Brandom
The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness
Through Its Own Activity:
A Reading
1. To understand this middle section of the Reason chapter, VB, it is important to grasp its
structure and the role that it is envisaged as playing in the work as a whole. This is a more
complicated matter than it may at first appear to be. The section opens with a
straightforward characterization:
Just as Reason, in the role of observer, repeated, in the element of the category,
the movement of consciousness, viz. sense-certainty, perception, and the
Understanding, so will Reason again run through the double movement of selfconsciousness, and pass over from independence into its freedom. [348]
We already saw how section VA, on Observing Reason, recapitulates some of the moves
of the Consciousness section. The new information is that VB corresponds to IVA, the
Independence of Self-Consciousness, while VC corresponds to IVB, the Freedom of SelfConsciousness. The passage continues by offering us a clue as to what sort of parallel is
intended:
To begin with, this active Reason is aware of itself merely as an individual and as
such must demand and produce its reality in an 'other'. Then, however, its
consciousness having raised itself into universality, it becomes universal Reason.
[348]
The forms of phenomenal consciousness considered here correspond to a conception of
the individual that one-sidedly identifies itself with the independence that the individual
displays in action. Action is conceived as mastery or domination of given circumstances,
the cancelling of their independence. In action what things are in themselves is supposed
to answer to what things are for consciousness--the opposite direction of fit from that
constitutive of consciousness. The moment of independence of the in-itself cannot be
cancelled wholesale, by an abstract negation, however, but only retail, by determinate
negation in the concrete cycle of action and experience. From the perspective of the
1
Brandom
whole chapter, what self-consciousness conceiving itself on the model of an active
individual must eventually reconcile is the two sorts of relations that it has to the
universal norms of the community in which it always already finds itself. On the one
hand, those norms, as embodied in communal practice (the "vivified ordinance" of [374]
or "the established living order" of [375]) provide the medium within which alone the
individual agent can form contentful intentions and act so as to carry them out. In this
sense the universal is given to or found by the individual who is constrained by or
dependent on it. It is the experience of this aspect that is reconstructed in the dialectic of
VB, whereby we come to see what is wrong with conceptions that attempt to ignore it.
On the other hand, those norms embodied in communal practice are also the product of
individual activity. In this sense they are made by the individual agent, and not just
found. For apart from the concrete activity of applying those norms to particular actions,
in practical deliberation and assessment, the universal is ideal rather than actual,
something merely for consciousness and not something in itself. The first aspect, of the
dependence of individuality on the universal, has been with us from the very beginning of
the work. What is distinctive of the stage of phenomenal consciousness being considered
here is the way in which it identifies its individuality with the second aspect, the
dependence of universality on individuality. Accordingly, what we find in the three
subsections of VB is a discussion of three forms of individualism: three ways in which
individuality seeks to conceive itself as independent relative to the universals that in
themselves (and so for us) in fact constrain it.
2. The structure of VB is architectonically overdetermined, however, and the most
enlightening way to think of it is not the one forwarded in the passage just cited. As just
pointed out, the first understandings of action considered here do indeed exhibit a
structure of Mastery, and as we shall see, in VC analogues to the stoic and sceptical
strategies of independence are presented as well. But the central lesson of VB is
2
Brandom
developed by means of a parallel to the stages of consciousness, not of selfconsciousness. The three sections of VB are a) Pleasure and Necessity, b) the Law of the
Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit, and c) Virtue and the Way of the World. They
should be understood as corresponding to sense-certainty, perception, and understanding
respectively. The upshot is that the role that thought as the realm of purely inferentially
significant claims was there discovered to play in language entries here is rediscovered in
a strictly analogous fashion for language exits. Thus VBa discusses action conceived as
the immediate expression of immediate impulses, inclinations, or desires. VBb then
discusses those actions as the mediated, or universalized expressions of immediate
impulses. VBc then discusses actions as the mediated or universalized expression of
motivations that are themselves mediated or universal. The progression from immediate
sensuous inclinations, to universals of sensuous inclination, culminating in purely
theoretical motivation not traceable to immediate inclination accordingly corresponds on
the side of exits from thought to actuality in practical activity to the progression from
immediate sensuous appearance to classification according to universals of sense to
understanding according to purely theoretical concepts on the side of entries from
actuality to thought in empirical consciousness. It is this structural parallel that governs
the discussion below.
3. The three main sections, Pleasure and Necessity, the Law of the Heart and the Frenzy
of Self-Conceit, and Virtue and the Way of the World, are preceded by an overall
introduction. It will not be discussed in detail here, but some general comments are in
order, since that introduction can be positively misleading unless its expository relation to
the body of the section is understood. We who are following the order of exposition are
making the transition to considering a different sort of conception of the practical activity
by which both individuals and the communities they recognitively constitute actualize
themselves. In the discussion of Observing Reason we saw practical activity conceived
3
Brandom
as something objective and simply there--bodily motions, biological functions,
neurophysiological activity. We are now to consider conceptions of practical activity as
the expression of individuality, that whereby what an individual self-consciousness is
subjectively, ideally, or for itself takes a form that is objective, actual, and for others.1
Although in the course of the dialectically reconstructed experience of these conceptions,
along with those recounted in VC, an adequate understanding of action as expression will
become available to us, all of the phenomenal forms we considered under the heading of
Reason, like all of those considered under the headings of Consciousness and SelfConsciousness, are alienated forms. Individuality is misunderstood in terms of one-sided
models of independence. This shows up in the difficulty of making explicit the
dependence on the universal involved in determinate contentfulness of what is expressed
while retaining categories independence regarding its expression. For us to know what to
look for in the conflict between determinate contentfulness and independence as it shows
up in the form of relations between the universal and the individual, it is useful for us to
know something about the universality whose role as constitutive of and constituted by
individuality is the ultimate explanatory target. For this purpose, rather than relying
entirely on the exposition of alienated conceptions of the universals that govern practical
activity by individuals, Hegel offers us a few remarks about the reality of which they are
appearances.
4. The fundamental thing to understand is, of course, the recognitive structure of both
social substance and individual self-consciousnesses that are its actuality. This much
Hegel takes it we have already learned2:
1
Being for others turns out to be the mediated form of what being in itself is the immediate form. The latter is a onesided or alienated conception of what is eventually revealed to us as the former.
2 Since this was not the lesson of either IVB or VA, he can only have in mind the discussion early in IVA, where we
first hear about mutual recognition.
4
Brandom
If we take this goal--and this is the Notion, which for us has already appeared on
the scene--in its reality, viz. the self-consciousness that is recognized and
acknowledged, and which has its own self-certainty in the other free selfconsciousness, and possesses its truth precisely in that 'other'...then in this Notion
there is disclosed the realm of ethical life [Reich der Sittlichkeit]. For this is
nothing else than the absolute spiritual unity of the essence of individuals in their
independent actual existence; it is an intrinsically [an sich] universal selfconsciousness that takes itself to be actual in another consciousness...[349]
As constituted by its own and others recognitions, the individual self-consciousness is said to be in itself and for itself3 universal. What are these
essentially social universals in terms of which we must understand individuals
and in terms of which they ideally understand themselves and each other? The
passage continues:
This ethical [sittliche] Substance, taken in its abstract universality, is only law in
the form of thought; but it is no less immediately actual self-consciousness, or it is
custom [Sitte]. [349]
The universals in question are norms, which can be expressed explicitly in laws (the form
of thought being conceptual and propositional), at the cost of abstractness, or may remain
implicit in customs or social practices, which have the benefit of concreteness. Norms in
the form of communal practice are norms actualized by individual self-consciousnesses.
This unity of being-for-another or making oneself a Thing, and of being-for-self,
this universal Substance, speaks its universal language [redet ihre allgemeine
Sprache] in the customs and laws of its nation. [351]
The determinately contentful norms that are the universal element both found and made
by the activity of recognitively self-conscious individuals are articulated in both the
implicit immediate form of practices and the explicit mediated form of laws. The social
nature of this universal element is not restricted to its normative form:
...in the universal Substance, the individual has this form of subsistence [in the
universal medium] not only for his activity as such, but no less also for the
content of that activity; what he does is the skill and customary practice of all.
[351]
3
"Reason is present here as the fluid universal Substance, as unchangeable simple thinghood, which yet bursts asunder
into many completely independent beings...which in their absolute being-for-self are dissolved, not merely implicitly, in
the simple independent Substance, but explicitly for themselves." [350]
5
Brandom
5. What is potentially misleading about this introductory discussion is the way in which
it anticipates the fuller discussion in the chapter on Spirit. There we will encounter,
officially for the first time, the three stage structural development of Spirit, from
immediate implicit Sittlichkeit, in the first stage, through the middle stage in which that
Sittlichkeit is shattered by the eruption of individual self-consciousnesses whose
independence is explicit to them, to the eventual hoped-for stage of Sittlichkeit explicit to
itself as mediated by the activity of individual self-consciousnesses. We who are
following the exposition have not yet been educated out of the alienated conceptions
characteristic of the middle stage, which we brought with is to the work. So for
unalienated conceptions of the relation of individuals to the universal norms that both
constrain and make possible the determinately contentful activities of those individuals,
on the one hand, and are themselves constrained and made possible by those activities on
the other hand, we must accordingly be directed either forward or backward.
