Brandom
10/1/2013
Self-Consciousness Notes
Plan: Divide the two sessions on Self-Consciousness at the point of discussing Mastery = a selfconception according to the concept of pure independence. Mastery, the causality of fate
(metaphysical irony), and SSUHC are all to be reserved for SC week 2.
1.
I call my approach to the PhdG a “semantic” reading. By that I mean that I see the core
of the topic Hegel is addressing as the notion of conceptual content. It is pretty easy to tell a
story structured around this idea about the Introduction and the three chapters of Consciousness.
For even on the surface, they all address broadly epistemological issues. And one of Kant’s
central innovations is his diagnosis of deep semantic issues as lying behind the overtly
epistemological concerns of the Early Modern tradition. (Most centrally, he thinks if we
properly understand representational purport, that our ideas seem to us to be representings of
something represented, that they are, as Descartes said, tanquam rem, then skeptical
epistemological concerns about the possibility or even intelligibility of representational success
will be obviated.). Basically, anyone who has been paying attention (and I don't mean, to me,
but to Kant) should know this.
Now that Hegel’s expository focus is shifting away from epistemology, it would seem to
be much more challenging to maintain a “semantic” reading. Where are the semantic issues in
the domination of, the exercise of power over, the Slave by the Master? The short answer is that
I understand Hegel, like Kant, to be a pragmatist about semantics, in the sense that he
understands conceptual content, what can be thought or said, ultimately in terms of what one is
doing in thinking or saying it. Also like Kant, his pragmatics, his theory of what one is doing in
thinking or talking, is essentially couched in normative terms. (In the language of MIE, H&K
both propound normative pragmatics, in which they embed broadly inferential semantics. One
might think this is a highly suspicious coincidence. My reading of them is, to be sure, influenced
by MIE. But the author of MIE was no less influenced by them.)
More specifically, what we see in the first part of Self-Consciousness is an account of the
nature of normative subjects, Hegel’s “self-conscious individual selves”, that is, subjects of
normative statuses such as the doxastic, anaphoric, and material inferential-incompatibility
commitments that were the topic of the Consciousness chapter, as well as the practical discursive
commitments that are the topic of the Reason chapter, which addresses intentional agency.
(“Reason is purposive agency,” Hegel says in [24].)
2.
Passage from Religion about structure of book:
Some readers of the Phenomenology have been misled by the fact that there is a retrospectively
discerned historical progression within the discussions of each of Consciousness, SelfConsciousness, and Reason into supposing that these three sections themselves form a single
historical progression. But the largest divisions in the Phenomenology are not related to one
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another like this. The movements of self-consciousness do not come after those of
consciousness, nor do they come before those of Reason, except in the exposition of the book.
Consciousness concerns what Sellars calls “language-entry transitions” in perception, and the
kind of empirical knowledge built on them. Self-Consciousness concerns the knowing and acting
subjects or selves, who live and move and have their being in a normative space that is
necessarily a social space. Reason concerns what Sellars calls “language-exit transitions”
through exercises of intentional agency. “Reason is purposeful agency,” Hegel says in [24].
To understand the book in the traditional way is to mistake the order of exposition for the order
of the developments it relates. Hyppolite was already quite explicit on this fundamental point:
Hegel quite clearly insists that the three moments, consciousness, selfconsciousness, and reason, are not to be considered a succession. They are not in
time: they are abstractions contrived from within the whole of spirit and studied in
their separate development. Only the specific forms of these moments -sensuous certainty, perception, understanding, etc., which represent a concrete
totality -- can be considered to be successive within the moment of which they are
a part.1
"The moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit --Spirit that is, as
immediate Spirit, which is not yet consciousness of Spirit. Their totality, taken together,
constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally; Spirit as such contains the previous
structured shapes in universal determinations, in the moments just named...Only the totality of
Spirit is in Time, and the 'shapes', which are 'shapes' of the totality of Spirit, display themselves
in a temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality and therefore the form of pure
freedom in the face of an 'other', a form which expresses itself in Time. But the moments of
the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit, just because they are
moments, have no existence in separation from one another." [679]
“Thus while the previous single series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by
nodes, but continued itself again from them in a single line, it is now, as it were, broken at
these nodes, at these universal moments, and falls apart into many lines, which, gathered up
into a single bundle, at the same time combine symmetrically so that the similar differences in
which each particular moment took shape within itself meet together.” [681]
(I take it that the inclusion of immediate Spirit along with consciousness, self-consciousness, and
reason in the first passage is explicitly to mark the role of the community, which is the other side
of individual self-consciousness.)
After (in the order of exposition of the Phenomenology) we have learned various lessons about
the different aspects of discursive activity discussed severally in Consciousness, Self1
Jean Hyppolite Introduction to the Reading of Hegel [ref.] pp. 36-7.
