Brandom
12/3/2013
AK and Preface
1. Here are two ideas about Hegel that are fundamental to my reading, and at first glance seem
to stand in considerable tension with one another:
First Idea: Conceptual Realism, Objective Idealism, Conceptual Idealism
Hegel’s non-psychological conception of the conceptual, according to which to be conceptually
articulated is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and (so) material consequence to
other such conceptually structured items (his view of the metaphysical structure shared by
things and thoughts as presenting a universe consisting of NAND gates), allows us to see
thoughts on the side of subjects and objective states of affairs as alike conceptually structured, so
that thought and fact can share a structure and differ only in form. This hylomorphic,
nonpsychological conception of the conceptual explains both what it means for the “conceptual
to have no outer boundary,” in McD’s terms, and how the GKC can be satisfied and, when all
goes well, the way things appear for us and how they are in themselves can coincide. Here we
might subdivide the idea of conceptual realism (cf. [798]) into two:
a1) “The conceptual has no outer boundary” read in terms of non-psychological
conception of conceptual structure and corresponding functional conception of
conceptual content as role w/res to that structure. (Note: it will be important below that
content be understood in terms of functional role w/res to a process rather than a
structure.) This is an assimilation of phenomena to noumena as of the same kind, namely
conceptually contentful.
a2) Hylomorphically reading this conceptual kind as inovlving two forms of one content,
in the case where things are for consciousness what they are in themselves (the
appearance of the reality is veridical). “When I think, and mean, that things are thus-andso, my thought and my meaning do not stop anywhere short of the fact that things are
thus-and-so.” (PI §95) The “identity theory of truth.”
The invocation of the distinction between justificatory and explanatory reasons in (1) is
meant to fill in some details of this conception of two forms, from a more familiar
direction.
Grice usefully distinguishes justificatory reasons from explanatory reasons (possibly following
Hume, though Hume is not mentioned in this connection). (He also has a third, mixed category
of explanatory-justificatory reasons, where an agent’s doings are explained by what justified
them. This third category might be of use in reading Hegel, if there is any reason to think he
focuses on it and abstracts the other two from it. I doubt this, but it is a possible line to explore.
1
Brandom
Cf. “Reason is purposive action,” [22]) For my purposes, this is a much more helpful way of
drawing a line than the practical/theoretical reasons line—which Grice, I think, confuses with it.
a) Justificatory reasons relate the deontic statuses or attitudes of subjects, such as
commitments and entitlements. Explanatory reasons relate objective states of affairs.
b) The two do line up roughly, according to something like the principle that if the belief
that A justifies the belief that B, then the fact that A would explain the fact that B. Of
course this is extremely crude, and would need to be hedged and qualified in many ways.
c) Here one might think, on the side of justifying reasons, of Ryle’s claim that every
inference involves a certain generality (“If today is Tuesday, tomorrow will be
Wednesday.”) As I would put it, inferences are good as instances of patterns of good
inference, even when their goodness is material rather than formal. This could be laid
alongside the hoary Hempel-Oppenheimer DN model of explanation. The thought would
be that each of these thoughts is trying to get at some phenomenon (structure, form)
common to justificatory and explanatory reasons.
d) It might be that Frege’s apparently eccentric insistence that one can only make inferences
from true claims (that in making an inference, one is taking the premises to be true)
reflects, on the side of justificatory reasons, the demand that explanatory reasons be
factive at both ends.
e) The behavior of common modals, and especially subjunctive conditionals, that Grice
begins to explore surely does reflect the notion of reason common to the justificatory and
explanatory uses.
f) A way of putting my pragmatic metavocabulary view of the relations between what is
expressed by deontic and alethic modal vocabulary would then be that what one must do
in order thereby to be taking A to explain the fact that B is to treat commitment to
the belief that A as justifying the belief that B. This would be a version of the claim in
(b), and would need similar sharpening. But it is moving toward conceptual idealism.
g) That there is a common generic notion of reason in play here (Grice’s good central
thought), explicable by appeal to (or just intricated with) a single notion of inference,
seems to me to be one of Hegel’s central ideas. It is crucial for him that there must be a
single generic notion that must take these two forms or exhibit these two species. (The
objective idealist thesis of reciprocal sense-dependence might be articulating only part of
or one aspect of this idea.) It is what stands behind the idea that the objective world, just
as it is apart from our involvement with it, is rational (exhibits a rational structure) in the
same generic sense that our thought does. (“On he who looks on the world rationally, the
world looks rationally back.”)
