogenic stage
at which contents are determined,
conceptual norms are instituted,
before the second stage,
comprising the application of concepts
in taking things to be thus
and so, to be as represented
by some already contentful
representings and not others.
Commitment to semantic purity
is commitment to the possibility
of pursuing semantics
independently of commitment
to how things actually are.
The thought is that epistemic commitments
are not to contaminate semantic ones.
Semantic commitments
are necessary conditions
only for the expression of epistemic ones.
On this picture, two independent elements
combine to make epistemic
commitments, true claims,
semantic commitments, picking a language,
settling on contentful
concepts, and how the world is.
And the second element is
simply irrelevant to the first.
Now semantic purity is not
an unintelligible idea.
It makes sense in the context
of stipulating associations
of semantic interpretants
with linguistic expressions
for artificial languages
by a theorist working
in a semantically more
powerful metalanguage.
But semantic naivete results
when one believes that
semantic purity is intelligible
for an autonomous intentional stratum,
for natural languages, or
for thought in general.
Quine objects to the semantic naivete
of commitment to the
possibility of pure semantics,
and in this regard makes common cause
with the later Wittgenstein.
Both thinkers take it that all there is
to confer content on our expressions
is the way those expressions are used,
paradigmatically in making
claims and forming beliefs,
that is, in committing
ourselves to how things are.
Two-stage theories about the division
of semantic and epistemological labor
for natural languages and
the thoughts they express,
Quine and Wittgenstein think,
are bound to invoke semantic
stories about the first stage
that make the notion of conceptual content
ultimately magical.
They're committed to semantic purity.
So when applied to natural
languages and thought,
they're semantically naive.
This is exactly Hegel's
complaint about Kant.
He was uncharacteristically
but culpable uncritical
about the source and nature
of determinate conceptual contents.
In this regard, at least,
Hegel stands to Kant
as Quine does to Carnap.
And like Quine and Wittgenstein,
Hegel offers an ultimately
pragmatist account
of how using a natural
language can be intelligible
as both instituting and
applying conceptual norms.
This line of thought bears directly
on the issue I started off by considering.
For global genealogical reductive
explaining away of norms
in favor of attitudes
presumes that it's intelligible
for the contents of
propositional attitudes
to stay in place after
normative reason-relations
among their judgeable
contents are relinquished.
Otherwise, what's being
explained genealogically
can no longer be understood as believings,
as attitudes of taking
things to be thus and so.
If our attitudes were not
genuinely conceptually contentful,
then we would not be even
purporting to represent things
as being thus and so.
Things would not even seem
to us to be thus and so.
If disillusionment about the reality
of norms of reasoning
entails semantic nihilism,
then it's self-defeating.
The genealogist's claims would entail
that her own claims are senseless.
The overall point I want to make
is that taking the contents
of propositional attitudes
in general to be independent
of the government of those attitudes
by norms concerning what
genuinely is a reason for what
presupposes a semantically
naive two-stage account
of the division of semantic
and epistemic labor.
For it requires that the contents
of propositional attitudes
have already somehow been fixed
in advance and independently
of the rough-and-tumble
of assessing evidence,
balancing reasons, and
deciding what to believe.
The semantic challenge
for the globalized Harmanian genealogist
is accordingly to say
how we're to understand
the contents of the attitudes
in favor of which genuine
norms have been eliminated.
The corresponding challenge
for a one-stage account
is to explain how institution
of genuine conceptual norms
is compatible with the possibility
of genealogical explanation of
acts of applying such norms.
Hegel understands this challenge
and offers an intricate
and sophisticated story
about the relations between
the institution and application
of conceptual norms,
including the relations
between discursive normative statuses
and discursive normative attitudes
that's aimed precisely at
meeting that challenge.
And in the rest of this talk,
I want to present the
outlines of his story
as I understand it.
One way into Hegel's
constructive alternative
to the semantic naivete
of two-stage theories
of the division of semantic
and epistemic labor
is through his conception
of the determinateness
of conceptual norms.
What semantic purity claims
conceptual contents are pure of
is contamination by the epistemic,
that is, by knowledge claims,
by judgments as to how
things actually are.
The semantics of concepts,
Hegel's universals,
is supposed not to depend at all
upon epistemic commitments,
that is, on judgments,
on the application of those universals
to particulars in judgment.