But from this happy state of having realized its essential character and of living in
it, self-consciousness which at first is Spirit only immediately and in principle, has
withdrawn, or else has not yet realized it; for both may equally well be said. [353]
The story that is recounted in the tripartite body of VB concerns the way in which
particular, immediate, sensuous inclinations come to be determinately contentful
expressions of individual self-consciousnesses (both for that self consciousness and in
themselves or for others) by being brought under universal, communally instituted
norms, that is, by being assessed in practice, or according to rules.
...what is superseded in the movement are the individual moments which for selfconsciousness are valid in their isolation. They have the form of an immediate
will or natural impulse which obtains its satisfaction which is itself the content of
a fresh impulse....Taken in the former sense, those forms are the coming-to-be of
the ethical substance, and precede it; in the latter, they succeed it and reveal to
self-consciousness what its essential nature is. In the former case, the immediacy
or rawness of the impulses gets lost in the process of getting to know what their
truth is, and their content takes on a higher form. In the latter case, what is lost is
the false idea of the consciousness which places its essential nature in those
impulses. In the former case, the goal they attain is the ethical Substance, while,
in the latter, it is the consciousness of that Substance... [357]
6
Brandom
The "former case" here is applying the story about the progressive mediation of the
immediate (on the side of the outputs, the aspect of purposive action, in which what
things are in themselves depends on what they are for consciousness) to the prealienation stage of Spirit, while the "latter case" is applying that story to the postalienation stage. Our attempt to move beyond our alienated concepts, we will discover, is
always stereoscopic in this way. We are separated from the more primitive stage by the
fact that the Sittlichkeit that consists in individuals recognizing themselves in and
identifying with the universal immediately is achievable only by practice, not by
theoretical understanding. It is only by being recognized and recognizing oneself in
practice as a member of some particular community, by actually taking part in its
practices, that this sort of Sittlichkeit is available to us. Talk about it, the attempt to
understand it, is not an approach to the first stage from the second, but from the second to
the third, from which our alienation still separates us. [The view is that the portal to that
third stage can at least be found by theoretical activity such as the exposition that is the
Phenomenology, even if to enter it requires the practical activity of instituting the
community of trust based on the "words of reconciliation"--the constitutive linguistic and
practical structure of recognition as mutual confession and forgiveness.] The process
whereby the raw natural impulses or desires acquire the infusion of universality required
to institute Spirit in its immediate form was addressed already in the discussion of Self-Consciousness. This was presented as a naturalistic story about how the primitive
consciousness associated with biological desire can achieve the form of desire for desire,
and so have the prerequisites for a concept of consciousness, and then be able to apply
that concept to itself in a community constituted by mutual recognition, that is, a spiritual
community. What we must come to understand from the present exposition is what it is
to lose "the false idea of the consciousness which places its essential nature in those
impulses," just as we have seen through the false idea of the consciousness which places
its essential nature in the immediacy of the deliverances of sense.
7
Brandom
6. The mark of our current alienated understanding of the purposive practical activity of
individuals is that
...consciousness appears split into this given actuality, and the End which it
realizes by superseding that actuality, an End which in fact it makes an actuality
in place of that with was given.
The target concept of action we want to achieve in the end, as we make the
transition to the third, unalienated stage of Sittlichkeit mediated by individual
self-consciousness is specified immediately afterwards:
Its primary End, however, is its immediate abstract being-for-self; in other words,
seeing itself as this particular individual in another, or seeing another selfconsciousness as itself. The experience of what the truth of this End is raises selfconsciousness to a higher level, and from now on it is itself its own End, insofar
as it is at the same time universal and has the law directly within it...What virtue
learns from this experience can only be this, that its End is already attained in
principle, that happiness is found directly in the action itself, and that action itself
is the good...Having discovered this, self-consciousness thus knows itself to be
reality in the form of an individuality that directly expresses itself, an
individuality which no longer encounters resistance from an actual world, and
whose aim and object are only this expressing of itself. [359]
There is a gap between intention and action. If the understanding of that gap begins with
a conception of failures of purposive action on the model of abstract negation, the
intention and the achievement are conceived of as mutually independent in the sense that
each can be just what it is entirely independently of the other, then a gap is opened up on
the side of practical activity that is comparable to the gap of intelligibility the
Introduction complains about on the side of cognitive activity. It becomes unintelligible
how we could achieve just what we intend ("What the deed is can be said of it" [322]).
Here Hegel announces (rather than explains) that the proper remedy for this
misconception of the "distinction that action implies" ([400]) between intention and
accomplishment lies in understanding action and the evaluation of its success in terms of
the expression of acting individual self-consciousnesses. Although we can as yet have
only a preliminary grasp of the point, we should already have a hold on the general
structure of the expressive model of individual self-consciousnesses in its dual parallel
8
Brandom
accounts of cognitive and practical empirical activity. Each involves a pole of certainty,
or what things are for an individual consciousness, and a pole of truth, or what things are
in themselves. In theoretical or cognitive activity, what things are for consciousness is
supposed to depend on and conform to what things are in themselves. In practical
activity what things are in themselves is supposed to depend on and conform to what
things are for consciousness. The key to getting beyond an alienated conception of these
dependences according to categories of self-standing independence and domination is to
concentrate on the cycle of action as essentially involving both the cognitive and the
practical movements. It can be seen as the concrete actualization of progress toward the
coincidence of the poles of certainty and truth in both directions. This evolution and
grooming of concepts, along with the thoughts and objective situations that display them,
this sort of progress is largely independent of the contingent details of the experience.
For happiness to be reconciled with virtue (which is one Kantian form in which Hegel
sees the problem of reconciling the individual with the universal), we must shift the way
we think of happiness, and so the way we think of the motivation of our individual action.
We must move from thinking of happiness in the formal Enlightenment utilitarian terms
of getting what we as particular individuals contingently want to thinking of it as a matter
of expressing the individual in universal terms, by actualizing it in a public arena where
determinate contents are acquired and altered, claimed and acknowledged. Determinate
mutual recognition by individuals, and their self-clarifying development through
experience can be achieved even where particular intention and achievement diverge.
I
VBa: Pleasure and Necessity
7. The first dialectically presented experience of phenomenal consciousness of practical
activity as the expression of its individuality bears the heading "Pleasure and Necessity"
9
Brandom
[Lust und Notwendigkeit], and occupies paragraphs [360] to [366]. This is the most
primitive of the conceptions of individuality as independent that are considered.
Instead of the heavenly-seeming Spirit of the universality of knowledge and
action in which the feeling and enjoyment of individuality are stilled, there has
entered into it the Spirit of the earth, for which true actuality is merely that being
which is the actuality of the individual consciousness. [360]
The aspect of its individual activity that this first form of phenomenal self-consciousness
seizes on one-sidedly in order to get a grip on the sort of independence it displays in
purposive action is (as with sense certainty on the input side) immediacy.
It plunges therefore into life and indulges to the full the pure individuality in
which it appears. It does not so much make [macht] its own happiness as
immediately [unmittlebar] take [nimmt] it and enjoy it. [361]
Self-consciousness understanding itself as sensuously self-indulgent, what will be called
here voluptuous self-consciousness, seeks to actualize itself by taking pleasure, that is by
the immediate realization of its immediate impulses. In this way its strategy is the
immediate expression of immediate sensuous inclination [Kant's arch enemy, sinnliche
Neigungen]. The immediacy of the expression consists in its taking the form of
inarticulate feeling. The difficulty that we can see for this sort of understanding of action
is that it is another strategy whereby individuality applies to itself categories of
independence. The moment of dependence of individual action becomes practically
evident in the pursuit of pleasure, in the form of constraint by necessity. At this stage of
development in thinking about action, such constraint can only be experienced by the
acting self-consciousness as something alien. In fact, since it does not understand the way
in which its own impulses acquire determinate content and practical significance only by
virtue of their role as products and producers of the experience that characterizes the cycle
of action, this moment of concrete dependence can appear to voluptuous selfconsciousness only as the abstract form of negation without its determinate content.
10
Brandom
8. To begin with it may be asked how the voluptuous consciousness differs from the
merely desiring consciousness of animals. The short answer is that voluptuousness is a
form of self-consciousness, which cannot be identified with the immediate satisfaction of
desire. Voluptuous self-consciousness is in the first instance a way of conceiving or
understanding the actions of self-conscious individuals.