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Consciousness, and Reason, we can put all three of them together and discuss the whole
phenomenon they are aspects of, in Spirit.
3.
Transition from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness:
Cf. [164]: “The necessary advance from the previous shapes of consciousness for which their
truth was a Thing, an 'other' than themselves, expresses just this, that not only is
consciousness of a thing possible only for a self-consciousness, but that self-consciousness
alone is the truth of those shapes. But it is only for us that this truth exists, not yet for
consciousness. But self-consciousness has at first become [simply] for itself, not yet as a unity
with consciousness in general.”
Reminder of what I said last time about the emergence of an expository focus (“for us”) on selfconsciousness. We rehearsed a rationally reconstructed expressively progressive, trajectory
whereby natural, phenomenal consciousness could disabuse itself of various misunderstandings
and learn how to think about the content of determinate empirical concepts in terms of their role
in the development of the Concept (the whole holistic constellation of doxastic and inferentialincompatibility commitments). In discovering what conceptual content really is (its “infinitude”:
that the relations that articulate it are themselves among the elements that are developing, as
Quine in “Two Dogmas…” also describes), the consciousness over whose shoulder we are
looking undergoes an experience in the sense of discovering that what it had taken to be how
things were in themselves was really only how they were for consciousness, as described in the
Introduction. In this case, what it thought was consciousness as it really is turns out to have been
(from the point of view finally achieved) what consciousness was for consciousness. That is, the
earlier views were really forms of self-consciousnsess.
[165] “[I]t is evident that we cannot without more ado go straightway behind appearance. For
this knowledge of what is the truth of appearance as ordinarily conceived, and of its inner
being, is itself only a result of a complex movement whereby the modes of consciousness
'meaning', perceiving, and the Understanding, vanish; and it will be equally evident that the
cognition of what consciousness knows in knowing itself, requires a still more complex
movement, the exposition of which is contained in what follows.”
4.
The overall topic is normativity, more specifically, the subjects of normative statuses:
normative selves or subjects. As before, we look at various conceptions of normativity and of
selves. We just saw in [164] Hegel agreeing with Kant’s claim that “Consciousness presupposes
self-consciousness.” Here we can say that empirical consciousness in the form of knowledge of
the world depends on normativity.
5.
How Kant made all things new, and shy he is for us philosophers what Swinburne says
the sea is for all of us: “the great, grey, mother of us all.”
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Basic Kantian ideas (forming an essential part of the background) are:
a) Normativity of intentionality, from Kant through Frege to Wittgenstein. What
distinguishes the judgments and intentional actions of minded (sapient) creatures from
the mere responses of unminded ones is not the presence of some Cartesian mind-stuff
but the fact that judgments and intentional actions are things subjects are in a distinctive
way responsible for, they are exercises of authority, they express commitments.
Responsibility, authority, commitment—these are all normative concepts.
b) Freedom as not only compatible with constraint, but as consisting in a distinctive kind of
constraint: constraint by norms (=normative statuses). For the German Idealists, all
norms are discursive norms, and that means rational norms, in the constitutive rather than
the evaluative sense—that is, as a matter of being subject to assessment according to
norms governing what is reason for what (and so whether one has reasons for one’s
discursive commitments, both doxastic and practical), rather than a matter of how
successful one is at satisfying those normative demands, that is, how one fares on
assessment according to the norms constitutive of conceptual contents, and hence of what
is a reason for or against what.
c) This is the background for the Kant-Rousseau criterion of demarcation of the normative
(distinguishing normative constraint from causal constraint) in terms of autonomy.
6.
A fundamental terminological suggestion: when Hegel talks about ‘independence’ and
‘dependence’, we can understand this as having two readings: an alethic modal one (involving
tracking) and, most fundamentally (in the order of understanding) a deontic normative one.
Independence is authority and dependence is responsibility. In Consciousness we have been
talking principally about the alethic modal sense of “incompatible” and so “determinate”. Now
we focus on the deontic normative sense.
7.
Two epochs in the history of normativity
a). Traditional: objective-ontological. Note that this did not always take the subordination form.
Greek polis had that (slavery, nobility) combined with reciprocal-recognitive among male heads
of household.
b). Enlightenment: normative statuses instituted by subjective normative attitudes.
Normative statuses as instituted by normative attitudes. This is a basic, characteristic
Enlightenment idea, epitomized in social-contract theories of political obligation.
c). The three stages of modern normativity start with subordination, inherited from traditional,
but then interpreted in the Enlightenment way, followed by autonomy and recognition, taking
the Enlightenment idea seriously.
8.
One main thematic progression from Subordination, to Autonomy, to Recognition, as
models of normativity:
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9.
Note that one way to divide the discussion of S-Consc is to leave all issues concerning
Mastery to next week.
a) Subordination paradigm of normativity. This is Master/Slave. Authority is identified
with the command of the superior to the subordinate.
i.