Hegel's slogan for the
conceptual sea-change
he sees as necessary for
appreciating the interdependence
of semantic and epistemic commitments
is that we must move from
understanding the conceptual
in terms of the static
categories of Verstand
to understanding it in terms
of the dynamic categories
of Vernunft, adapting Kant's
terminology to his own use.
Kantian concepts are determinate
in the Verstand sense
in that the rational relations
of consequence and
incompatibility between concepts,
which identify and individuate them,
are taken to be fully settled
in advance of any application
of those universals to
particulars in judgment.
Kant envisaged an asymmetric
structure of capacities
in which a faculty of spontaneity
is the source of universals,
which are applied to particulars
supplied by a faculty of receptivity.
In developing his successor
Vernunft conception,
Hegel takes over from Kant his insight
into the normative
character of concept use
and radicalizes it by
construing the relations
between universals and particulars itself
in normative terms of
authority and responsibility.
Hegel says independence and dependence.
Hegel takes his cue from the fact
that transposed into the normative key,
the relations of authority
and responsibility
between universals and particulars
are reciprocal and symmetric.
Kant's system masks
that underlying symmetry
by an artificial, asymmetric division
of semantic and epistemic labor.
Spontaneous exercises of
the semantic authority
of the understanding,
Verstand, over universals
are, for Kant, independent of and prior to
exercises of the epistemic
authority of particulars,
which determine the correctness
of application of universals
to those particulars in judgment.
This overarching asymmetric structure
is a manifestation of Kant's understanding
of freedom and reason
in terms of autonomy,
what Hegel calls pure independence.
According to Hegel's
symmetric normative construal
of the relations of
authority and responsibility
between universals and particulars,
the application of one
concept or universal
obliges one to apply
others to that particular
according to rational
relations of consequence
that articulate the content
of the concept or universal.
And it precludes one from being entitled
to apply others to that particular
according to relations of
rational incompatibility
that also partially articulate
the content of that concept or universal.
This is the authority of
universals over particulars,
the responsibility of
particulars to universals.
There's a corresponding relation
of authority of
particulars over universal.
For it can happen that
one applies a concept,
a universal to a particular
and the particular does not cooperate
in also exhibiting the universals
that are its consequences
or in also exhibiting universals
that are incompatible
with the original one.
This, Hegel construes,
as the particular exercising
authority over the universal,
telling it, as it were,
that it cannot have
the consequence and the
incompatibility relations
that it originally came with,
that is, that a different
universal is required.
For Hegel, none of these
reciprocal relations
of authority and responsibility
between universals and particulars
should be understood as purely semantic
nor as purely epistemic.
The clean division of
semantic and epistemic labor
is an artifact of semantically
naive two-stage accounts.
Our judgments shape our concepts
no less than our concepts
shape our judgments.
Hegel understands determinateness,
his (speaks in foreign language),
in terms of what he calls individuality,
(speaks in foreign language).
Individuality, in turn, is a matter
of the characterization of
a particular by a universal,
which is something that has the form
of a fact or a judgment.
As Kant emphasized, concepts
shape and articulate judgments.
Hegel adds the idea that
judgment is a process
by which concepts are determined.
The essence of Hegel's Vernunft conception
is an account of the structure
of the dynamic process
in which the whole constellation
of concepts and judgments
develops by the exercise
of the reciprocal authority
of universals over particulars
and particulars over universals.
Judging, the application of
universals to particulars,
is the development of individuals,
at once the semantic shaping
and determining of universals
and the epistemic discovery
of which universals apply
to which particulars.
Kant's pure independence
model of semantic authority
as untrammeled by
corresponding responsibility
leaves it unclear what room there remains
for epistemic constraint.
Why cannot the boundaries,
the implications and the
incompatibilities of the universal
that's been applied simply be redrawn
to accommodate any looming recalcitrance?
More deeply, what even counts
as changing the content of a
concept or universal for Kant?
What holds fixed in advance
the commitments one
undertakes by applying it
if its content is wholly up
to the spontaneous
activity of the subject?
The Kantian division of
semantic and epistemic labor
seems unable to exclude the possibility
that as Wittgenstein puts it,
whatever seems right to me is right,
in which case the issue of
right doesn't get a grip.
There's just nothing
in the Kantian picture
to confer determinate
contents on concepts,
nor to hold them in place as determinate.