h) Hegel’s rationalist-idealist strategy is to use this amphibiousness of reasons (one aspect
of Grice’s “equivocality” [This is a terrible terminological choice because of its
reminiscence of “equivocation.” He uses it because he wants to be noncommittal on
whether common modals are univocal across what he thinks of as the practical/theoretical
divide, or equally and correspondingly multivocal.]) to understand the intentional nexus
2
Brandom
common to knowledge and agency. That it is reasons and inference that he invokes for
this purpose, rather than representation, is the great conceptual sea-change he
recommends already in the Introduction, as necessary and sufficient to avoid the
skepticism (failure to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge Condition) that inevitably (he
claims) ensues from focusing on representation. I should represent this strategic
recommendation as Hegel’s central idea in the area. At its core is the phenomenon of
reason being Janus-faced, essentially, and not just accidentally, coming in the two paired
forms of justificatory and explanatory reasons. Hegel’s Big Idea is to put this
phenomenon at the center of our understanding of intentionality (of “the Idea as the unity
of Thought and Being”) rather than representation.
i) Indeed, this hylomorphic thesis about the relation between justificatory and explanatory
reasons is what stands behind the Preface claim that “everything depends on
understanding [what there is] not only as substance but as subject.” Cf. the Reason
chapter’s claim that “consciousness’s certainty of being all reality” (Bewußtseins
Gewißheit, alle Realität zu sein) is the essential expression of idealism.
j) What I have focused on as Hegel’s “non-psychological conception of the conceptual,”
according to which conceptual contents articulated by relations of material
incompatibility and consequence can show up both in deontic and alethic forms, is a
more specific way of working out the broader claim, which can usefully be put in terms
of justificatory and explanatory reasons. I should try first characterizing Hegel’s idealism
in terms of these two species of the genus reason, and only then move to the more
specific conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by such reasons. I can do that
in my discussion of the Preface.
k) Spinoza: “The order and connection of things is the same as the order and connection of
ideas.” But the latter is normative, and the former is alethic.
Objective Idealism and Conceptual Idealism:
3
Brandom
Reciprocal Sense Dependence
Subj. processes
Obj. relations
Experience
Self-1
Recollection
The Concept
a) Straight lines are objective relations. Curved lines are subjective processes/practices.
Arrows indicate that the recollective practices institute the objective representational
relations.
b) Objective idealism just concerns the sense-dependence between objective relations of
determinate negation=material incompatibility, on the one hand, and subjective processes
of resolving incompatible commitments. This is just a matter of what happens within the
inner square and circle.
c) The next question is about the whole constellation [intended to be a term neutral between
(causal) objective relations and (normative) subjective practices/processes. The question
is: How does it stand between the objective and subjective aspects of this constellation?
How should they be understood (construed)?
d) There are two possible forms of answer:
i) Objective relations (represented by straight lines);
ii) Subjective processes/practices represented by curved lines);
4
Brandom
e) Conceptual idealism says that the way to understand the whole constellation is that
subjective processes institute objective relations (of reference) between the subjective
and the objective. (Compare: semantic government and epistemic tracking, in
MEMRTA.)
f) The way this happens is by recollection, the second, reflective, reconstructive,
recollective, phase of forgiveness that goes with the first, experiential phase of error that
needs to be confessed.
Second Idea: Immediacy as Conceptual Instability:
Hegel’s successor conception to Kant’s (and everyone else’s) empiricist construal of sensuous
immediacy as conceptually inexhaustibility, in the sense that there will always be more true
observation-judgments to make. It is the idea that the sense in which the richness of content
provided by the senses outruns what can be captured in concepts—what McD responds to by
pointing at demonstrative concepts—consists rather in the instability of any system of
determinate OED concepts. Slogan: from conceptual inexhaustibility of the richness of
sensuously immediate content to the conceptual instability of the concepts that mediate sensuous
immediacy. There is no set of determinate OED concepts (including but not limited to ones with
observational uses) whose proper use—correctly following out the norms that implicitly govern
their use—will not eventually lead us to acknowledge commitments that are incompatible
according to those very norms, thus obliging us to change those conceptual norms. We will
always be obliged to acknowledge that our previous claims were not exactly right. Cf. Aristotle
on “hand”: “chairos”. “I have two hands.” But notice that we can retrospectively institute an
extensional reading of this claim, according to which what he said was true, because he was—
though he did not know it—referring to hands, not the things he thought he was talking about.
This is moving from the Fregean to the Hegelian conception of reference.