Variations include how the relation superior/subordinate is understood, for
instance as a matter of ontological-metaphysical fact (the Great Chain of
Being, Divine Right of Kings) or as a matter of desert, i.e. as having to have
been earned. (Feudalism is an amalgam that says it was earned by your
ancestors. Those against inheritance taxes in principle are feudalists in this
sense.) The British Moralists divide on this issue. Mandeville and Hobbes on
naturalist-reductionist side, Hutcheson out of Shaftesbury on the norms-allthe-way-down side, for instance. All are Enlightenment figures in looking to
normative attitudes to institute normative statuses, (unlike strict Great Chain
of Being folks) but differ on how that institution is to be understood. (See
D.D. Raphael’s two-volume edition, replacing the classic Selby-Bigge
compilation.) This is still the model of Pufendorf and Crusius (whom Kant
was most directly developing—for him, particularly Crusius [see
Schneewind’s book on the pre-history of autonomy], though I think Pufendorf
is more interesting and important ).
ii.
This first point is about the status of the superior/subordinate relation is
related but not identical to the issue as to whether the command of a superior
has its normative force as arbitrium brutum (and the act good because the
gods or superiors love it), or whether it is good because they have good
judgment (the act good because that is what the gods or superiors love as per
Euthyphro on piety).
b) Autonomy. The only genuinely normative binding is self-binding. One is responsible
(normative status) only for that for which one takes responsibility (normative attitude),
whether explicitly or implicitly. Only the subject-agent has the authority to make herself
responsible. But it is an attitude that institutes the status. It is just that the subject of the
attitude and the subject of the status must be identical. H will see a more complicated
kind of identity (of subject-agent and of status) through difference (which is an idea alien
to that of independence).
Here we have the idea of freedom as constraint by norms (though H claims we are still only at
the level of independence, not yet of freedom.)
[Here tell the story from my second Woodbridge lecture:]
1. An integral element of Kant’s normative turn is his radically original conception of
freedom. His theory is unusual in putting forward a conception of positive rather than
negative freedom. That is, it is a conception of freedom to do something, rather than
freedom from some sort of constraint. The positive freedom exhibited by exercises of our
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spontaneity is just this normative ability: the ability(authority) to commit ourselves, to
become responsible. It can be thought of as a kind of authority: the authority to bind
oneself by conceptual norms, that is, to make oneself responsible. That it is the authority
to bind oneself means that it involves a correlative kind of responsibility. That the norms
in question are conceptual norms means that the responsibility involved in exercising that
sort of authority is a rational responsibility.
2. On this account, far from being incompatible with constraint, freedom consists in a
certain kind of constraint: constraint by norms. This sounds paradoxical, but it is not.
The positive freedom Kant is describing is the practical capacity to be bound by
discursive norms.
3. The Enlightenment is animated by a revolutionary new conception of the relations
between normative statuses and the attitudes of the human beings who are the subjects of
such statuses, the ones who commit themselves, undertake responsibilities, and exercise
authority, and who attribute or take themselves and others to exhibit those statuses. This
is the idea that normative statuses are attitude-dependent.
4. Following his hero Rousseau, Kant radicalizes the Enlightenment discovery of the
attitude-dependence of normative statuses into an account of what is distinctive of
normative bindingness, according to a model of autonomy. This model embodies a
criterion for demarcating normative statuses from natural properties: The difference
between non-normative compulsion and normative authority is that we are genuinely
normatively responsible only to what we acknowledge as authoritative.
5. The Kant-Rousseau autonomy criterion of demarcation of the normative tells us
something about normative force—about the nature of the bindingness or validity of the
discursive commitments undertaken in judging or acting intentionally. That force, it tells
us, is attitude-dependent.
6. It is important to realize that such an approach can only work if it is paired with an
account of the contents that normative force is invested in that construes those contents as
attitude-independent. Otherwise “whatever seems right to me will be right,” (LW).
7. Kant secures this necessary division of labor by appeal to concepts, as rules that
determine what is a reason for what.
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c) Recognition:
Self-consciousness as an essentially social recognitive achievement.
(Slogan: “From independence to freedom,” cf. Sklar.)
i.
Communities (universals) and self-conscious individual selves (individuals)
simultaneously synthesized (Kant) by reciprocal recognition by (particular) desiring
organisms.
ii.
Self-consciousness does not happen between the ears of a hominid, but is a feature of
and is articulated by the relations among particular hominids. (“It takes a village.”)
This is a radical anti-Cartesianism, of a kind we would not see the like of until the
later Wittgenstein.
Note that there is a problem taking Geist as a whole to be self-conscious in this same sense, if Geist as a whole
is the community of those who recognize and are recognized. McD potentially has a good response to this,
conceiving Geist exclusively as the form of individual self-consciousness. So he would not face the challenge I
address in “Some Pragmatic Themes in Hegel’s Idealism.”
iii.