What's needed, Hegel thinks,
is to replace Kant's individualist model,
driven by his understanding
of freedom as autonomy,
with a social one.
What Kant tried to accomplish
within the boundaries of
a single knowing subject
by the division of semantic
and epistemic labor
should be done rather
by a genuinely social division of labor.
Concepts for Hegel are not to be found
between the ears of individual knowers,
but in the public
language that they speak.
Language, he said, is the dasein of geist.
This transposition of the issue
into a social, linguistic key
makes it clear how in judging
whose paradigm now becomes asserting,
I can bind myself by norms
provided by the concepts
I apply to particulars.
It is, for instance, wholly up to me
whether I assert that the
coin is made of copper
rather than, say, manganese.
But it's then not up to me
what else I've committed
myself to by claiming that
and what would entitle
me to that commitment.
The metallurgical experts in my community
that my community charges
with the care and feeding
of the concept of copper
will hold me responsible
for having committed myself
to the coin's melting at a 1084 degrees C
and having precluded myself
from claiming that it's
an electrical insulator.
Whether I know about these implications
is neither here nor there.
They're features of the move
I've made in the language game.
And it's my participation in that game
that permits me also to
think quietly to myself
that the coin is copper,
a thought that inherits its shared content
from claimables whose
sense the community fixes.
On this model, the authority
of the individual speaker
is balanced by a
reciprocal responsibility.
And the content I freely
committed myself to
and made myself responsible for
is held in place as determinate
by my fellow speakers,
whom I've authorized to
hold me responsible for it.
What I'm responsible
for is what I've said,
not what I might later
claim to have meant.
What Heidegger called
the dignity and spiritual
greatness of German Idealism
is founded on Kant's reconstrual
of self-conscious selfhood
as consisting in freedom
in a sense of authority,
specifically the authority to
commit oneself determinately,
the capacity to bind
oneself by conceptual norms,
to make oneself responsible to norms
that are rational in the
sense that they articulate
what's a reason for a
judgment or an action
that has that content.
Hegel sees that self-consciousness
in this normative sense
is an essentially social achievement.
The authority to make oneself responsible
makes sense only in a context
in which one can be held responsible,
and that requires two loci of
authority and responsibility.
Normative statuses, such as
authority and responsibility,
and the selves that are the
subjects of such statuses,
Hegel teaches, are instituted
by reciprocal recognition,
that is, by individuals practically taking
or treating one another as
authoritative and so responsible,
as having the authority to
make themselves responsible.
Those I recognize in this normative sense
of authorizing them to hold me responsible
form a recognitive community.
In telling language, Hegel says
that self-conscious individual
selves, normative subjects,
are instituted only when
particular biological organisms
come to stand in recognitive
relations to one another,
a matter of their practical
normative attitudes,
and so come to be
characterized by the universal
that is the recognitive community.
That's his model for how universals,
particulars, and individuals are related.
Now besides developing
Kant's normative insights
along the social dimension,
Hegel develops it along
a historical dimension.
What binds them together is Hegel's idea
that determinateness on
the side of the content
of conceptual norms,
the topic of semantics,
is intelligible in principle
only in the context
of a thoroughgoing reciprocity
of authority and responsibility
on the side of the practical force
or significance of those norms,
the topic of pragmatics in a broad sense.
His metaconcept, Vernunft,
is a view about the process
of determining conceptual contents
and about the kind of
determinateness that results.
This process, he thinks,
has a normative structure
distinctive of traditions.
Understanding genealogical analyses
as undercutting the claims of reason,
as undercutting the rational
bindingness of conceptual norms
depends on assessing the
rationality of discursive practice
solely on the basis of the extent
to which applications of concepts,
whose contents are construed
as already fully determinate,
are responsive exclusively
to evidential concerns.
Responsiveness of concept applications
to any factors that are contingent
relative to the conceptual
norms already in force,
which is the phenomenon
that genealogical diagnoses highlight,
is accordingly identified as
an eruption of irrationality.
But the idea that
assessments of rationality
are appropriately addressed
only to the application
of already fully determinate concepts
is the product of a
blinkered semantic naivete.
It ignores the fact that the
very same discursive practice
that is from one point of view
the application of conceptual norms
is from another point of view
the institution of those norms
and the determination of their contents.
Only when discursive
practice is viewed whole
does its rationality emerge.