The richness and fecundity of the immediate sensuous experience of particulars—the way it is
bound to overflow any conceptual classification—is manifested primarily not in its necessary
inexhaustibility by any finite set of empirical judgments, but rather in the necessary instability of
any set of determinate empirical concepts. There is and can in principle be no set of determinate
concepts whose correct application in empirical judgment will not eventually require us to revise
and reject some of them. For that reason, any set of determinate empirical judgments is not only
incomplete and fallible, but is guaranteed to be incorrect. That is, it not only must omit some
claims that are true and may contain some claims that are not true, it must contain some claims
that are not true. In short, as I want to put the point, Hegel is not just an epistemic fallibilist
about the truth of empirical judgments, but a semantic pessimist about the adequacy of empirical
concepts. It is not just that we are necessarily ignorant of some truths and possibly in error
about others, the necessary inadequacy and incorrectness of our concepts means we are
necessarily in error.
5
Brandom
[63]: We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this
correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it
in some other way.
There are weaker and stronger versions of the thought that it is in the inadequacy and instability
of every constellation of empirical concepts—the way each such system breaks down and point
beyond itself to another—that the conceptual inexhaustibility of the empirical consists.
Weak: The addition of any new bit of knowledge may require a change of concepts. But it need
not. It may be entirely compatible with our prior beliefs, and bring in its train no alteration in the
counterfactual-supporting inference potentials of other sentences. This is only semantic
fallibilism, not yet semantic pessimism. It adds to traditional epistemic fallibilism only the
minimal lessons required by rejecting the semantic atomism of the Enlightenment.
Strong: “nature shows us a countless number of individual forms and phenomena”1 or
“nature…runs on into endless detail in all directions.”2 When he says, for instance, that “In this
motley play of the world…there is nowhere a firm footing to be found,”3 he might not mean just
that we can’t be sure that what seems now to be firm won’t at a later point slip.
“the Antinomies are not confined to the four special objects taken from
Cosmology: they appear in all objects of every kind, in all conceptions, notions,
Ideas….The principles of the metaphysical philosophy gave rise to the belief that,
when cognition lapsed into contradictions, it was a mere accidental aberration,
due to some subjective mistake in argument and inference.”4
On this reading, when Hegel says of the concrete that “the true, thus inwardly determinate, has
the urge to develop,”5 and that “The Understanding, in its pigeon-holing process, keeps the
necessity and the Notion of the content to itself—all that constitutes the concreteness, the
actuality, the living movement of the reality which it arranges,”6 he means that no concepts with
fixed, determinate boundaries can capture how things are in a way that will not turn out to
require eventual revision. The case of the defective concept of acid* sketched above is not
exceptional. We will always “learn by experience that we meant something other than what we
meant to mean,” and so be obliged to “correct our meaning”.7 We are always, and in principle,
not just epistemically, but semantically in medias res. Coming to understand this is learning to
think with the concept of the “true infinite” of Vernunft, in place of the “spurious infinite”, which
is the “infinite of the understanding”8, identified with the “perennial ought” and the “progress to
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
[EL §21Z].
[EPN Introduction, before §245].
[EL§123].
[EL §48].
Berlin Introduction (1820) to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy (p. 20 [32])
[PG M53].
[PG M63].
[SL p. 139].
6
Brandom
infinity”9 of Verstand. The difference is a matter of how we understand finite determinateness,
and the infinity that it implicitly contains.
The conflict between these two ideas seems palpable. At least the (a2) limb of the first insists
that the conceptual nature of objective reality means that we can get things exactly right. Our
thought can be how things really are. The second idea is the idea that no set of concepts permits
us to get things right.
2.
The apparent tension is only apparent. It is resolved by making three moves:
a) Appreciate the two temporal perspectives constitutive of experience: confession (a
kind of acknowledgment) of error and forgiving recollection. (1b), inexhaustibilityas-instability says experience in the first (need for confession) sense will never cease.
(1a), the hylomorphic construal of knowing (and acting), describes what experience
in the second sense (after forgiveness) produces. This is the form of the
reconciliation of these two aspects of objective immediacy=substantiality. And they
are intelligible in principle only in terms of the dually temporally perspectival process of
experience. Understanding this is the “science of the experience of consciousness.”
This is profoundly anti-Tractarian.
b) Give up the Kant-Frege Verstand picture of conceptual contents in terms of their role in a
static structure in favor of a view of them in terms of their evolving and developing
functional role in the process of experience. Part of this adjustment is a new way of
thinking about truth, as a “vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a soul sober,” a process, not
a relation.
c) Think of immediacy as internal to conceptual content, as its restless principle of
movement (“negativity”), as thoroughly mediated, but contributing the principle of
movement to that mediation. “Mediated immediacy.”
The result of a successful recollection is the display of what is to consciousness the noumenon
as the result of a rational expressive process passing through a sequence of phenomena: Genuine
Knowledge. We need (b) to see that the fact that this identity of content in two forms is fragile
and potentially temporary does not disqualify it from being genuine knowledge. Knowing is the
process that passes through such stages, and is always at some such stage. Final, unrevisable
nuggets of fact are an illusion of Verstand.