Its action is only in one respect an action of Desire...
The element in which desire and its object subsist as mutually indifferent and
independent is animate existence [lebendige Dasein]; the enjoyment of desire puts
an end to this existence so far as it belongs to the object of desire. But here this
element which gives to both a separate actuality is rather the category, a being
which is essentially in the form of thought. [362]
As self-consciousness in the form of thought, voluptuous consciousness is itself thoroughly
mediated and determinately contentful. But it understands its activity purely in terms of
categories of immediacy. Accordingly, we can see that it does not bring to bear the
theoretical resources it needs to understand itself.4 It is our job as phenomenological
observers to distinguish in each form of phenomenal consciousness that is rehearsed for us
what is expressively progressive, revealing explicitly for acting, knowing phenomenal selfconsciousness something of what it is implicitly or in itself, from what remains for it
obscure and inadequately expressed. Self-consciousness that misconceives its individual
practical activity on the model of immediate expression in the form of voluptuousness is a
kind of determinately contentful thought. We want to see how what is presupposed by that
determinate contentfulness makes itself manifest actually to us, and potentially to the
phenomenal self-consciousness under consideration, in spite of the latter's defining refusal
to acknowledge the sorts of mediation and dependence essential to the determinate
contentfulness of individual practical activity. Voluptuous self-consciousness thinks; its
activity is thoughtful; what it does can be said of it. What self-conscious individuals who
understand themselves as voluptuaries in fact are trying to encompass under the concept of
4
Compare the intricately counterfactual slogan neurophysiologists use to console themselves: "If the brain were so
simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
11
Brandom
immediate expression of feeling is determinately contentful, deliberate, purposeful action
and the assessment of its success. The manifestation in experience of the mediation,
dependence, and "the distinction that action implies" (between the perspective of
deliberation and the perspective of assessment) is what appears to the self-consciousness
that understands itself as voluptuous in the abstract form of necessity.
9. The voluptuous self-consciousness is not wholly or merely wrong about the activity by
which it actualizes its individuality, however. It is determinately wrong, and so presents us
with specific positive lessons as well as negative ones. In particular, this form of selfconsciousness is an attempt to conceive individual action as consisting in the essential
unity of purpose and achievement. When we can correctly grasp this unity as mediated by,
among other things, the "distinction that action implies", we will have overcome our
alienated self-conception. Consciousness that identifies with its individual self as falling
under the concept of action motivated and assessed by pleasure has not achieved this
mediated understanding of the unity of action, since its conception of that unity is precisely
as immediate. Nonetheless, it is that unity that it endorses and addresses, albeit with an
inadequate model. Its understanding of the unity of purpose and achievement is immediate
in that it is, according to the model, a unity in the form of a single feeling. The feeling of
pleasure is both the sole motivator of action, and the sole measure for assessing its success.
The kind of thing that plays the role of inner, of purpose, is taken simply to coincide with
the kind of thing that plays the role of outer, of accomplishment or achievement. The
model of expression is immediate in that implicit and explicit are identified with each
other. This is the immediate expressive unity of motivation and satisfaction in feeling.
10. Another positive lesson exhibited for us by the conception of action characteristic of
the voluptuous self-consciousness consists in the way in which the officially and explicitly
immediate feeling of pleasure is implicitly and in fact the feeling of a relation to oneself
12
Brandom
that is mediated by relation to an independent other. Accordingly, it glimpses darkly the
way in which the unity of action mediated by the difference it implies is properly to be
understood, what we will understand eventually as the expressive unity of content between
what a performance is for the agent whose performance it is and what is for other
independent self-consciousnesses, the unity of being for self and being for others. For the
hedonic paradigm of Hegel's discussion of what is in German Lust is sexual pleasure.
Identifying one's individual self with what is expressed in the pursuit and achievement of
sexual pleasure includes an implicit acknowledgment of the role of independent other in
constituting my individuality. The social nature of sexual pleasure provides the immediate
sensuous image, the mere representation that does duty, crudely, in picture-thinking, for
actively contentful concepts of the mutual recognition on which the true, mediated, unity
of action is based.
It attains therefore to the enjoyment of pleasure, to the consciousness of its
actualization in a consciousness which appears as independent, or to the vision of
the unity of the two independent self-consciousnesses. It attains its End, but only
to learn there the truth of what its End is. It comprehends itself as this particular
individual who exists for himself, but the realization of this End is itself the
setting-aside of the latter. For it is not as this particular individual that it becomes
an object to itself, but rather as the unity of itself and the other self-consciousness,
hence as an individual that is only a moment or universal. [362]
Further, the independence of the other will manifest itself, in a way ultimately
incompatible with the claims of independence made by consciousness that conceives itself
as voluptuous. Here what is independent, the world confronted by the individual selfconsciousness, is not only or primarily the world of nature, but also and fundamentally a
social world.
It is, however, as yet the poorest form of self-realizing Spirit; for it is aware of
itself at first only as the abstraction of Reason, or is the immediacy of the unity of
being-for-itself and being-in-itself...
Nevertheless it no longer has the form of immediate simple being, as it has for
Reason in its observational role where it is abstract being or, posited in the form
of an alien being, is thinghood in general. Here in this thinghood there has
entered being-for-self and mediation...[363]
13
Brandom
Communal norms or universals, whether implicit in practice or explicit as rules (in the
form of custom or of law) provide resistance to the immediate gratification of sensuous
inclination. Other acting individual self-consciousnesses may prove uncooperative. The
picture of motivation, its expression, and its satisfaction as immediately identified with one
another in the feeling of pleasure, conceived as independent and immediate, cannot
properly present the role of social and natural recalcitrance in the constitution of the
contents of intentions and perceived performances. The moment of independence appears
instead as the simple and contentless negation of action (that is, pleasure).
The realization attained by this individuality consists therefore in nothing more
than this, viz. that it has cast for this circle of abstractions from its confinement
within simple self-consciousness, into the element where they are for selfconsciousness, in other words, are expanded into an objective existence. The
object, then, that is for self-consciousness as it takes its pleasure its essence...has
no content. It is what is called necessity...whose work is the nothingness of
individuality. [363]
As we will see, the conceptual scheme of the voluptuous consciousness, by leaving no
room for the moment of independence that corresponds to being (determinately)
recognized, cuts itself off from the possibility of understanding both determinately
contentful purposes and (what is for Hegel the same thing) the development to fruition in
public actuality of determinately contentful projects.
11. Why is "the work of necessity the nothingness of individuality", according to the sort
of self-consciousness that identifies with its individual activity under the concept of
gratification of immediate sensuous impulse? Individuality is understood to be just the
particularity of this impulse, as the unity in feeling of motive and satisfaction. But the
content of this impulse is like the content of this now. Sensuous inclination bloweth as it
listeth. To identify with it is not to identify with some developing content, but with
something flickering and evanescent. (It is to focus on the swirl of shades made by the ink
particles rather than the sentences they express.) This explanatory strategy is committed to
identifying the content of individuality with the content of the inclination whose
14
Brandom
satisfaction is pleasure. How is content to be associated with some episode in the play of
inclination? It is either immediately satisfied or it is not. If it is, it vanishes, as protoconsciousness as desire vanishes in its satisfaction. Individuality, so conceived, disappears
in the very performance that is its actualization. Immediately successful expression cancels
what is expressed. Within the structure of pure immediacy there is no way to hold the
content of such an impulse fixed, to render it repeatable, and so assailable, defensible,
something that can be appealed to, in short, something thinkable. In any case, sensuous
inclination is never merely satisfied. The feeling of pleasure is never the only achievement
or accomplishment of a performance. Any actualization of an intention, inclination, or
impulse, any purposeful performance has consequences beyond the pleasure it provides for
the agent. These consequences, what the performance is in itself or for others, indeed what
it is for the agent in addition to being pleasure, appear to the voluptuous self-consciousness
in the guise of abstract constraint or necessity. All the more does necessity appear in the
recalcitrance of the world to the immediate achievement of pleasure. Always too much or
too little is in fact accomplished or actualized, and every difference violates the immediacy
of self-expression that is the hallmark of the voluptuous or hedonistic self-conception.
The transition is made from the form of the one or unit into that of universality,
from one absolute abstraction into the other, from the purpose of pure being-forself which has thrown off all community with others, into the sheer opposite
which is thus equally abstract being-in-itself. Consequently, the form in which
this appears is that the individual has simply perished, and the absolute
unyieldingness of individual existence is pulverized in the equally unrelenting but
continuous world of actuality. [364]
Individuality conceived as the particularity of current unrepeatable impulse vanishes like
the 'Now', in the absence of some universal to hold it fast as determinately contentful. As
it is, the experience voluptuous consciousness has of its action is forced by its deformed
self-conception into the alienated mold of an abstract and barren disjunction between what
things are for the acting self-consciousness and what they are in themselves or for others.