If the semantogenic process
by which conceptual contents
are determined and developed is ignored,
the distinctive way in
which reason informs
and infuses discursive
practice must remain invisible.
For Hegel, the principal task of reason
in his preferred sense of
Vernunft rather than Verstand
is, as he says, to give
contingency the form of necessity.
Following Kant, by necessary, he means
having the form of a rule.
That is, for him, reason's job is to put
the sort of material contingencies
the genealogist points to
into a normative shape.
From Hegel's point of view,
far from undercutting reason,
the possibility of
genealogical explanations
just underlines the need
for this particular function of reason
and the crucial job that it does.
So how can we understand the process
whereby concepts acquire and develop
their determinate content
as putting contingencies
of their application
into a normative shape?
Hegel's idea is that a distinctive kind
of retrospective rational reconstruction
of prior applications of a concept
is necessary and sufficient
to exhibit those applications
as conferring a determinate
content on the concept.
One brings order to the motley welter
that is the discursive
practice one inherits
by discriminating within it
a privileged trajectory that's
expressively progressive
in the sense of making gradually explicit
norms that then show up retrospectively
as having been all along implicit.
Doing that, he says, is
turning a past into a history.
The best model I know of the
kind of rational activity
that determines conceptual contents
by making or finding the
right kind of history for them
is the jurisprudential one
institutionalized and
codified in case law.
Its purest, paradigmatic form takes place
in what in the Anglo-American legal world
is called common law.
For in that realm, by
contrast to statute law,
judges are not guided in
their decisions as to whether
to apply or withhold the
application of a concept,
say, the concept of strict liability,
by explicit statutes propounded
and given the force of law
by legislatures, statutes
that say explicitly
what is and is not licit
according to the norm they institute.
In case law, in lieu of norms
explicit as such principles,
judges at common law must
decide cases with novel facts
on the basis only of norms
that they discern as implicit
in the tradition of already decided cases.
The governing authority
to which common law judges are responsible
is provided by precedent.
The judge's job is not only
to decide the present case,
but also to provide a
rationale for the decision
by providing a distinctive
kind of narrative
justifying it as correct.
Such a narrative selects
some prior decisions as precedential
in the sense of being not
only relevant and correct
but as having revealed
some hitherto hidden aspect or contour
of the norm that's developing
in the tradition defined
by those precedents.
The legal concepts and
principles explicating them
that are given expression
as rationales for deciding novel cases
are often characterized as judge-made law.
And this description is apt
because there's nothing
more to give content
to this kind of law and its concepts
than the decisions that
judges have rendered
and the retrospective rational
reconstructions of traditions
defined by precedents
that the judges offer
to justify those decisions.
Rational, rationalizing
processes of this sort
are both responsible to the contents
of the conceptual norms they apply,
and they exercise authority
over the development of
those conceptual contents.
They are processes of
determining conceptual contents,
both in the sense of finding
out what those contents are,
manifested in the essentially
retrospective rationales
judges supply for their decisions,
and in the sense of making
those contents what they are,
manifested in the essentially prospective
shifting and sharpening of the norms
that each new application
and interpretation provides.
These hermeneutic
practices give contingency
the normative form of necessity,
and by incorporating those contingencies,
infuse determinate content
into the developing norms.
It's of the essence of
the kind of rationality
distinctive of this sort of
concept-determining process
to be articulated by these
complementary perspectives,
retrospective, determining as finding,
and prospective, determining as making,
responsibility to the
tradition one inherits
and authority over the
tradition one bequeaths.
Looking backward along
the privileged trajectory
of precedents selected by the narrative
rationalizing any particular decision,
one sees only unbroken
expressive progress,
the gradual emergence into
the explicit light of day
of a governing norm that appears
as having been all along
implicit in earlier decisions.
But looking forward at how legal concepts
and principles evolve by being
applied in concrete cases,
the discontinuities between
those narratives shows up
as sequential judges revise
their predecessors' judgments
as to which earlier applications
should be treated as precedential and how.
T.S. Eliot describes this
aspect of Hegelian Vernunft
as at work in a different
corner of the culture.
He says what happens when a
new work of art is created
is something that happens simultaneously
to all the works of art that preceded it.
The existing monuments form an
ideal order among themselves,
which is modified by the
introduction of the new,
the really new work of art among them.