3. The resolution of the tension in (4) must itself be articulated along two dimensions:
a) The subjective side of thought, where immediacy means the deliverances of
noninferential reports (empirical, demonstrative).
b) The objective side of being, where immediacy means the stubbornness and recalcitrance
of empirical facts.
In particular, we can ask, when we have made the reconciling moves in (2) on the side of the
subject, how should that alter our picture of the objective world? Must we give up the very
9
[SL p. 142].
7
Brandom
idea of there being a determinate way things are (way the world is)? In particular, in order to
understand the True not only as substance but as self, to understand immediacy on the objective
side as also self-like not only in being articulated by negativity, but by containing a principle of
motion, must we understand objective reality as moving and changing in some way more
radically than, say, Kant did?
No. The point is not that how the world really is is always changing. It is more the Wilson
point that any set of determinate concepts is a patchwork, which can work well in some places
only at the cost of not working so well at others.
My overall point, though, is that this last question, about the identification of objective substance
as self-like, should be answered by answering my first question, in (1) about how to get together
these two features of H’s thought about concepts: what responds to the Genuine Knowledge
Condition, and immediacy as conceptual instability.
4. Dangerous analogy invited by the claim that the conceptual has no outer boundary: It is as if
the objective facts were just the beliefs of a world-believer. This is a dangerous image, because
it invites the vulgar folk conception of Hegelian idealism. (Cf. John Haldane’s reading of Mind
and World as a covertly theistic work.) Here one might think that such a “world assertor” would
never make incompatible claims. But actually, this is wrong. Experience of error and
recollection operate on the deontic side of the subject, but concern the objective realm. Finding
oneself with incompatible commitments is finding oneself in a contradictory world.
But one is committed to forgiving that objective incoherence in the recollective phase of
experience: finding an expressively progressive trajectory appealing to at least somewhat
different concepts and contents, which are not incoherent. Cf. conceptual inexhaustibility of
sensuous immediacy as instability of every constellation of determinate concepts (OEDs).
Putting these two points together (the need for experience as confession of incompatibility of
commitments to be succeeded by recollection as forgiveness and inexhaustibility as instability)
gives the sense in which objective immediacy includes the principle of restless negativity,
according to which the phenomena, always already in conceptual shape, keep threatening to slip
out of that shape into something contradictory, which is the showing up of noumena behind the
phenomena, forcing us to recollective rational reconstruction.
The world is always in conceptual shape, but not placidly, passively, or statically (i.e. according
to metacategories of Verstand). The conceptual itself, as a form, includes this restlessness
reflecting its incorporation of immediacy—in the form of mediation (concepts) and (so)
negativity, not only as the collision of incompatible commitments-properties, but as the
movement of resolving them, which gives that notion of incompatibility and collision its sense.
5. Substance and immediacy.
a) In Spirit, I have argued that Hegel uses 'substance' to refer to the community: social
substance is synthesized by reciprocal recognition. 'Essence' is used there to refer to the
norms instituted recognitively by the community. ‘Selves’ are the individual recognizing
8
Brandom
and recognized agents-and-knowers, whose commitments and entitlements and other
normative statuses are assessed according to the norms.
b) The sentences following the critical [17] “Everything turns on understanding the true not
only as substance but as self,” passage show that he means this doctrine to hold on the
side of objective stuff, and not just subjects, communities, and their norms. What does
‘substance’ mean here? One answer comes from Perception. Substance is what has
properties. It is, he says in the Preface, following Aristotle, what is subject to change, so
what abides. The properties are articulated in the first instance by relations of
determinate negation (=material incompatibility, Aristotelian contrariety). They are what
mediates the immediacy of objects, stuff, material, the hypokeimenon.
c) All this motivates understanding the issue from [17], as it itself tells us to, in terms of
immediacy and mediation. (Note that there is some strain here with the usage of Spirit,
since there, substance  immediacy. The closest connection is in the discussion of
Bildung, in which the inherited culture—which can be identified with social substance,
the language as opposed to individual utterances—is treated as immediate.) We have to
understand both the objective and the subjective sides of the intentional nexus of
knowing-and-acting as mediated immediacy, and appreciate the contributions of both
aspects. This demand is part of the hylomorphic-expressive view of the relation between
the two poles of the intentional nexus (certainty and truth—cf. the usage of [17]). This
means that in [17] he is claiming there is a self-like aspect to objectivity, too. The
challenge is to say what this means, how the principle of negativity-as-the-motor-ofmovement (change) is to be understood.
