Georg Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

In his retrospective review of The Phenomenology of Spirit Robert Brandom tries to re-actualize Hegel’s ideas, linking his speculative dialectics to the twentieth-century linguistic philosophy and pragmatism. The German philosopher, Brandom argues, definitely concurs with the Wittgensteinian tradition in emphasizing social practices (“uses, customs, institutions”) as providing the framework for our understanding of normatively significant contents. But where Wittgenstein is suspicious in principle of philosophical theorizing, Hegel is an ambitious metaphysical system-builder. Coeval with modal realism, Hegel’s “idealism” claims that not only our linguistic practices and subjectively entertained thoughts, but objective states of affairs as well are conceptually articulated (as John McDowell put it, “the conceptual has no outer boundary”).

The “normative statuses” (Hegel’s “being-in-itself” translated into Brandom’s slang) are instituted by reciprocal recognition of individual subjects participating in a collective “game of giving and asking for reasons.” Recognition — that is what is required for what Hegel calls “actual self-consciousness:” to be what one takes oneself to be. Traditional (pre-modern) society understood normative statuses as objective, written into the non-, pre-, or super-human world as it objectively is independently of any subjective attitudes (“being-for-itself”). Brandom’s Hegel condemns this view as essentialist. Norms are made, not found; they are products of our recognitive practices. Still the collapse of the traditional order generates “alienation” (Entfremdung) by which Brandom means a characteristically modern process of relativization of the human’s moral and political consciousness. What is needed, he thinks (with Hegel), is some way of reconciling what the ancients knew, that our normative attitudes are responsible to our actual normative statuses, with what the moderns learned, that statuses are nothing apart from the attitudes. He accordingly envisages the next stage of human history in which this lesson is explicitly embraced, and the stance of modernity is reconciled with Sittlichkeit, so that alienation of the modern (individual) consciousness is overcome. This post-modern form of self-consciousness Hegel calls “Absolute Knowing.”