The existing order is complete
before the new work arrives.
For order to persist after
the supervention of novelty,
the whole existing order must be,
if ever so slightly, altered.
And so the relations,
proportions, and values
of each work of art toward
the whole are adjusted,
and this is conformity
between the old and the new.
Now, considering
genealogical counterfactuals
about what the norms would have been
had various non-evidential
factors differed
reveals a judicial process
shot through with contingencies,
as, for instance, when the order
in which two cases
happened to be adjudicated
evidently affects the content
of the law that results.
The normatively contingent character
of any particular decision
to apply or not to apply
a particular concept
is manifested in the fact
that one always can explain
any particular decision genealogically,
in terms of what the
judge had for breakfast
in the derisive slogan of
jurisprudential theory.
That is to explain it in terms
that do not appeal to
the content of the norm
whose applicability is in question,
to explain it instead, for instance,
in terms of the intellectual fashions
or public passions of the day
or by features of the judge's
training, temperament,
or political convictions.
But to conclude that the
possibility of such an explanation
means that no norm is
therefore instituted,
that the norms discerned as implicit
in the tradition inherited
cannot rationally justify
one decision rather than
another in a novel case
is to insist stubbornly and one-sidedly
on occupying only one of the perspectives
that are, in fact, two sides
of one coin, as Hegel insists
and as jurisprudential
practice demonstrates.
It's precisely to refuse
to see Vernunft whole.
It's to embrace the semantic naivete
that ignores the essential role
rationally incorporating
those contingencies plays
in conferring determinate content on,
determining the content of
always evolving conceptual norms.
Hegel points to the
generality of the lesson
he wants us to learn
from his Vernunft model
of the practice of reason
in a remarkable passage epitomized
in an aphorism expressing his
twist on a slogan of the day.
He says no man is a hero to his valet,
but that's not because
the man is not a hero,
but because the valet is a valet.
The passage continues,
explaining that the reason is
that the valet's dealings
are with the man,
not as a hero, but as
one who eats, drinks,
and wears clothes in general,
with his individual wants and fancies.
Thus, for the judging consciousness,
there is no action in
which it could not oppose
to the universal aspect of the action,
the personal aspect of the individuality,
and so play the part of the
moral valet toward the agent.
What Hegel calls the
universal aspect of the action
is its normative dimension.
The hero is a hero insofar as he acts
according to the norms
that articulate his duty.
The valet views what the
hero does genealogically,
in resolutely naturalistic,
non-normative, reductive terms,
and so, as the passage continues,
the valet explains the action
as resulting from selfish motives.
Just as every action is
capable of being looked at
from the point of view
of conformity to duty,
so too can it be considered
from the point of view
of the particularity of the doer.
If the action is accompanied by fame,
then it knows this inner
aspect to be a desire for fame.
The inner aspect is judged to be an urge
to secure his own happiness,
even though this were to consist
merely in an inner moral conceit,
in the enjoyment of being
conscious of his own superiority
and in the foretaste of a
hope of future happiness.
No action can escape such judgment,
for duty for duty's sake,
this pure purpose, is an unreality.
It becomes a reality in the
deed of an individuality,
and the action is thereby charged
with the aspect of particularity.
That's the end of the quote.
Here Hegel, writing in
1806, before the advent
of the great unmaskers of
the dawning 19th century,
acknowledges that every
application of a norm
is in principle liable
to a naturalistic,
genealogical explanation.
It can be seen, indeed,
can be correctly seen
as far as that vision reaches
from the point of view
of its particularity,
its normative contingency.
But that valet's-eye
genealogical view is one-sided.
It fails to see the whole of the doing.
For the valet fails to see
that a norm can also be active,
that the particular
contingent motives he sees,
what the hero had for breakfast,
can be given the form
of normative necessity,
can be incorporated in a narrative
that exhibits them as
in conformity to duty,
as correctly performed according
to the governing norms.
Hegel calls the genealogical
valet's attitude
(speaks in foreign language),
literally, something like
a striving for the low,
an impulse to debase.
His term for the practical
attitude of giving contingency
the normative form of necessity
is (speaks in foreign
language), magnanimity.
It's a form of
norm-instituting recognition.
Its retrospective recognitive
aspect, he calls forgiveness.
Its prospective recognitive
aspect, he calls confession.
What one forgives is the
normative contingencies
that infect prior
applications of concepts.