6. A good way into this circle of key concepts is to consider the relation between mediation
and its partner-in-contrast immediacy.
...Substantiality embraces the universal, or the immediacy of knowledge itself, as well as that
which is being or immediacy for knowledge. [17]
a) Throughout the dialectical rehearsal of the experience of various one-sided shapes of
consciousness, two sorts of immediacy have been in play. Objective immediacy is the
immediacy of being or existence, of what is simply there. Subjective immediacy is the
immediacy of thought or of knowledge. The cognitive self-conception of mere
representation, vorstellen, conceives of these two sorts of immediacy as independent of one
another, each what it is quite apart from the other—the world could be just what it is
without us experiencing it, and our thought could be just what it is regardless of how the
world is. This is the Cartesian confrontation of two different kinds of substance, across a gap.
b) What is immediate in thought has a content. The content is thought of as immediately
possessed by the thought, independently of any relation to other contents, or to objects, and as
immediately related to the knowing subject, who grasps the content immediately, merely by
having the thought. Thought is (original representings are) immediately or intrinsically
intelligible.
9
Brandom
c)
What immediately is outside of thought, by contrast, is intrinsically without content,
inarticulate, in itself unintelligible. This is the origin of the gulf of intelligibility, which the
Introduction begins by deploring, and which renders mysterious the possibility of thought
contents genuinely being about what exists, thereby cutting of Self from Substance. The
notion of immediacy as independent is the notion of "abstract immediacy, i.e. the
immediacy which barely is,"[32]. It presents an alienated conception of substance and the
substantial, and misconstrues, in an ultimately disastrous way, the aspect of relative
immediacy that experience genuinely exhibits.
7. The objective world is not pure mediation, any more than thought is. It, like thought, is
mediated immediacy.
a) On the subjective side of thinking, the immediacy takes the form of the sensuous
immediacy of noninferentially acquired perceptual commitments, which are also fully
conceptualized (mediated).
b) On the objective side of being, the immediacy shows up as the stubbornness,
recalcitrance, and intransigence of objectivity to being expressible by any static
constellation of determinate concepts. It is the principle of instability of any and every
such constellation.
That we can only understand objective immediacy in terms of its effect on the process of
experience, in terms of its being the motor of change of constellations of determinate conceptual
contents is on the one hand
c) conceptual idealism, and on the other
d) immediacy as negativity, in the sense Hegel thinks of as self-likeness: the requirement of
sacrifice of some commitments and identification with others. Confession of error is of
the (normative) need (obligation) for sacrifice, given the incompatibility of the
commitments one finds oneself with (inherits), and forgiveness is the sacrifice-andidentification by progressive recollection.
What qualifies Substance, and presumably would qualify anything else that could measure up, as
Subject, that is, as having the structure of a self, is glossed here in terms of movement,
mediation, negativity, and content. Note also the predicates associated with these key terms:
"positing itself", "self-othering with itself" [Sichanderswerden mit sich selbst], "reflection into
self". These refer to the activity that explicitly comprehends the reconciliation of the moments
of diversity of content and unity of system and thereby expresses, develops, and actualizes a selfconsciousness that is for itself what it is in itself.
8. The distinction between vorstellen and begreifen, as it appears in AK and the Preface, which
lines up with Verstand and Vernunft;
According to the alienated self-misconception of vorstellen, or representational thinking,
Substance is what confronts Self as an independent constraint on its cognition and action. Proper
comprehension of the truth will overcome this abstract opposition.
Explicit comprehension is a process ('traversing the moments') whereby the content that is
implicit in a concept is expressed or made explicit.
10
Brandom
the Subject,... by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract
immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or
immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself. [32]
To comprehend substance, to conceive it as subject, is to conceive the substances that play the
role of knowing and known in cognition, of acting and acted upon in action, as determinately
contentful, and so as involving both a moment of immediacy and one of mediation, rather than
according to the alienated model of representation, which conceives the substantial as
independently and so abstractly immediate. There is no determinate content without immediacy,
for substantial content arises through the constraint on the movement of knowledge and action as
it is reflected back to one through the assessments of others (and of oneself as audience for one's
own doings): "nothing is known that is not in experience" [802]. For the other side, ever since
the discussion of consciousness understanding itself as merely perceiving, we have understood
that determinate contentfulness requires determinate relations of inclusion (by inferential
containment) and exclusion (by incompatibility) to other similarly determinately contentful
items. The question then becomes how to conceive the relation between immediacy and
mediation, both in determinately contentful thought and in determinately contentful states of
affairs.
9. Considering in this way the relation between mediation and immediacy in determinately
contentful substance brings us to another of the characteristics in terms of which the
"Substance is Subject" claim is unpacked, namely movement [Bewegung] or becoming
[Werden].