Far from being immediately unified, impulse and satisfaction are rent asunder into
15
Brandom
independent sorts of things, confronting one another contingently across a conceptual
chasm.
This transition of its living being into lifeless necessity therefore appears to it as
an inversion which is not mediated by anything at all. The mediating agency
would have to be that in which both sides would be one, where, therefore
consciousness recognized one moment in the other: its purpose and action in fate,
and its fate in its purpose and action, that is would recognize its own essence in
this necessity. [365]
To do so, however, requires acknowledging that one's own individual identity is not
something constituted and possessed independently and immediately, but something one
has or is only in virtue of the mediation of and so relation to relatively independent others,
whom one must acknowledge as such and be acknowledged by. This is precluded by the
model of independence, here considered in its most primitive form, as immediacy. As a
result, self-consciousness understanding its individualizing and actualizing practical
activity on the model of voluptuousness cannot comprehend the sort of unity that purpose
and accomplishment have (determinately contentful precisely because of the ultimately
social "distinction that action implies"). For:
...these moments are not contained and linked together in feeling, but only in the
pure self, which is a universal or thought.[365]
Voluptuous consciousness, of course, does not think of itself this way.
12. The result is that the experience of this form of phenomenal consciousness shows us
(and could show such a consciousness) the inadequacy of its conception of itself as an
acting individual. The voluptuous consciousness can't recognize itself in what it does,
whether its inclination is satisfied or thwarted, whether the world is recalcitrant or
compliant to the demands of its pleasure.
Consciousness, therefore, through its experience in which it should have found its
truth, has really become a riddle to itself, the consequences of its deed are for it
not the deeds themselves. What befalls it is, for it, not the experience of what it is
in itself, the transition is not a mere alteration of the form of the same content and
essence, presented now as the content and essence, and again as the object or
[outwardly] beheld essence of itself. [365]
16
Brandom
Here we are offered, albeit in a backhanded fashion, a characterization of the unalienated
conception of action we are striving to attain. Self-consciousness conceiving its practical
activity on the model of voluptuousness, like self-consciousness conceiving its cognitive
activity on the model of sense certainty, applies the model of independence in the form of
immediacy, and accordingly precludes itself from understanding the determinate
contentfulness of action ("what the deed is can be said of it") and, respectively, cognition.
The content that escapes these strategies of immediacy is precisely the unity that is
conferred by the experience of the difference that action implies, as an aspect of the cycle
of action, of the concrete practical activity of a community of individuals acting and
assessing actions. On the expressive model of action, which is to replace our current
alienated conceptions, the distinction between content and form is precisely the distinction
between what is preserved in action, as the inner is translated in to the outer,
...action simply translates an initially implicit being into a being that is made
explicit...[401]
the content, and what is distinguished, the form as implicit or explicit. Both the
distinction, the moment of difference, and the unity, the moment of identity, depend upon
relations to (and so are mediated by) other relatively independent self-consciousnesses, and
their determinate acknowledgments of performances (taking them to be the actualization of
determinately contentful commitments) or assessments of actions.5
13. A third positive lesson of which voluptuous consciousness provides us with a confused
but recognizable expression concerns the relation between the feeling of pleasure and the
metaphysical significance of individuality expressing itself in the realm of actuality by its
practical activity. One of the Kantian dualisms that Hegel's conceptual scheme seeks to
overcome is that between happiness and virtue. Of course he does not immediately
5
The significance of this sort of identity-in-difference for the overall explanatory project of the Phenomenology has
already been alluded to, in the discussion of VA.
17
Brandom
identify them with each other, but unites them by means of a middle term. Each is to be
understood in terms of the expression of individuality in actual practical performance.
Happiness is for Hegel in the first instance a metaphysical status, consisting in recognizing
oneself in one's deeds. The feeling of pleasure is merely the immediate aspect of
happiness. But identifying one's individuality with what is immediately expressed in the
attainment of the feeling of pleasure, that is, one-sidedly with only an aspect of happiness,
is nonetheless identifying with individuality conceived as what succeeds in expressing
itself in action. This is a decidedly alienated conception of happiness, one that can be
contrasted backwards with the immediate unalienated conception of the universal self as
expressed in each individual action characteristic of the original simple ethical substance,
and forwards to the fully mediated version we are prepared for by this chapter.
The pleasure enjoyed has indeed the positive significance that self-consciousness
has become objective to itself; but equally it has the negative one of having
reduced itself to a moment. [363]
II
VBb: Law of the Heart & the Frenzy of Self Conceit
14. Section VBb, The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit [Das Gesetz des
Herzens und der Wahnsinn des Eigendünkels] occupies paragraphs [367] to [380]. The
transition to this section corresponds on the output side to the transition from Sense
Certainty to Perception on the input side. In each case the phenomenal consciousness in
question begins to be entitled to attribute determinate contents to the sensuous states it
had previously misunderstood as independently authoritative simply in virtue of their
immediacy. Perception acknowledges the importance of universality to contentfulness by
conceiving its knowledge in terms of immediate universals of sense, that is empirically
applicable concepts or observable properties. The Law of the Heart acknowledges the
importance of universality to contentfulness by conceiving its activity in terms of
18
Brandom
immediate universals of sensuous inclination, that is empirically felt motivations. The
way in which consciousness understanding itself as voluptuous works out the mistaken
strategy of independence, of identifying itself only with (recognizing itself only in) the
moment of independence, is to insist on the authority of its immediate impulses as
consisting simply in their particular immediacy. However, in a dialectically
reconstructed experience whose structure is familiar to us already from the opening
discussion of 'Now' and 'This', it has emerged for us that no determinate content can be
associated with authority that does not point beyond the merely immediate. The authority
of particular sensuous impulse turns out to be contentless, and totally abstract. The
moment of constraining dependence confronting those impulses and exercising authority
over them, which has been suppressed and ignored, can only then be experience as the
equally abstract negation or denial of that authority. With the Law of the Heart
universality is acknowledged as essential to the authority of immediate sensuous
inclination, and so it becomes possible to associate determinate content with that sort of
authority.
What necessity truly is in self-consciousness, it is for this new form of selfconsciousness, in which it knows its own self to be the principle of necessity. It
knows that it has the universal law immediately within itself, and because the law
is immediately present in the being-for-self of consciousness, it is called the law of
the heart. This form takes itself to be, qua individuality, essence like the previous
form; but the new form is richer because its being-for-self has for it the character
of necessity or universality. [367]
Remember that the Kantian sense of 'necessary' is just 'according to a rule', a broadly
normative matter. The great advance of this form of phenomenal consciousness is that it
has incorporated necessity, dependence in the form of constraint by the universal, into its
own self-conception as an aspect of what is its own in action, rather than as something
other that is merely opposed to that what is its own in action. Like consciousness that
understands itself as perceiving, however, "this consciousness at first knows universality
only as immediate..." [374]. From pleasure as the immediate unity of impulse and
19
Brandom
satisfaction in feeling confronted by necessity as the pure abstraction of their difference,
we move to the law of the heart as encompassing both pleasure and necessity:
To it the two of them are undivided; its pleasure is what conforms to the law...For
within its own self, individuality and the necessary are immediately one...[370]
15. How ought we to understand what it means to acknowledge universals of sensuous
inclination on the output side by analogy to the acknowledgment of sense universals by
perceiving consciousness on the input side? Instead of understanding individual action in
terms of raw impulses (cf. [357]), merely immediate Neigungen, it is to be understood in
terms of articulated, mediated motives that have the form of reasons. The Ends or
purposes that are the certainty of action or what it is for the acting consciousness are now
conceived as including universality, and so as determinately contentful in a way that
inclinations conceived as merely immediate proved to be incapable of. Such motives retain
their immediacy, as do the universals of sense, but are mediated as well in that they are
caught up in relations of inference and incompatibility. In VBc we will consider what
happens when motives are acknowledged that are in no sense immediate, when actions are
taken to be motivatable by purely mediated motives, reasons that do not express immediate
impulses but are purely theoretical. This move corresponds to that from Perception, with
its concern with sense universals, to Understanding, which admits as well purely
inferentially accessible claims. The central concept to focus on in approaching the sort of
phenomenal consciousness that understands itself according to the Law of the Heart is that
of expressing an impulse in the form of a reason, expressing immediate inclination in the
mediated form of thought. It is only insofar as we understand this transformation that we
can understand what it means to associate determinate content with immediate inclination
at all.