One forgives them not
wholesale, by a grand gesture,
but by the hard retail
work of constructing
an expressively progressive
historical narrative
in which they play precedential roles
as making explicit aspects
of the developing conceptual
content that are now revealed
as hitherto having been
all along implicit.
The slogan of this generous
hermeneutic recognitive attitude
is Tennyson's when he says,
"Yet I doubt not through the ages
"one increasing purpose runs,
"and the thoughts of men are widened
"with the process of the suns."
This is what Hegel does
in his own writings,
first and foremost in the Phenomenology,
but no less in the histories he constructs
for philosophy, art, and
religion in his lectures.
Concrete, magnanimous,
hermeneutic forgiveness
is finding such a
purpose, that is, a norm,
to which the concept-application
being forgiven
can be seen to contribute, so
widening the thoughts of man.
Hegel calls this making what
happens into something done.
What the magnanimous interpreter confesses
is the contingent inadequacy
of each particular such forgiving
rational reconstruction.
One confesses that one is
unable to find a narrative
in which every contingency
is given the normative status
of a progressive precedential expression
of the underlying
developing conceptual norm.
In confessing, one
petitions one's successors
for forgiveness of that contingent failure
of one's own effort at forgiveness.
The (speaks in foreign language) rational,
rationalizing process
in which conceptual norms are instituted
by diachronic magnanimous
reciprocal recognition
is a structure of trust,
trust that one's
trespasses will be forgiven
as one forgives those who
have trespassed before one.
So Hegel foresaw the
genealogical challenge
to rational normativity
that would arise from
a reductive naturalism
and would result in a small-minded,
(speaks in foreign language) valet's
hermeneutics of suspicion.
The hermeneutics of magnanimity and trust
he recommends instead
is not based on fine
feeling or pious sentiment.
Instead, he argues that the only construal
in which reason and meaning are threatened
by the possibility of genealogy
is a narrow, one-sided conception
that's mistaken because
semantically naive.
In its place, he puts a
more capacious conception
of Vernunft as comprising not only
the norm-governed application of concepts
but the process and practice
by which their content is determined.
At its core is the
magnanimous hermeneutics
that shapes genealogical contingency
into a normative, rational form.
My aim here has been to sketch
in the broadest of outlines
the insights that underlie
Hegel's inspiring vision
of the relations between the
normative and the natural.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Okay, Bob has said he would be,
Professor Brandom has
said he would be willing
to take some questions for a few minutes
if there are some as I'm sure there are.
- [Audience Member] Thank you very much.
That was awe-inspiring,
and I'm sure I understand
only a small piece of it.
The piece I did understand
was the reference to law,
and I was wondering about that
because it seemed to make
the case for Hegel worse.
I realize you're presenting Hegel's vision
rather than defending it.
But the very few lawyers
today who would accept
the romantic teleological
story you told about law,
that as judges work
through the common law,
they work it pure, that's the old trope.
Even Dworkin, I think,
would have taken that
as a kind of sentimental conceit.
And I think what most people
thinking about law would say is
that sort of story is a necessary piece
of the legitimation of law,
the sociological legitimation of law.
It also works as a kind of hard constraint
to impose some external
controls on what judges do,
but not even the earliest
of the legal realists,
the what-the-judge-had-for-breakfast guys,
thought that judges just
threw up their hands
and, you know, awarded
damages to themselves.
The point was that the concepts
were highly under-determinative,
but that there's some
determination by these concepts,
but basically the work of singling out
who won and who lost in a particular case
was explained genealogically
and that we had to tell
this progressive story.
This progressive story came from outside.
It came from the needs of power
to justify a system that by and
large serve those interests.
And I think that, I mean, that's the worry
that one would throw back on Hegel,
that this progressivism comes externally.
It's a legitimation story.
It makes us feel good about ourselves,
about the nature of the concepts we have,
but it's ultimately a myth
about the contingencies we have.
- Yeah, I mean, I absolutely
agree that if that were the,
if that were the story I
was attributing to Hegel,
it would be subject to
all those criticisms.
I think, instead, you can see it as
articulating the normative fine structure
of what Dworkin calls
the judge's chain novels.