Recognizing someone (something, a particular desiring organism, which becomes
someone if and as suitably recognized) is taking them to be the subject of normative
statuses: commitments and entitlements, responsibility and authority.
Sociality passages
Note: discuss here (in connection with these passages)
i)
the simultaneous social synthesis of individual self-conscious selves and their recognitive
communities, by reciprocal recognition, and
ii)
ii) the peculiar structure of reciprocal authority and responsibility (independence and
dependence).
1.
A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact selfconsciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for
it… With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for
consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is—this absolute substance which is the unity of
the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect
freedom and independence: 'I' that is 'We' and 'We' that is 'I'. It is in self-consciousness, in the
Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind it the
colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible
beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present. [177]
2.
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for
another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged… The twofold significance of the distinct
moments has in the nature of self-consciousness to be infinite, or directly the opposite of the
determinateness in which it is posited. The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual
unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition. [178]
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3.
Now, this movement of self-consciousness in relation to another self-consciousness has
in this way been represented as the action of one self-consciousness, but this action of the one
has itself the double significance of being both its own action and the action of the other as
well. For the other is equally independent and self-contained, and there is nothing in it of which
it is not itself the origin…Thus the movement is simply the double movement of the two selfconsciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands
of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same.
Action by one side only would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought
about by both. [182]
4.
It is aware that it at once is, and is not, another consciousness, and equally that this
other is for itself only when it supersedes itself as being for itself, and is for itself only in the
being-for-self of the other. Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates
itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate
being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They
recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. [184]
5.
We have now to see how the process of this pure Notion of recognition, of the
duplicating of self-consciousness in its oneness, appears to self-consciousness. At first, it will
exhibit the side of the inequality of the two, or the splitting-up of the middle term into the
extremes which, as extremes, are opposed to one another, one being only recognized, the
other only recognizing. [185]
6.
[T]he 'other' is also a self-consciousness; one individual is confronted by another
individual. …Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own
self-certainty still has no truth. For it would have truth only if its own being-for-self had
confronted it as an independent object, or, what is the same thing, if the object had presented
itself as this pure self-certainty. But according to the Notion of recognition this is possible only
when each is for the other what the other is for it, only when each in its own self through its
own action, and again through the action of the other, achieves this pure abstraction of beingfor-self. [186]
7.
[The “smoking gun” passage, contra McDowell’s reading:] In Scepticism, consciousness truly
experiences itself as internally contradictory. From this experience emerges a new form of consciousness
which brings together the two thoughts which Scepticism holds apart. Scepticism's lack of thought about
itself must vanish, because it is in fact one consciousness which contains within itself these two modes.
This new form is, therefore, one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as self-liberating,
unchangeable, and self-identical, and as self-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness of
this self-contradictory nature of itself.
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In Stoicism, self-consciousness is the simple freedom of itself. In Scepticism, this freedom
becomes a reality, negates the other side of determinate existence, but really duplicates itself, and now
knows itself to be a duality. Consequently, the duplication which formerly was divided between two
individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is now lodged in one. The duplication of self-consciousness
within itself, which is essential in the Notion of Spirit, is thus here before us, but not yet in its unity: the
Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being. [210]
8. Hegel’s principal innovation is his idea that in order to follow through on Kant’s
fundamental insight into the essentially normative character of mind, meaning, and
rationality, we need to recognize that normative statuses such as authority and
responsibility are at base social statuses.
9. He offers an account of the simultaneous synthesizing of normative individual selves or
subjects and their communities by practices of reciprocal recognition.
10. The problem is to understand how the authority to undertake a determinate responsibility
that for Kant is required for an exercise of freedom is actually supplied with a
determinate responsibility, so that one is intelligible as genuinely committing oneself to
something, constraining oneself. This co-ordinate structure of authority and
responsibility (‘independence’ and ‘dependence’ in the normative sense Hegel gives to
these terms) is what Hegel’s social model of reciprocal recognition is supposed to make
sense of.
11. Taking someone to be responsible or authoritative, attributing a normative deontic status
to someone, is an attitude Hegel (picking up a term of Fichte’s) calls ‘recognition’
[Anerkennung]. Hegel’s view is what you get if you take the attitudes of both recognizer
and recognized, both those who are authoritative and those who are responsible, to be
individually necessary conditions of the institution of genuine normative statuses, and,
when those attitudes are symmetric or reciprocal [gegenseitig], that they are also jointly
sufficient.
12. What institutes normative statuses is reciprocal recognition. Someone becomes
responsible only when others hold him responsible, and exercises authority only when
others acknowledge that authority. One can petition others for recognition, in an attempt
to become responsible or authoritative. To do that, one must recognize them as able to
hold one responsible or acknowledge one’s authority. This is according them a certain
kind of authority. But to achieve such statuses, one must be recognized by them in turn.