20
Brandom
16. The overall parallel that governs the lining up of Consciousness and Reason generally
is something like this. Becoming a competent empirical perceiver or noninferential
reporter is acquiring the practical capacity to respond to some features of the environment
by acknowledging commitments that are propositionally contentful in virtue of the
inferential and incompatibility relations they stand in to others. Hegel says that what has
this sort of content has "the form of thought". Thus perception is a process whereby what
is immediate comes to be expressed in the mediated form of thought (hence "entries" or
"inputs" to thought). Dually, becoming a competent empirical agent is acquiring the
practical capacity to respond to one's acknowledging of commitments that are
propositionally contentful in virtue of the inferential and incompatibility relations they
stand in to others by altering some features of the environment. Thus action is a process
whereby what is in the mediated form of thought comes to be expressed immediately in an
actual performance that has a content not only for the acting consciousness but for others
(hence "exits" or "output" from thought). In the cycle of action and perception of the
consequences of action, both the contents of our individual purposes and the universal
concepts we have available develop and are clarified by being expressed and applied. This
process is what is concrete and actual and provides the standard to which we must always
revert in assessing our use of concepts corresponding to aspects we have abstracted from it.
It is in terms of that cycle that we must understand the two complementary sorts of
expression that correspond to expressing the immediate in the form of thought in
perception and expressing thought in the form of the immediate in action. Perceivings and
intendings are kinds of determinately contentful thoughts that express and are expressed in
the immediate, respectively. It is important to see that the sort of expression introduced at
the end of the previous paragraph is different from either of these. For what is at issue
there is the expression of an immediate impulse in the mediated form of an intention. The
general duality between perception and action addresses the relation between intention and
immediately actual public performance, not that between immediately actual inclination
21
Brandom
and contentful intention. Putting perception and cognition and their role in the cycle of
action to one side for the moment, within the aspect of purposive activity itself there is a
dual expressive relation of mediate thought to the immediate. Immediate inclination is
expressed in the form of thought as contentful intention, and thought as contentful purpose
is expressed in the form of immediacy in actual purposeful performance. Our central
source for understanding the second of these is VC. The first of them is raised as a topic in
the transition from VBa to VBb.
17. One of the main hurdles that we face in overcoming our alienated conceptions of
action concerns the contingency of expression. We one-sidedly emphasize the distinction
that action implies (between purpose and achievement) without appropriately
acknowledging the necessity or the identity that it also implies. On the cognitive side we
saw in the Introduction the strategy for overcoming the one-sided emphasis on the
distinction between certainty and truth, what things are for consciousness and what they
are in themselves, is broadly speaking to locate the distinction within the concrete process
of experience. This same phenomenal strategy is to be applied on the active side, to
overcome the alienated conception of action by locating the distinction between the
certainty and truth of action within the social cycle of action. In that context the role of
determinately contentful distinctions between the purpose and the consequences associated
with a performance, and so of contingency, can be properly appreciated. This sort of
worry about the contingency of the connection between what is expressed and its
expression has to do with the expression of the mediated contentful purpose in the realm of
immediacy, since the arena of actuality in which the purpose is to be enacted always
already comes fully furnished with given conditions, means, abilities, and so on. There is a
corresponding sort of worry about the contingency of the connection between what is
expressed and its expression that has to do with the complementary expression of
immediate inclination in the articulated form of a determinately contentful purpose. For
22
Brandom
what specific content is associated with a given felt impulse depends on what concepts are
available to express it. It is tempting to suppose that the same impulse might be articulated
as a purpose differently in two cases that differed only in what conceptual contents were
available for that purpose at the particular stage in the conceptual development of the
communities in question. The expression of an inclination in the form of a reason for
action would then be contingent on the particular population of concepts that happened to
be in play for the individual who is inclined. The general form of the way in which the
master-concept of expression is to be used to situate these different but related sorts of
contingency is the same for both, and its treatment is best postponed until the discussion of
VC. It can be noted here, though, that at least with regard to this issue the ability to
express immediate impulses in the articulate form of determinately contentful purposes or
intentions can be treated as just another perceptual ability. It is a kind of seeing-as, the
capacity to perceive (be able to tell) what you want. Developing this sort of perceptual
ability is a prerequisite of being able to pursue a project, that is to develop the content of a
purpose by a process of clarifying expression that is the actualizing of the intention.
18. The reason that there is no determinate content to the impulses as conceived by the
voluptuous consciousness is that it does not conceive itself as undergoing any experience.
Experience shapes the contents of concepts by confronting the moment of independence in
their actual application with the moment of dependence of such application on the
applicability of other concepts whose contents stand in determinate inferential or
incompatibility to them. Voluptuous consciousness does not take its immediate impulses to
have these determinate dependencies, and so can't associate this sort of content with them.
As a result, this form of consciousness can only experience dependence as abstract
negation--necessity as the pure empty form of being constrained. We saw that as long as
the individual self is identified with the currently felt impulses, any actualization of the
individual, any attempt to realize the what is taken to be the individual by satisfying the
23
Brandom
impulse can appear only as the loss of the individual, whether the attempt is successful or
not. Buffeted by the play of sensuous inclination, voluptuous consciousness does not
permit itself the resources to pick up an unrepeatable impulse and appeal to it in later
motivation as a reason. Here again it is useful to compare the play of unrepeatable 'Nows'
that Sense Certainty could not hold fixed, its need for universals expressed in the
presupposition of anaphora by deixis. Voluptuous consciousness cannot secure its impulse
in the form of a project or plan, an intention that can be progressively carried out.
Individual self-consciousnesses understanding themselves and their motivation as
voluptuous will in fact carry out projects of pleasure that survive the only intermittently
felt inclinations that motivate them, of course, but insofar as this becomes explicit to them
it forms part of the experience of the untruth of this form of self-understanding. This is
again parallel to consciousness understanding itself as sensuously certain, which in fact
always already finds itself applying universals, making inferences, and so on, though these
activities don't find a place in its theory of itself.
19. To be determinately contentful, an impulse or inclination must prompt an endorsement
that exhibits the form of thought in being mediated, in that its content depends on its
inferential relations to other contents that it entails or that entail it, by determinate negation
of other contents with which it is incompatible, and in being universal in that it is
repeatable--a content that can be endorsed, a reason that can be offered, a consideration
that can be appealed to on a variety of occasions. Consciousness understanding itself
according to the model of the law of the heart does not comprehend any of these
adequately, but has versions of all of them in play. It determinately recognizes itself as
committed to various different contents, and identifies with its individual activity as the
process whereby its own content is clarified, defined, and developed. The capacity to fix
an inclination in the form of a repeatable reason for action, intention, or contentful
commitment to act makes projects possible. In a project one identifies with one
24
Brandom
commitment to the exclusion of those incompatible with it, while acknowledging further
commitments that it instrumentally entails (commitments to subgoals, employment of
specific means). "The individual then carries out the law of his heart," [372]. Carrying
out the law of the heart is acting according to an inclination that has assumed the form of a
determinately contentful reason. The experience (in the sense of the Introduction) of
carrying out the law as a practical project is what determines the content of the
commitment that inclination has become. That content is determined not only by what
other commitments are incompatible with the projected one in general, but also which
incompatible commitments the agent explicitly finds himself with, and how those
incompatibilities are resolved when they arise in experience. The structure of selfdefinition we saw already in the discussion of Pride is exhibited here, but in determinate
rather than abstract form. Individuals attain the sorts of status characteristic of spirit by
identifying something they are for themselves as essential, by being willing to sacrifice for
them other aspects, which are thereby practically classified as accidental an inessential.
The experience of pursuing an enduring project consists in the sacrifice of some
commitments in favor of others. In this way one is forced to clarify, express, and develop
just what one takes oneself to be, just what commitments one acknowledges as more
important. The content of an individual's identity can be seen to consist in part in the
determinate ways in which dependence is acknowledged in clarifying an articulate
commitment by carrying it out. According to this picture of how boundaries around an
individual specifying what is that individual's own, doing so is a process worked out in
actual practical experience, mediated by and dependent upon relatively independent natural
and social others. This model contrasts with a cartesian one according to which the
identity of an individual is secured immediately--it simply is what is its own, quite
independently of any relation to anything else. What is mine immediately is knowledge
and action that is direct, and so infallible. Represented and representing can't diverge
because they are identical. All the rest of knowledge and action is a two-stage affair, a
25
Brandom
matter of directly knowing or doing one of these mental things, which then is somehow
connected with what is not mine (and in that sense outside of me). The direct, minimal,
safe knowings and doings are appearings and willings (projected by a bad theory of the
significance of the non-iterability of 'seems' and 'tries'). Hegel opposes to this one-sided
conception of immediate taking and making of self a view according to which we find and
make ourselves through what we do, in detailed co-operation with other things and
individuals. Consciousness conceiving its individuating activity as the expression of the
law of the heart, a sensuous inclination in universal form, offers us a glimpse of this selfidentification as a concrete process of expression, clarification, and development that is not
available in the conceptions of the voluptuous consciousness. Immediate impulse must be
fixed in the universal medium of thought in order to take part in the determinate
acknowledgment of dependence that is the experience of carrying out a purpose.