And what distinguishes the Hegelian story,
which I was really just able
to wave my hands at here,
but which in other places
I have written about more extensively,
is that it's not that he thinks
that there are secreted in the tradition
some norm which is gradually getting,
all the pieces of that except the pieces
that are of that statute
are being chipped away
by each decision,
and the already present
statute is being found.
Rather, he thinks each judge
has to tell the story like that.
That's the only form of rationalization.
The only form of reason you can give
for making one judgment
rather than another
is to find that rationale implicit
in the decisions that
have been made before.
But the very next judge's story
may be radically different
about what is progressive.
The trajectory that he discerns,
which again is, as far as
he picks out the precedents,
expressively progressive and
cumulative and monotonic.
Each precedent that he picks
out is revealing some aspect
that he's appealing to,
but it's relation to the rationale
that the previous judge told
may be radically different.
And so Hegel sees, sort of at each stage,
when we ask, well, what is
the content of this concept,
we've gotta understand it as a snapshot
of something that is being shaped
in a process of this description.
And I read him as thinking
that that's what we should be doing
for our philosophical
predecessors as well,
that he told one story
in the Phenomenology
and in the history of philosophy
about what each philosopher had discovered
such that if you put all
these things together,
you got to the system to his account.
And I read him as
thinking that it's our job
to do quite a different one
and say, oh, well, yes, and
the piece that he got was this
and he misunderstood Leibniz and so on.
So the romantic picture that
you were properly rejecting,
I think, is one that isn't looking
at this prospective discontinuities,
the radical discontinuities
between the retrospective
Whiggish stories.
He thinks that telling stories like that
is the form of reason's
march through history,
but that in principle,
that process of determining
the content of concepts
involves also these
radical discontinuities.
- [Audience Member] Yeah,
thank you very much.
That was excellent.
I have a few questions,
one general systematic question
and then more of a Hegel question.
So here's the general question.
Like if I understand you correctly,
Hegel has resources to fight
a globalized form of
hermeneutics of suspicion,
but you yourself said that almost no form
of the hermeneutics of suspicion is global
unless it goes global and
you didn't mention that one.
So I would like to hear
something about that.
So I think some form of globalized form
of reductive naturalism
can be fought with Hegel,
but that doesn't give us a lot
of ground against a skeptic
because the skeptic might say,
well, all contents can be
reduced minus this one.
So, you know, if that's all the
the ground that we stand on,
that doesn't seem to be a lot.
So I wonder whether you could
say something about that.
- Well, I mean,
specifically on that point,
I mean, I think the residue has got to be,
the bit that doesn't get
genealogically reduced
has got to be an autonomous
discursive practice,
a language game one could
play that one played no other.
So that's not just leaving, you know what,
one or two concepts out of
the genealogical target area.
That's got to leave, you know, enough
for us to understand ourselves
as rational beings within.
Now, if then you can be genealogical
about individual motivational structures
or about political economy,
I mean, the question's going to be,
well, can you really be
genealogical about what our
regions of discourse or vocabularies
that after all threaten to spread out
to encompass the way we
understand ourselves.
- [Audience Member] Okay,
and then the Hegel question.
I mean, you draw distinction now
between the epistemic and the semantic
which does a lot of work in this paper.
But I wonder if you don't need,
in addition to that distinction,
the ontic if not the ontological.
I know that you don't
like the concept of truth
to play a very important role here,
but Hegel, of course, insists
in the subject of logic
that truth itself is the
object that he's contemplating.
So I wonder if you have
a deflationary reading
of Hegel's obvious insistence on truth
because if I read him correctly,
he's saying that inferences are only,
that better reasons better
be sometimes best reasons
and best reasons are reasons
hooked up with the truth.
So I'm wondering if there's a
deflationary account of that
in your reading.
- Well, I actually wouldn't read him
as saying what you've just said,
but I am perfectly happy to say
truth is absolutely central for him
and furthermore is front and center
in the story I'm telling.
But it's not,
the best place to look to see
how he's thinking about it
is not the subjective logic
but the preface to the Phenomenology
where he gives us what I take
to be a definition of truth,
though it hardly is gonna show up in your,
you know, coherence theory,
correspondence theories,
where he says truth is a
vast bacchanalian revel
with not a soul sober,
where no sooner does an individual member
of the drinking party fall
insensible beneath the table,
than another takes his place.
So this is his theory of truth.
Yes, this is the story.