That is to make oneself in a certain sense responsible to them. The process that
synthesizes an apperceiving normative subject, one who has the authority to commit
himself in judgment and action, become responsible cognitively and practically, is a
social process of reciprocal recognition that at the same time synthesizes a normative
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recognitive community of those recognized by and who recognize that normative subject:
a community bound together by reciprocal relations of authority over and responsibility
to each other. For I am entirely independent, I have complete authority, over my
recognitive attitudes: who I recognize as having the authority to hold me responsible,
who I am in that sense responsible to. But my authority is essentially the authority to
make myself responsible. (That is Kantian autonomy.) Those I recognize are completely
dependent on (responsible to) my recognitive attitudes for their authority. But if I
exercise that authority, I am granting them genuine authority over me.
13. The reciprocal recognition model Hegel recommends balances moments of normative
independence or authority of attitudes over statuses, on the part of both recognizer and
recognized, with corresponding moments of normative dependence or responsibility to
the attitudes of others, by reading both of these aspects as individually only necessary,
and only jointly sufficient to institute normative statuses in the sense of giving them
binding force.
14. For Hegel, social substance is synthesized by reciprocal recognition. It is articulated into
individual recognizing and recognized selves, which are the subjects of normative
statuses of commitment, authority, and responsibility—statuses instituted collectively by
those recognitive attitudes. He sees these social recognitive practices as providing the
context and background required to make sense of the Kantian process of integrating
conceptual commitments so as to synthesize a rational unity of apperception.
15. Hegel’s term for the whole normatively articulated realm of discursive activity (Kant’s
“realm of freedom”) is ‘Geist’: spirit. At its core is language: “Language is the Dasein of
Geist,” Hegel says.
16. Hegel’s social, linguistic development of Kant’s fundamental insight into the essentially
normative character of our mindedness provides a model of positive freedom that, while
building on his notion of autonomy, develops it substantially.
***
17. The normative conception of positive freedom then makes possible a distinctive kind of
answer to the question of how the loss of individual negative freedom—freedom from
constraint—inevitably involved in being subject to institutional norms could be rationally
justified to the individual.
18. The capacity for radical semantic novelty fundamentally distinguishes sapient creatures
from those who do not engage in linguistic practices. Because of it we can (and do, all
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the time) make claims, formulate desires, and entertain goals that no-one in the history of
the world has ever before so much as considered. This massive positive expressive
freedom transforms the lives of sentient creatures who become sapient by constraining
themselves by linguistic—which is at base to say conceptual—norms.
19. In the conceptual normativity implicit in linguistic practice we have a model of a kind of
constraint—loss of negative freedom—that is repaid many times over in a bonanza of
positive freedom.
20. Of course, one need not be a creature like us. As Sellars says, one always could simply
not speak—but only at the price of having nothing to say.
21. At least this sort of normative constraint is rational from the point of view of the
individual: it pays off by opening up a dimension of positive expressive freedom that is a
pearl without price, available in no other way. Hegel’s idea is that this case provides the
model that every other social or political institution that proposes to constrain our
negative freedom should be compared to and measured against.
22. The reciprocal recognition model (and criterion of demarcation) for normative
bindingness underwrites all of:
 A strong version of the Enlightenment idea of the attitude-dependence of normative
statuses, since the recognitive attitudes of individual members of a recognitive
community, while individually only necessary, are understood as jointly sufficient for the
institution of determinately contentful normative statuses of commitment, responsibility,
and authority;
 A social version of the structure of autonomy—one that incorporates the dependence on
or responsibility to the attitudes of others characteristic of the obedience model in the
weaker form of merely necessary conditions—since each individual is responsible only
for what she has authorized others to hold her responsible for; and
 Provision for the relative independence of the content of each commitment (what one is
responsible to) from the authority of the one who commits himself.
23. Hegel’s distinctively linguistic version of the social recognitive model of normativity
opens up a powerful and original notion of positive expressive freedom and normative
self-hood, as the product of the rationality-instituting capacity to constrain oneself by
specifically discursive norms.
Recap:
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a) Freedom as the capacity to commit oneself determinately. That requires two loci of
authority: one for the normative force (committing oneself), the other to administer the
content (what one is committed to). Normative attitudes do institute normative statuses,
but it requires the attitudes of others (who recognize one, and whom one recognizes) as
well as one’s own attitudes (of recognizing them).
b) Analyzing normative statuses as instituted by normative recognitive attitudes that are de
facto mutual or reciprocal offers a distinctive symmetric structure of authority and
responsibility (reciprocal independence and dependence). I am wholly authoritative
regarding whom I recognize (e.g. as a good chess player, good writer, or good
philosopher). But then I make myself responsible to them for whether I achieve the
status I aspire to. They, in turn, are responsible to me for being recognized. Without
that, they have no authority at all. But if I do recognize them, then they have authority
over me and my statuses.
c) Sartre exploited the idea (suggested by Hegel) that one species of this genus is the
structure of love.
d)
Hegel claims the modal logic of recognition is defective unless it is S5. For only if the
recognitive (accessibility) relations are algebraically symmetric, transitive, and reflexive
do they institute discursive normative statuses that are not defective.
e) Fact: Relations that are de jure transitive and de facto symmetric (reciprocal) are de
facto reflexive. This is where self-consciousness comes from.