20. Motivation by momentary felt inclination rather than by commitment to an articulable
purpose ("What the deed is can be said of it") is lightmindedness of a sort that
consciousness understanding itself in terms of the law of the heart has gotten beyond.
And so it is no longer characterized by the levity [Leichtsinn] of the previous form
of self-consciousness, which only wanted the particular pleasure of the individual;
on the contrary it is the earnestness [Ernsthaftigkeit] of a high purpose... [370]
Consciousness that understands its individual action as the actualizing expression of a
heartfelt law conceives of immediately felt inclinations expressed in the form of reasons
for action as public. Motivation that has taken the form of a reason is understood as
transcending the impulses it expresses not only temporally within the agent, but also
socially, across the community of agents. At the beginning of the dialectically
reconstructed experience of this sort of phenomenal self-consciousness, the bindingness of
the reasons or laws that make explicit what is implicit in sensuous inclination is conceived
abstractly, as bindingness in general. In this way, in spite of its having been given specific
content by consciousness acting according to the law of its heart, in a way that was not
26
Brandom
open to the voluptuous consciousness, necessity, being governed by or subject to law, is
nonetheless conceived as having the same indifferently universal form. So the law that
expresses my impulses is not taken to apply to me only, but simply to apply.
...the immediate unity of the individual heart with universality is the thought,
elevated into a supposedly valid law, that, in what is law, every heart must
recognize its own self...the particular content of the heart as such is supposed to
have the status of a universal. [373]
We can see that this is an overgeneralization, both of the aspect of independence of the
individual and of universality. The independence (authority) of the individual does not in
fact reach far enough to establish a universal with this scope. The unfettered generality of
this conception of universality is a consequence of its abstractness, inherited (as yet
uncorrected) from the expositorily earlier (and conceptually more primitive) stage of
pleasure and necessity. Understanding individual activity on the model of the law of the
heart is one form of the alienated strategy of independence. Recall the architectonic
blueprint of [348] discussed at the opening of this essay, which lines the whole of VB up
with IVA, The Independence of Consciousness. The conception the law of the heart has of
itself exhibits the structure of mastery or domination, of the moment of independence or
recognizing being taken one-sidedly, without a corresponding moment of dependence.
This form of phenomenal self-consciousness understands its individual activity as
constitutive of what is correct and incorrect, of what norms are in force. There is of course
a seed of truth in this attitude. We are rehearsing various ways in which pieces can appear
of the truth that the activity of individual self-consciousnesses is not only constrained and
thereby rendered contentful by norms or universals, but also that those universals are
themselves dependent on the activity of self-conscious individuals, are actualized and
rendered contentful by it. The law of the heart represents progress towards correctly
grasping the relation between individuals and universals, for it represents one way in
which the dependence of norms on individual activity can be understood. (The proper way
to understand that relation is in terms of mutual recognition. The exposition has advanced
27
Brandom
our initial abstract understanding of that structure by discussing determinate recognition or
acknowledgment. This is acknowledging or attributing a determinately contentful
commitment, classifying the individual under a norm or universal that can be expressed in
the form of a law.) Though in this way it has a genuine hold on the topic of the
contribution of individual activity to the constitution of universals, the law of the heart
misunderstands it. A self-conscious individual understanding itself this way takes its own
particular activity immediately to establish universals. In this way it takes itself to be a
constitutive consciousness, a constitutive maker of universals.
21. The experience of such a self-consciousness, which is rationally reconstructed in the
dialectic of the Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit, must take the form of the
eruption of the unacknowledged moment of dependence.6 That implicit moment becomes
partially explicit in the experience of the law of the heart in two fundamental ways. First,
this form of consciousness expresses its individual inclinations in the form of laws, and
then takes this expression as independently and immediately constitutive of their force as
binding. But as this universal binding, the law is indifferent to the particularity of this
individual.
Consequently, what the individual brings into being through the realization of his
law is not his law...
The individual who wants to recognize universality only in the form of his
immediate being-for-self does not therefore recognize himself in this free
universality, while at the same time he belongs to it, for it is his doing. This
doing, therefore, has the reverse significance...For the individual's act is supposed
to be the act of his particular heart, not a free universal reality...[372]
It is not possible coherently to conceive universality as binding on individuality generally
while conceiving of ones own individual self-consciousness as a constitutive maker and
taker. The law of the heart does not provide a good strategy for achieving recognition of
6
This is why all the subsections in VB have two parts, corresponding to the moment of independence and of
dependence--though the structure is much more complicated than this crude division suggests. See the discussion
below of the summary from [381] of the substructure of these dyadic oppositions.
28
Brandom
one's own individuality in the norms one acknowledges, for its model of its role in
instituting them undercuts its comprehension of what it is to acknowledge them. Second,
like the original masterful self-consciousness that is our model for this phenomenal form,
self-consciousness that understands its individual activity as independently and
immediately constitutive of the laws that are in force is precluded from acknowledging
other individuals as having the same status. According to it, these laws of its heart are
binding as the laws of all hearts. But they are not in fact so acknowledged by others, as
they must be to complete this conception. The certainty of this conception, the moment of
acknowledging by the heart that establishes a law, does not coincide in content with its
truth, the moment of being acknowledged as law by other hearts.
Thus, just as the individual at first finds only the rigid law, now he finds the hearts
of men themselves, opposed to his excellent intentions and detestable. [373]
This opposition or incompatibility, this collision of individualities is not something the
heartfelt law-constituting self-consciousness can conceive in terms of a concrete process of
experience by which both universal concepts and acting individuals are clarified, refined,
and educated [Bildung], a process in which determinately contentful commitments are
confronted with incompatible ones so that some must be sacrificed and other identified
with, some universals treated as correctly applicable and others not. In place of this messy
sorting out of determinately contentful recognitions, that is, acknowledgments and
attributions of determinately contentful commitments, which is how universals and
individuals are in fact constituted, self-consciousness in the form of the law of the heart
can acknowledge only bare abstract opposition or negation.
22. This restriction to the abstract is just the consequence of its retaining the model of
immediacy and independence in conceiving the universal, the same formal commitments
that showed themselves to us as the source of the inadequacy of the conception of
empirical consciousness discussed under the heading of Perception. For the actual process
29
Brandom
by which individuality contributes to drawing the distinction between correct and incorrect
application that a determinately contentful norm (of the sort that can be made explicit in
the form of a law) consists in is thoroughly mediated by, and so dependent upon, the
activity of other individualities, and the application of other norms. Recall that perceiving
consciousness is not able to reconcile the mutual independence, which it associates with
sense universals because of a mistaken appreciation of the significance of their immediacy,
with their determinate contentfulness. For this latter essentially involves incompatibilities
and inferential relations to other contentful universals. Perceiving consciousness even has
trouble understanding what it means for two universals to have incompatible contents.
One of the important moves in the dialectic that presents its experience to us takes the form
of making the notion of incompatible properties coherent by distinguishing different
possible centers (particular objects as 'Also's) that exhibit properties. Incompatible
properties are then comprehended as those that cannot be exhibited simultaneously by one
such object. Similarly, for consciousness that understands itself as immediately expressing
its inclinations in the form of laws, appreciating the determinate contentfulness of the laws
that result is not simply a matter of being able to distinguish the inclinations that give rise
to them. It must be able to understand incompatibility as well. As we have seen, that is
part of the point of fixing an inclination by expressing it in the form of a repeatable reason.
Thinking this notion of incompatibility through will require distinguishing different
possible centers of individual inclination expressed as law. The possibility of distinct,
differently inclined individuals, expressing themselves through commitment to different
and incompatible principles is essential to the determinate contentfulness of those
expressions. But to acknowledge this possibility is to acknowledge the possibility of other
legislators such as oneself. To do that requires moving beyond the conception of one's
own activity as immediately and independently legislative. Doing that will be
acknowledging the possibility of a distinction between something seeming or appearing to
30
Brandom
me as a reason for action (the side of certainty) and its actually being a reason for action
(the side of truth), which this form of consciousness treats as immediately identical.
23. The experience of voluptuous self-consciousness is the experience of the mere form of
opposition between contentless individual inclination and its abstract denial and constraint
by the universal, the brutely existing normative order (in fact constituted by what things
are for others). The law of the heart incorporates both sides of this opposition into itself.