[M]ediation is nothing beyond self-moving selfsameness, or...when reduced to its pure
abstraction, simple becoming...[M]ediation...is just immediacy in the process of becoming, and is
the immediate itself. [21]
Mediation is actualized only in what is also immediate. It is implicit in immediacy, and the
"movement of becoming" is the process whereby it is expressed, becoming at once more explicit
and more definite.
...experience is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate, the
unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous [but still unsensed] being, or only
thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation,
and is only then revealed for the first time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a
property of consciousness also. [36]
The move that takes us from vorstellen to begreifen (Verstand to Vernunft) is the replacement of
the model of experience as representation, an external relation between independently
specifiable realms of representings and representeds, confronting each other across a gulf, by a
model of experience as expression, an internal process of development whereby a single content
originally in implicit form is expressed or unfolds, becoming available in explicit form.
Experience is the process whereby the determinate, and so mediated contents implicit in
immediacy come to appear as explicitly mediated.
11
Brandom
10. This truth therefore includes the negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be
regarded as something from which one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the
contrary, be regarded as essential, not in the determination of something fixed,10 cut off from the
True, and left lying who knows where outside it, any more than the True is to be regarded as
something on the other side, positive and dead. Appearance is the arising and passing away that
does not itself arise and pass away, but is 'in itself', and constitutes the actuality and the
movement of the life of truth. The True is thus a vast Bacchanalian revel with not a soul
sober; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much
transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit
do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and
necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent. In the whole of the movement, seen as
a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein, and gives itself particular existence, is
preserved as something that recollects itself, whose existence is self-knowledge, and whose selfknowledge is just as immediately existence. [47]. I have adjusted the translation somewhat, in
part out of admiration for Baillie’s memorable rendering of the key passage: “Das Wahre ist so
der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist; und weil jedes, indem es sich
absondert, ebenso unmittelbar [sich] auflöst, ist er ebenso die durchsichtige und einfache Ruhe.”
11. AK passages:
[798] the Notion, has become the element of existence, or has become the form of objectivity
for consciousness. [BB: Conceptual realism.]
[799] The content is…the very movement just spoken of; for the content is Spirit that
traverses its own self and does so for itself as Spirit by the fact that it has the 'shape' of the
Notion in its objectivity.
[802] For experience is just this, that the content—which is Spirit—is in itself substance, and
therefore an object of consciousness. But this substance which is Spirit is the process in which
Spirit becomes what it is in itself; and it is only as this process of reflecting itself into itself that it
is in itself truly Spirit. It is in itself the movement which is cognition—the transforming of that
in-itself into that which is for itself, of Substance into Subject, of the object of consciousness
into an object of self-consciousness, i.e. into an object that is just as much superseded, or into
the Notion. [BB:To be an object of self-consciousness is to be in the form of the Begriff, i.e. to
be in begrifflich form.]
[804] Spirit, however, has shown itself to us to be neither merely the withdrawal of selfconsciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere submergence of self-consciousness into
substance…but Spirit is this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself
into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the
substance into an object and a content at the same time as it cancels this difference between
objectivity and content. [BB: Homogeneity of thought and object, self and substance.]
10
“ nicht in der Bestimmung eines Festen…”
12
Brandom
[804] The 'I' [does not have] to cling to itself in the form of self-consciousness as against the
form of substantiality and objectivity, as if it were afraid of the externalization of itself: the
power of Spirit lies rather in remaining the selfsame Spirit in its externalization and, as that
which is both in itself and for itself, in making its being-for-self no less merely a moment than its
in-itself. [BB: Homogeneity of thought and object, self and substance.]
[805] In this knowing, then, Spirit has concluded the movement in which it has shaped itself, in
so far as this shaping was burdened with the difference of consciousness [i.e. of the latter from
its object], a difference now overcome. The content, in accordance with the freedom of its
being, is the self-alienating Self, or the immediate unity of self-knowledge. The pure
movement of this alienation, considered in connection with the content, constitutes the
necessity of the content. The distinct content, as determinate, is in relation, is not 'in itself';
it is its own restless process of superseding itself, or negativity; therefore, negativity or
diversity, like free being, is also the Self; and in this self-like form in which existence is
immediately thought, the content is the Notion. [BB: The movement is necessity. These are
relations of material incompatibility and the process of rational integration. Conceptual
idealism says that the process institutes the relations. Recollection is the consciousness of that,
which is the highest form of self-consciousness.]
[805] the form of the Notion…unites the objective form of Truth and of the knowing Self
in an immediate unity. …[T]he pure Notion and its onward movement, depends solely on
its pure determinateness.