Starting further back, and beginning to rehears the Hegelian story:
10.
From Desire to Recognition (and so, Commitment):
a) Creatures Things Can Be Something For: Desire and the Tripartite Structure of Erotic
Awareness
Erotic or orectic awareness has a tripartite structure, epitomized by the relations between
hunger, eating, and food.
 Hunger is a desire, a kind of attitude. It immediately impels hungry animals to respond
to some objects by treating them as food, that is, by eating them.
 Food is accordingly a significance that objects can have to animals capable of hunger. It
is something things can be for desiring animals.
 Eating is the activity of taking or treating something as food. It is what one must do in
order in practice to be attributing to it the desire-relative erotic significance of food.
Eating is the activity that is instrumentally appropriate to the desire of hunger. It is
subjectively appropriate, in that it is the activity hungry animals are in fact impelled to by
being in the desiring state of hunger. It is objectively appropriate in that it is an activity, a
way of responding to environing objects, that often (enough) results in the satisfaction of the
desire.
b) From Desire to Recognition: Two Interpretive Challenges:
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i.
How are we to understand the transition from the discussion of
the concept of desire to the discussion of the concept of recognition? This corresponds
to the shift from consideration of particular merely biological creatures impelled
wholly by natural impulses, in relation to their species, on the one hand, to
consideration of genuinely social self-conscious individuals motivated by normative
relations of authority and responsibility within their communities, on the other.
ii.
Why should it be the case that reciprocal (that is, symmetric)
recognition is a necessary condition of reflexive recognition (that is, selfconsciousness, awareness of oneself as a self)?
c) Simple Recognition: being something things can be something for being something
things can be for one
d) Robust Recognition: Specific Recognition of Another as a Recognizer
e) Self-Consciousness
11.
a)
b)
c)
d)
Self-Consciousness, Pride, Identification, and Sacrifice
Self-conscious creatures as ones such that what they are for themselves (who they
recognize) is an essential part of what they are in themselves, normatively (what they are
recognized as by those they recognize). Kant thinks, in effect, that what one is for
oneself is what one is in oneself. For only one’s intentions matter for the normative
assessment of one’s will.
Self-conscious creatures have the possibility of being (at least partially) self-determining
or self-constituting creatures. For they can change what they are in themselves by
changing what they are for themselves. Creatures subject to this sort of
transformative development have histories, not natures.
This is not to say that they can thereby automatically change themselves into being in
themselves just whatever they are for themselves. That further step is the step into the
self-delusions of Mastery=pure independence.
In the recognitive case, an essential part of what one is for oneself is who one recognizes,
in the sense of to whom one grants the authority to hold one responsible.
What they then in fact hold one responsible for is what one is really responsible for (that
is the idea of reciprocal recognitive attitudes as instituting genuine normative statuses).
That is what one is in oneself.
Proud self-consciousness as essentially self-conscious in identifying itself with and as a
creature such that what it is for itself is an essential part of what it is in itself.
2) Consciousness is born of Desire, but Humanity is the offspring of Pride. [Hegel doesn't
give us special terms for the consciousness that counts as 'staking its own life' [187], so I
have supplied this one.] The desiring animal is merely accidentally conscious.
Consciousness is a by-product or epiphenomenon of Desire. To reach the level of humanity,
one must become essentially conscious.
“The presentation of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in
showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached
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to any specific existence, not to the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not
attached to life.” [187]
3) For pride, then, a new element is required. One must identify oneself with an ideal or
desired state of oneself rather than with the actual desiring state.
4) Identifying with something is being willing to risk or even sacrifice what one is in oneself for
it. That one identifies with that ideal rather than with the actual self is shown by one's
willingness to risk one's life in the pursuit of that ideal. The identification with the ideal is
expressed as the willingness to risk one's biological life rather than relinquish the pursuit of
that self-conception. This is the attempt to become in oneself (actually or in truth) what one
is for oneself (ideally, or merely certainly).
According to this requirement, proud consciousness must take the element of ideality which
Desire has introduced and identify itself with an ideal (merely thought or desired) self rather than
with the actual (thinking or desiring) self.