It is the immediate unity of individual inclination and universal necessity. But for the
reasons indicated above, this conception is unstable. Experience constantly unmasks that
immediate identity of individual and universal as a unity only for consciousness, as the
mistaken appearance of what is in itself diversity. So long as this form of selfconsciousness remains committed to understanding its activity on the model of immediacy,
the only form in which this moment of difference can appear is as immediate difference.
The frenzy of self-conceit (Hyppolite and his translator render "der Wahnsinn des
Eigendünkels" as "the ravings of presumption") sees the origin of universality in
individuality not as the immediate confirmation of its authority, but as immediately
perverting that authority. Previously
It took this divine and human ordinance which it found as an accepted authority to
be a dead authority in which not only its own self...but also those subject to that
ordinance would have no consciousness of themselves; but it finds that his
ordinance is really animated by the consciousness of all...that the reality is a
vivified ordinance [Ordnung]...[374]
The individual self-consciousness appreciates that "the established living order is equally
its own essential being and work," [375] as an individuality. In the form being considered
now, however, that it derives its content from the inclinations and activity of individuals is
seen as contradicting its form as universal ordinance. This is inevitable as long as one is
committed to understanding universals as immediate and independent (due to a
misunderstanding of the significance of universals of sensuous inclination, exactly parallel
to the misunderstanding of sense universals by consciousness that understands itself as
31
Brandom
perceiving). Self-consciousness exhibiting the frenzy of self-conceit in effect identifies
itself with the form of universality rather than content of individuality.
Thus it is rather its self as not a particular individual...or its purpose has the form
of law, hence the form of a universality, which it is for its own consciousness.
[377]
Individuality, which it also identifies with, is conceived as immediately opposed to that
universal form. Insofar as the effects of individual activity and purpose can be discerned
within the law and within concepts, it appears as a perversion. This form of selfconsciousness accordingly identifies itself with what it takes to be an abstract
contradiction.
In this its derangement, consciousness declares individuality to be the source of
this derangement and perversion. [377]
The self-conceit is for an individual self-consciousness to set itself up as a judge assessing
the bindingness of law that is living and concrete in the form of the customs and practices
of a community, and find them one and all invalid (its all right to do this piecemeal, but not
wholesale) in virtue of the signs they bear of their origin in individual inclination. This is
the point of the example of dismissing law as the product of self-interested priests and
despots.7 In adopting this attitude the frenzied self-consciousness fails to understand that
The established laws are defended against the law of an individual, because they
are not an unconscious, empty, and dead necessity, but a spiritual universality and
Substance, in which those in whom this spiritual substance has its actuality live as
individuals and are conscious of themselves; so that even when they complain
about this ordinance as if it went against their own inner law, and maintain against
it the opinions of the heart, they cling to it with their hearts, as being their
essential being. [378]
The conceited self-consciousness is committed to a contradictory strategy for the assertion
of its individuality. For it asserts its individuality precisely by denying the validity of
universals insofar as they are expressions of individuality. That a universal expresses
individual inclination is taken to impugn its status as universal. Yet it is precisely an
7
Hegel has after all lived through the bloodthirsty turn that the Enlightenment takes in the French Revolution, where
there is more than mere rhetoric in the attitude of those who will not be happy "until the last king is strangled with the
guts of the last priest".
32
Brandom
individual who in this way sets himself up above the universal and assesses it. Its reliance
on the categories of immediacy conceived as independence preclude this consciousness
from putting together the two sorts of relations of dependence between individuals and
universals: the sense in which individuals are dependent on, bound and constituted by,
universals, and the sense in which universals are actualized and constituted by individuals.
Because this consciousness at first knows universality only as immediate...the
nature of the realization and the activity is unknown to it; it does not know that
this realization as what affirmatively is, is in truth rather the implicit universal in
which the individuality of consciousness, which entrusts itself to it in order to be
this particular immediate individuality, really perishes...But that in which it does
not recognize itself is no longer a dead necessity, but a necessity animated by the
universal individuality. [374]
III
VBc: Virtue and the Way of the World
24. Section VBc, Virtue and the Way of the World [die Tugend und der Weltlauf]
occupies paragraphs [381] to [393]. It opens with a summary of the structure of the three
sections of VB.
In the first shape of active Reason, self-consciousness took itself to be pure
individuality, and it was confronted by empty universality. In the second, the two
sides of the antithesis each had both moments within them, law and individuality;
but one side, the heart, was their immediate unity, the other their antithesis. Here,
in the relationship of virtue and the 'way of the world', the two members are each
severally the unity and antithesis of these moments, or are each a movement of
law and individuality towards one another, but a movement of opposition. [381]
This sort of passage tends to induce architectonic vertigo, but we should at least be in a
position to construe and appreciate the justice of the characterizations of Pleasure and
Necessity and of the Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit. The conceptions of
individuality and universality are presented as progressive in that mediation of each by the
other is gradually becoming more explicit to the phenomenal consciousnesses being
considered, as we move through these stages. We are told about the third stage as the
passage continues:
33
Brandom
For the virtuous consciousness law is the essential moment, and individuality the
one to be nullified...True discipline requires nothing less than the sacrifice of the
entire personality as proof that individual peculiarities are in fact no longer
insisted upon.
In the 'way of the world', individuality behaves in a way which is the reverse of its
behaviour in the virtuous consciousness, viz. it makes itself the essential
moment... [381]
The sacrifice of individuality that virtue makes is its practically identifying itself with a
universal self-conception. Such transformation of what self-consciousness is in itself by
practical identification with some elements of what it is for itself is progressive in its
recognition of itself in the universal, but it is coupled with an inadequate understanding
of that universal, and so of itself. Virtuous self-consciousness conceives its own
individual activity as the expression and actualization of the universal. Identifying itself
in this way is understanding its motivation as ideal or purely theoretical, in the sense of
motivation purely by reasons that do not express impulses or desires felt by the
individual. The requirement that the universals appealed to in deliberation and in
assessment of performances (both ones own and those of others) be universals of
sensuous inclination is dropped, as Understanding dropped the requirement that the
universals it classifies particulars under be sense universals. Consciousness conceiving
its empirical knowledge as Perception tries to understand the determinately contentful
authority of its cognition, the validity or bindingness of the universals applied there, in
terms of the immediacy of their origin and application. Consciousness conceiving its
empirical knowledge as Understanding, by contrast, takes the essence of universality to
lie in mediation rather than immediacy, and focuses on what is expressed by the use of
universals corresponding to unobservables, purely theoretical concepts. Selfconsciousness conceiving its individual empirical activity in terms of the Law of the
Heart tries to understand the determinately contentful authority of its activity, the validity
or bindingness of the universals applied there, in terms of the immediacy of their origin
and application. Self-consciousness conceiving its individual empirical activity in terms
of Virtue, by contrast, takes the authority of reasons for action to involve mediation
34
Brandom
essentially, and focuses on what is expressed by the use of universals corresponding to
unobservables, purely theoretical concepts, in deliberation and assessment.
25. As the virtuous consciousness identifies itself with universality in its various aspects,
the way of the world combines the two forms of individuality that have already been
rehearsed:
The general content of the actual 'way of the world'...is nothing else but the two
preceding movements of self-consciousness...The 'way of the world' is thus, on
the one hand, the single individuality which seeks its [own] pleasure and
enjoyment...The other moment of the 'way of the world' is the individuality which
claims to be law in its own right, and in its own conceit disturbs the existing
order. [382]
This content, it is claimed, is a practical self-conception that takes two forms, an
immediate, implicit one and a mediated, explicit one. In the first, or voluptuous form of
individualism, it is self-consciousness that takes its individuality to express itself in the
immediate unity of its certainty of itself in felt inclination and its truth in felt satisfaction,
and to be warped and shattered by brute nay-saying necessity in the form of
uncooperative others. In its mediated form, this conception of the constitutive role
played by individual acknowledging (determinate recognizing) concerns the institution of
norms or universals that are explicit in the form of laws. In this form too it is the
experience both of the unity of immediate individuality and universality as conscious of
itself as heartfelt in its law-giving, and the disparity between them in the confrontation
between its presumption in conceiving itself as independently and immediately
constitutive of the universals and the other uncooperative individuals who do not
acknowledge the universals as so constituted. This is a practical self-conception of
oneself and others as pursuing selfish, merely particular interests8, and as seeking to
impose those interests on others.
8
Interests are desires and inclinations expressed in the form of repeatable universals or reasons for action, which can
be held onto and pursued as projects. See the account of interests in [401], and its relation to individuality in [405].
35
Brandom
26. Virtue is committed to a conception of the universal that does not tie it to what
expresses and so fixes and publishes the immediate inclinations of particular individuals.