[807] Yet this externalization is still incomplete; it expresses the connection of its self-certainty
with the object which, just because it is thus connected, has not yet won its complete freedom.
The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know
one's limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice is the externalization in which
Spirit displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of free contingent happening,
intuiting its pure Self as Time outside of it, and equally its Being as Space. This last becoming of
Spirit, Nature, is its living immediate Becoming; Nature, the externalized Spirit, is in its
existence nothing but this eternal externalization of its continuing existence and the movement
which reinstates the Subject.
[BB: The limit here is something exclusively different. These material incompatibilities
(relations of determinate negation) both articulate determinate conceptual content and constrain
the process of sacrificing some commitments that are incompatible with those one thereby
identifies with. That process of rational integration is the aspect of the movement of Spirit that
corresponds to (Kantian) consciousness. Recollection then corresponds to (Hegelian) selfconsciousness. ]
[808] History, is a conscious, self-mediating process—Spirit emptied out into Time.
[BB: Recollection (history) as self-consciousness.]
its fulfilment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this
knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its
existential shape over to recollection.
13
Brandom
[BB: self-consciousness as understanding the process as instituting the relations.]
the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit…
[R]ecollection, the inwardizing, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being,
and in fact the higher form of the substance.
The goal, Absolute Knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the
recollection of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of
their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in
the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically]
comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance: the two
together, comprehended History,
[BB:Giving contingency the form of necessity, by recollection.]
form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of
his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone.
16. PREFACE:
...everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as Substance, but equally
as Subject. At the same time it is to be observed that substantiality embraces the universal, or
the immediacy of knowledge itself, as well as that which is being or immediacy for
knowledge. [17]
[BB: The second sentence tells us that it is not just that there is an indissoluble connection between the subjective
side (Self) and the objective side (substance) of the intentional nexus (both of knowing and acting), but that
substantiality—and therefore, one presumes, also subject-like-ness—exists on both sides of the subject-object
relation. The subject-like-ness of the objective side is the principle of movement implicit in its disposition to
overflow any particular static conceptual capturing of it: its inexhaustibility by any constellation of determinate
concepts.]
Grasping the true is implicitly comprehending it, while expressing it is explicitly comprehending
it. We will see that the latter involves the use of specifically logical vocabulary, of the sort
Hegel deploys in the Phenomenology. The centrality of the claim that the True is not only
Substance but Subject is indicated by its repetition--it appears with only slight variations also at
[18], [25], [32], [37], [39], [54], and [65]. Let us look first at "the True". In [20] we are told that
the True is the whole. In this idiom we do not find the opposition between truth and certainty
that is in play in the rest of the book. The truth of Spirit's self-consciousness and its certainty
coincide when it knows itself absolutely.
Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or what is the same, is in truth
actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its selfothering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very
reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition
[BB: This is the opposition that becomes explicit in the experience of error, which normativelyrequires sacrifice (of
some commitments in favor of others), and is to be confessed.],
14
Brandom
and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate
simplicity]
[BB: This is the unity re-achieved in the recollective phase of experience].
Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself—not an original
or immediate unity as such—is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that
presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being
worked out to its end, is it actual. [18]
[BB: At the end of the recollective phase, the beginning shows up as having been implicit in what has, over the
course of the rationally reconstructed expressive development become explicit as the goal or end.]
The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself
through its development...
For mediation is nothing beyond self-moving selfsameness, or is reflection into self, the
moment of the 'I' which is for itself pure negativity or, when reduced to its pure
abstraction, simple becoming. The 'I', or becoming in general,
[BB: a crucial identification--this is why the Begriff is (in the “speculative” sense of ‘is’) a self (and contents
generally), and why Spirit is.]
this mediation, on account of its simple nature, is just immediacy in the process of becoming,
and is the immediate itself. [21]
Reason is purposive activity. [22]
[BB: Here is an explanation of a metaphor that is informing his language:]
Still, in the sense in which Aristotle too defines Nature as purposive activity, purpose is what is
immediate and at rest, the unmoved which is also self-moving, and as such is Subject. Its power
to move, taken abstractly, is being-for-self, or pure negativity.
The result is the same as the beginning, only because the beginning is the purpose;
[BB: This beginning is, in the image-allegory he is appealing to Aristotle for the fixed end of, what for the Begriff
becomes the recollectively rationally reconstructed (RRR) noumenon-referent that is (taken to be) implicit all along
and so a ‘purpose’, in relation to the result, which is (according to that same RRR) that purpose made explicit.]
in other words, the actual is the same as its Notion only because the immediate, as purpose,
contains the self or pure actuality within itself.