“It is only through staking one's life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for selfconsciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it
appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it
which could not be regarded as vanishing moments, that is only pure being-for-self.” [187]
Here the claim is that in taking someone to be essentially something more than merely biological
(ultimately, something spiritual, someone rather than something), one takes it that there is
something toward which its desire is directed that it is committed to being willing to risk its life
for. An extreme example is the classical Japanese samurai code of Bushido, which required
ritual suicide under a daunting variety of circumstances. To be samurai was to identify oneself
with the ideal code of conduct. In a situation requiring seppuku, either the biological organism
or the samurai must be destroyed. Failure to commit biological suicide in such a case would
be the suicide of the samurai, who would be survived only by an animal. The animal had
been a merely necessary condition of the existence of the samurai (like the presence of oxygen in
the atmosphere, which is important to us, but which we do not for that reason identify ourselves
with). No doubt even good samurai must have hoped that such situations would not arise. But
when and if they do, failure to act appropriately according to samurai practices shows that one
never was a samurai, but only an animal who sometimes aspired to be one. One would thereby
demonstrate that one was not, in oneself, what one had taken oneself to be, what one was for
oneself. The decision as to whether to risk one's life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a
decision about who one is.
In such a case one not only finds out who one is (animal or samurai) by one's performance, but
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constitutes oneself as animal or samurai by it. (These are two senses of “determines”.) One can
turn oneself into something higher than an animal simply by valuing something more than one
values one's biological existence. By such an self-identifying (existential) expression of
preference one becomes a new kind of thing, a thing whose biological existence is not its
essence, but merely a necessary condition. Henceforth one's self-conception, what one is for
oneself, becomes essential to what one actually is, what one is in oneself. The taking of oneself
to be, e.g., samurai, is, like all takings, a matter of responsive dispositions. The response which
defines such self-takings is the willingness to risk life. Being willing to risk life for various
features of one's self-conception makes those features essential to what one really is. It is by
this means that desiring animals lift themselves by ideal bootstraps to a new plane of existence
where the actual is governed by the ideal. That for this very special case consciousness appears
to constitute its object, that these practical self-takings are self-makings, exhibits a crucial feature
of consciousness. That feature is misunderstood, however, by the first form of proud
consciousness, and becomes the conception of consciousness as independent, that is as sovereign
or constitutive of its objects, discussed below.
5) The claim here is not that one identifies oneself with whatever object of Desire one is
prepared to risk one's life in continued pursuit of. Crazed animals may risk their lives in
pursuit of the objects of all sorts of desires. A predator who overcomes accustomed fear and
plunges into dangerous rapids pursuing prey it will not starve without does not thereby
identify itself with the object of the Desire which leads it to that act.
a) To count as Pride, willingness (or commitment) to risk one's biological life must be in the
service of a self-conception. The object of the Desire for which one will risk all must be
one's self, the very subject of Desire. It is only risk for such an object of Desire that
shows that one is not essentially a living being that only happens to exhibit
consciousness-as-Desire, but essentially a conscious being who happens to require life as
a merely necessary condition of existence.
b) For the object of Desire for which one is willing to risk life to be a self-conception is for
it to be a conception of a taker, one for whom things are something, a subject. One must
thus take oneself to be a taker. If one is disposed to risk one's life to make that selftaking true or actual, then the taking becomes constitutive of a new kind of being.
c) One may not become essentially or in oneself a taker simply by so taking oneself (though
independent consciousness does not understand this). But one at least becomes something
which essentially takes itself to be a taker.
d) That an ideal element, a self conception, can become in this way essential to what
something actually is enforces a distinction between creatures with histories and
creatures that merely have natures: what they are for-themselves is essential to what
they are in-themselves, so that they can develop (not merely change), by altering (through
experience [in a somewhat broader sense than that in play in the Introduction and
Consciousness]) what they are for themselves. What makes what one is for oneself (but
not yet in oneself—so we are talking about something ideal, something one is committed
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to) an essential part of what one is in oneself is one's willingness to risk what one is in
oneself in pursuit of that ideal, in fulfilling that commitment. It is this practical feature
of one's commitment that gives one this sort of self-constitutive authority. But notice that
one cannot make oneself be in oneself just what one is for oneself simply by taking
oneself to be that (even in this very strong sense of 'taking', which involves risk of what
one already is/has). That strong sort of commitment makes one into something different,
something for which that commitment is (in the sense given to the term by that practical
significance and investment in it) essential to what one is in oneself. But what one
becomes is still in general different from what one is committed to being. That disparity
is what drives development. (We see many forms of this in Reason, and throughout the
Phenomenology.)