(audience laughs)
This is the story about the process
of the development of these concepts,
which are elbowing each other at the table
with their incompatibilities,
with their consequences to each other.
But each one, each determinate concept
eventually shows itself
not to be adequate to the phenomena
to incorporate some claim
about what follows from water.
What's incompatible with what
that is precisely informed
by the particulars,
it falls beneath the table.
We say, you know, that isn't the norm.
That concept that says
that if it's copper,
then this follows from it,
that's not quite right.
That one goes beneath the table,
but there's always another
one to take its place.
And that's the locus of truth,
is that process which is precisely
where the semantic and the epistemic
are merely aspects of it but
not separable components.
Now, obviously a lot of
work would need to be done
to connect that to the other things
he also says about truth,
but that's the one I'm talking about.
- [Audience Member]
Would you kindly tell me
what is the definition of a fact
and what is the difference with truth
and how we can apply this
to ideas of fact and truth
in terms of making our judgment?
We make judgments every day,
thousands of them every day.
Now, who has the best judgment?
- Yeah, well, I don't know
that I have a lot to say
about who has the best judgment.
I mean, on this account of
truth, the essential thing is
that there's no final judgment about it.
I mean, I think Hegel
would agree with Frege
that a fact is a thought that is true,
a thought not in the sense of
a thinking but of a thinkable.
But that notion of truth
has to be understood
in terms of this process
of committing ourselves
to something as true, to
taking something as a fact.
And we've got to realize that
those are fragile attitudes,
that none of them is unrevisable,
and in the end it may be
none of them are unrevised.
Now it is one of Hegel's challenges
to make sense of the notion of
an objective empirical world
that is the way it is
regardless of our attitudes towards it.
And I think in the introduction
of the Phenomenology,
he gives us an account of
the nature of representation
that lets us do that.
But there on hangs a tale.
- [Audience Member]
Thank you for your talk.
I have a question about this
globalizing genealogy project
that you mentioned because
thinking about the
universal in particular,
my field is modern Chinese history,
and when we think about the
universal in particular,
it's always a sort of process
of how China went from,
say, being its own universal
to, say, the Middle Kingdom
to but one nation among many.
And so I guess on a very practical
level, I'm just wondering
how does this globalizing
genealogy work if,
I mean, I don't even
know what it looks like,
I guess, on the one hand.
Second, it seems like is this
sort of globalizing
genealogy as method that is
sort of useful to,
you know, a sort of ongoing conversation
that's been happening in
Western Europe and the US,
but how do you see it going beyond,
I guess, is the question I have.
- I mean, my guess is that
we're slightly talking
past each other on globalization,
that, you know, I'm starting
with the notion of genealogy as
a particular kind of reductive naturalism,
as wanting to understand
how our discursive practices
in a valet's terms of causal processes
that are not normative.
And that has local and global versions.
What it's local and global with respect to
is discursive practice.
The local versions are only
looking at some vocabularies.
Freud, by and large, only cares about
our understanding of our
own motivational structure,
but the kind of argument he gives
is one that one could open up
to talk about all of discourse.
And I was concerned to
give a counterargument
to that kind of radicalization
of a genealogical argument.
But I doubt that those
considerations are gonna help much
with the concerns that you had.
- [Audience Member] I
really enjoyed your talk,
both feeling that it
was a pleasure to follow
and equally to be challenged by it.
Your bringing up case law
as a paradigm of this normative process
made me think of my own
experience as a musician,
and it seems like that
there's just a lot of richness
in using that as a way of
understanding the tradition,
particularly I think in
the Western tradition
where you have both a written
artifact from the past
in this tradition of interpretation
and this living quality of it
that is very stimulating
and enjoyable, thank you.
- Oh good, I mean, I put in
the Eliot quote at the end
to indicate that this isn't
all about copper, you know,
or strict liability or whatever.
This is supposed to be a
story about concepts as such,
and in particular, if there's any go
to the normative fine structure
distinctive of tradition,
which is one of the things I'm saying
Hegel has a lot to teach us about,
then that's gonna be true
in artistic traditions
absolutely as much as in
jurisprudential or scientific ones.
- And that's all we have time for today.
Remember, Bob Brandom
will be talking again
in the Philosophy Department tomorrow on,
what was the topic?
It was about modal logic and
expressivism together again.
But please join me in thanking him
for a very stimulating discussion today.
(audience applauds)
(light music)