Its account of the role of reasons in motivation focuses on explicit principles that cannot
be arrived at by noninferentially finding oneself inclined to endorse them. To the
virtuous self-consciousness, the way of the world accordingly has a conception of the
universal that is perverted. It is, in particular, a reductive view that interprets all reasons
as expressions of selfish interest. It is a motivational or practical instrumentalism
analogous to cognitive instrumentalism about theories, in that it treats all reasons for
action as immediately observable, noninferential entries from inclination.
It is from virtue now that the universal is to receive its true reality by nullifying
individuality, the principle of perversion [Verkehrung]. Virtue's purpose is, by so
doing, to reverse again the perverted 'way of the world' and to make manifest its
true essence. [383]
Virtuous consciousness is to act from pure reasons, reasons that do not derive from
individual inclination, and so to show in practice the inadequacy of the conception of the
concepts, norms, universals, reasons that bind individuals in deliberations about and
assessments of action. The passage continues:
This true essence is at first only implicit in the 'way of the world', only its in-itself;
it is not yet actual and consequently virtue only believes it. This faith virtue
proceeds to raise to sight, without, however, enjoying the fruits of its labor and
sacrifice. For in so far as it is an individuality, it is the activity of the conflict it
wages with the 'way of the world'; but its aim and true nature is to conquer the
reality of the 'way of the world'. The bringing into existence of the good thus
effected is thus the cessation of its activity or of the consciousness of
individuality. [383]
The self-conception of virtuous consciousness is still a form in which individuality
conceives itself as independent. It demonstrates this independence by identifying itself
with the universal, rather than by opposing itself to it. In this it consolidates the progress
made by the conception of the law of the heart over that of pleasure. The individual
activity that it identifies itself with is precisely the sacrifice of its individual interests. In
this way it makes the universal as reasons for action more than a matter of the expression
36
Brandom
of selfish individual interests in universal form, precisely by taking it to be more. The
mechanism is just that we first saw in the form of the project of Pride, whereby one shows
oneself to be more than merely natural by being prepared to sacrifice one's natural interests
for some spiritual ones. Making a conception of the bindingness of the universal on the
individual by practically (to the point of actual sacrifice) taking it to be is constitutive
acknowledgment or recognition. Thus even the virtuous consciousness will be revealed as
a form of self-consciousness as mastery, an alienated strategy of individual independence,
albeit one in which the seeds of an unalienated conception can be seen to be germinating.
For this reason, its attempt to realize its individuality (as the moment of independence in
constitutively acknowledging the universal) by refusing to acknowledge the independence
of the individual, by treating the individual as completely dependent upon and obliged to
acknowledge the universal, contains an implicit conflict. Its project, like the immediate
achievement of desire for desire, is in principle not a project that can succeed. Success
would be failure. As identifying action purely with the universal aspect of reasons (a
misunderstanding of the mediation of motivation), virtue spurns the individual in spurning
immediacy. The conflict that this causes is due to the fact that
...to bring into existence is, qua action, a consciousness of individuality...[381]
The universal is actualized only by individuals.
27. According to virtue, the true nature of the way of the world lies outside of it, in a
supersensible beyond of universals in the form of principles. To understand the actions
of individuals, from the point of view of deliberation or the point of view of assessment,
one must classify them under the universals that bind them. These universals have only
an ideal existence; the are creatures of thought in that they are something merely for
consciousness. They must be actualized by the activity of virtuous consciousness, which
identifies itself with the activity of actualizing them, securing for them acknowledgment
like its own from the uncooperative way of the world. The perverted way of the world is
37
Brandom
the "verkehrte Weltlauf". The inverted world discussed under the heading of Force and
Understanding is the "verkehrte Welt". The initial misunderstanding of the inverted
world was to think of theoretical claims, claims about unobservables, as describing a
separate ontological realm, a supersensible beyond. The recommended way to rectify
this misconception of the relation of what is expressed by exclusively inferentially
accessible claims to what is expressed by noninferentially accessible claims is to see the
former not as describing the reality that the latter is the mere appearance of, but rather as
making explicit in the form of claims what is implicit in the equally essential inferential
practices of using the noninferentially accessible claims, as conferring their determinate
universal content. Insofar as one persists in the alienated idiom of appearance and reality,
the reality made explicit in the form of laws is something implicit in appearance, not
something opposed to it. Analogously, the dialectical Erinnerung of the experience of
virtue will make explicit for us that pure principles, motivating claims, reasons, or
universals that are not the expression of immediately felt sensuous inclinations, do
express what is implicit in the determinate contentful expression of those inclinations, not
something beyond or apart from them. It is because of their role in making explicit what
is implicit in felt motivations that universals that are not universals of sensuous
inclination but only make explicit the inferential relations between such universals
exhibit a determinate content at all. As with Understanding the laws that the virtuous
consciousness identifies with make explicit the contents that have evolved in the cycle of
action and experience, thick universals whose determinate content is conferred by their
actual history of application in the course of the evolution of a particular population of
other contentful universals.
Therefore, wherever virtue comes to grip with the 'way of the world', it always
hits upon places which are the actual existence of the good itself which, as the initself of the 'way of the world', is inextricably interwoven in every manifestation
of the 'way of the world'. [386]
38
Brandom
The good is implicit in the Weltlauf, not something that dwells in an ideal supersensible
realm beyond it. Reasons for action in the form of principles that are not themselves
expressions of immediate inclination do not for that reason make explicit universals or a
conception of the good that is wholly independent of the actualization of individuality by
practical projects in pursuit of individuating interests. The good is manifested precisely in
the pursuit of the actualization of individuality in published action. It is an aspect of the
concrete social process that is the cycle of action and experience. If it were not, the
universal would not be determinately contentful or actual. Just as the determinate
contentfulness of noninferentially accessible reports and immediate inclinations depends
on inferential relations to other contents, so determinate contentfulness of purely
inferential claims and principles depends on relations to noninferentially accessible reports
and immediate inclinations.
28. Virtue understands its individual activity as the attempt to bring about the good, a
specific conception of which is articulated by the mediated structure of determinate
universal whose classifications govern deliberation and assessment. That the good needs
to be realized by individual action is an implicit acknowledgment of its dependence
precisely on the individuality that the virtuous consciousness takes itself to be
relinquishing.
Virtue, therefore, is conquered by the 'way of the world'...
It wanted to consist in bringing the good into actual existence by the sacrifice of
individuality, but the side of reality is itself nothing else but the side of
individuality. [389]
Actualizing the universal and renouncing individuality as inessential and superseded are
accordingly incompatible.
The 'way of the world' was supposed to be the perversion of the good because it
had individuality for its principle; only individuality is the principle of the real
world; for it is precisely individuality that is consciousness, whereby what exists
in itself exists equally for an other; it does pervert the Unchangeable, but it
perverts it in fact from the nothing of an abstraction into the being of reality.
[389]
39
Brandom
Clearly what is at fault here is the understanding of perversion, according to which
individuality is the perversion of the universal. The virtuous self-consciousness is right
that the way of the world has not correctly appreciated the sense in which its individuality
is constituted by and dependent on the universal. But it has itself failed to appreciate the
dependence of the universal on the interested individuality whose busyness is the way of
the world.
In its conflict it has learnt by experience that the 'way of the world' is not as bad
as it looked; for its reality is the reality of the universal. With this lesson in mind,
the idea of bringing the good into existence by means of the sacrifice of
individuality is abandoned; for individuality is precisely the actualizing of what
exists only in principle, and the perversion ceases to be regarded as a perversion
of the good, for it is in fact really the conversion of the good, as a mere End, into
an actual existence; the movement of individuality is the reality of the universal.
[391]
29. The lesson is that we must rethink our conception of the relation between
understanding action as the pursuit of individual ends, of which immediately felt
inclinations form a distinguished subset, and understanding it as essentially constituted by
the applicability to it of universal norms, in deliberation and justification, and in
assessment and criticism.
The individuality of the 'way of the world'...is better than it thinks, for its action is
at the same time an implicitly universal action. When it acts in its own interest, it
simply does not know what it is doing; and when it avers that everyone acts in his
own interest, it is merely asserting that no one knows what action is. [392]
The correct view with which to replace this alienated understanding is not presented here.
It is the theme of the final sections of the chapter on Spirit. There we will see the full
critique of conceptions of practical activity that treat motivational rootedness in interest
and inclination as incompatible with virtue. The dark side of intentionalism of the sort
Kant develops is seen in the hypocrisy that is obliged to deny the dependence of its own
attitudes (in deliberation and assessment) on its own interests, and to condemn the attitudes
of others (in their deliberations and assessments) on grounds of dependence on interests.
40
Brandom
This is the ethics of the Kammerdiener. At the end of VB, however, we are merely enticed
with the prospect of a transformation of the virtuous consciousness in which
...also its fine-spun explanations which know how to demonstrate the presence of
self-interest in every action--all these have vanished...[392]
41