e) I think this sort of thing happens at all levels in the development of creatures with
histories. That is, at each stage, whatever recognitive status one has achieved—what one
is in one oneself, the self of which one is more-or-less conscious, which is more or less
explicit to one—is what one must be prepared to risk for what one is at that stage for
oneself, for what one is in that very strong sense committed to being. When one exhibits
this sort of pride, by identifying oneself with one's commitments through willingness to
risk what one is in oneself (prior recognitive status) for what one is for oneself (a current
recognitive petition, as yet not reciprocated), one alters what one is in oneself. So at
these later stages, it need not be one's life that one is prepared to stake. That there be
something normative, some commitments (fulfilment of some responsibilities, exercise of
some sort of authority—for instance, in agency) for which one is willing to risk one's
biological life is still a necessary condition of being an essentially normative creature,
and not just accidentally one. (This might be called 'generic' or 'constitutive' pride, by
contrast to the more specific commitments that at any stage may be invested with the
special sort of identificatory strength that marks one as specifically proud.)
f) Notice that at every stage, identification of oneself in this sense involves resolving a
conflict of commitments. The struggle that Hegel describes allegorically is an allegory
for the experience of being confronted with incompatible commitments: in the
allegory, to safeguarding one's life, on the one hand, and securing recognition as a
constitutive taker (as one whose commitments are as such binding on others), on the
other. But once normative practices are an up-and-running enterprise, it is a matter of
deciding when one will relinquish commitments (authority, responsibility) that one is
already acknowledged as having, in favor of incompatible ones that one is determined to
undertake. It is in deciding in practice how to resolve these incompatibilities that one
becomes who one is. Acknowledging such conflicts of commitments and resolving them
proudly is being aware or conscious of oneself as a self: as a locus of determination, as
an undertaker of commitments. This is self-consciousness in the sense we bring out of
the discussion of Consciousness. (See the story culminating in (3) above.)
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6) Proud self-consciousness can by its own attitudes constitute itself as essentially selfconscious. In this sense, it is self-constitutively proud.
7) But it mistakenly understands itself as self-constitutively both self-conscious and selfconstitutively self-constituting.
8) And it is neither and can be neither, for deep metaphysical reasons about the nature of
normative statuses and their relation to normative attitudes, specifically recognitive ones.
9) Reciprocity of authority and responsibility is not only a matter of reciprocal sense
dependence but, H claims, also of reciprocal reference dependence. So, the claim is, it
matters that one actually be recognized by those one recognizes, in order really
(determinately) to be (count as) responsible, as having committed oneself.
12. Two questions:
a) Specific recognition need not be symmetric. Why need general recognition be? A: GR is the
context in which SR takes place.
It cannot be that “whatever seems right to me is right.” For the Kantian picture to work, I must
have the authority to make myself responsible. Both of these statuses are, the alternating
iteration of these statuses is, essential to the Kantian picture of freedom as constraint by norms.
Trying to have authority without that responsibility is idle, it is Mastery. But for me to be
responsible, someone must be able to hold me responsible.
b) Q: Why can't we be symmetric enough to institute determinate conceptual contents, and then
asymmetric after that, helping ourselves to language, but exploiting those contents?
But language is the modern form of power-relations, at least legitimation relations, for Hegel.
This would be to build power on top of language, contra Habermas and Foucault.
And ultimately, it is the language-like-ness of political institutions that makes them legitimate.
Note that that answer suggested for (a) makes (b) very difficult to give a different answer to.
It has to be the nature of authority and responsibility as such. But that is a hard case to make out.
Conceptual content would seem to be only a special case--but is it? Institutional engineering is
at least another special case. If there is a general argument, it would be widely significant.
13.
A large question:
Q: Why does (should) Hegel insist that what constitutes a self-conscious self is
a) actual recognitive attitudes? Why not
b) merely possible ones, or
c) ones that the others one does or would recognize are disposed to adopt?
d) Why not ones that one deserves, normatively, for them to adopt?
All these variants were considered in connection with the subordination model of normativity, by
the British moralists of the 17th and 18th centuries.
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A: The appeal to actual attitudes (for instance, actual applications of determinate empirical
concepts) is where contingency is given the form of necessity, and where contingency can
contribute to determinateness.
***
14.
Subsequent idea:
The Causality of Fate (H) or Metaphysical Irony. Why the Master Can’t Get What He Wants.
a) The necessary defectiveness of normative statuses instituted by asymmetric normative
recognitive attitudes.
b) There is a psychological reflection of this defectiveness: the instability of celebrity.
c) There is also an institutional reflection: if the hierarchy of superior-subordinate relations
in a classic Twen-Cen corporation or organization modeled on it does not make authority
and responsibility co-ordinate and commensurate, structural defects ensue that it is the
job of good social engineering to avoid.
d) But the underlying issue is ontological or metaphysical.
e) The defect is that authority without commensurate responsibility is defective.
f) At base, one cannot deploy determinate conceptual contents this way.
g) Q: But why can’t we inherit those contents from the language, and impose asymmetric
power relations on top of them?
A1: Social institutions legitimations depend on their being language-like, in increasing
the expressive power of participants.
A2: In modernity, according to Hegel and in fact, power relations take the form of
language. That is why the contemporary form of them is (as Habermas puts it)
“systematically distorted forms of communication.”
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