The realized purpose, or the existent actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming; but
it is just this unrest that is the self; and
the self is like that immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it is the result, that
which has returned into itself, the latter being similarly just the self.
And the self is the sameness and simplicity that relates itself to itself. [22]
Pure recognition in absolute otherness, this Aether as such, is the ground and soil of Science or
knowledge in general. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or requires that consciousness
15
Brandom
should dwell in this element. But this element itself achieves its own perfection and
transparency only through the movement of its becoming.
Already something thought, the content is the property of substance; existence [Dasein] has no
more to be changed into the form of what is in-itself and implicit [Ansichseins], but only the
implicit—no longer merely something primitive, nor lying hidden within existence, but
already present as a recollection—into the form of what is explicit, of what is objective to
self [Fursichseins]. [29]
[BB: the relation is conceived not as of contentful representation to contentless represented, but of implicitly
contentful substance expressed explicitly in subject.]
But the Life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by
devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only
when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.
[BB: The “utter dismemberment” is the opposition that is experienced as error, with the consequent need
to sacrifice some commitment, to confess that one cannot integrate it. Consciousness “wins its truth”
when it “finds itself” through the phase of experience as successful recollection, which is forgiveness.]
It is this power, not as something positive...On the contrary, Spirit is this power only by
looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the
magical power that converts it [the negative] into being. This power is identical with what we
earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element
supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic
substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this
mediation itself. [32]
Determinate thoughts have the 'I', the power of the negative, or pure actuality, for the
substance and element of their existence, whereas sensuous determinations have only
powerless, abstract immediacy, or being as such. Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking,
this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment...by giving up not only the fixity of the pure
concrete, which the 'I' itself is, in contrast with differentiated content, but also the fixity of the
differentiated moments which, posited in the element of pure thinking, share the
unconditioned nature of the 'I'. Through this movement the pure thoughts become
Notions, and are only now what they are in truth, self-movements, circles, spiritual essences,
which is what their substance is. [33]
The immediate existence of Spirit, consciousness, contains the two moments of knowing and
the objectivity negative to knowing. Since it is in this element [of consciousness] that Spirit
develops and explicates its moments, these moments contain that antithesis, and they all appear
as shapes of consciousness. The Science of this pathway is the Science of the experience which
consciousness goes through; the substance and its movement are viewed as the object of
consciousness...
16
Brandom
...experience is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate, the
unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous [but still unsensed] being, or only
thought of as simple, becomes alienated from itself and then returns to itself from this alienation,
and is only then revealed for the first time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a
property of consciousness also. [36]
The disparity which exists in consciousness between the 'I' and the substance which is its object
is the distinction between them, the negative in general.
...Now although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the 'I' and its object, it
is just as much the disparity of the substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen
outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance
shows itself to be essentially Subject.
[BB: The distinction that consciousness involves shows up subjectively in the form of error. That is a matter of
incompatibility of commitments. But that is the incompatibility of commitments concerning how things are
(objectively). ]
When it has shown this completely, Spirit has made its existence identical with its essence; it has
itself for its object just as it is, and the abstract element of immediacy, and the separation of
knowing and truth, is overcome.
Being is then absolutely mediated; it is a substantial content which is just as immediately
the property of the 'I', it is self-like or the Notion.
With this the Phenomenology of Spirit is concluded. [37]
'True' and 'false' belong among those determinate notions which are held to be inert and wholly
separate essences, one here and one there, each standing fixed and isolated from the other, which
it has nothing in common...
The substance is itself essentially the negative, partly as a distinction and determination of
the content, and partly as a simple [process of] distinguishing, i.e. as self and knowledge in
general...
To know something falsely means that there is a disparity between knowledge and its Substance.
But this very disparity is the process of distinguishing in general, which is an essential
moment [in knowing]. Out of this distinguishing...comes their identity, and this resultant
identity is the truth...Disparity, rather, as the negative, the self, is itself still directly present
in the True as such. [39]
Philosophy, has to do... with essential determinations; its element and content is not the abstract
or nonactual, but the actual, that which posits itself and is alive within itself—existence within
its own Notion. It is the process which begets and traverses its own moments, and this whole
movement constitutes what is positive [in it] and its truth. This truth therefore includes the
negative also, what would be called the false, if it could be regarded as something from which
one might abstract. The evanescent itself must, on the contrary, be regarded as essential, not
as something fixed, cut off from the True...
17
Brandom
Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is
in itself, and constitutes actuality and the movement of the life of truth.
The True is thus a vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a one sober;
yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much
transparent and simple repose. Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of
Spirit do not persist any more than determinate thoughts do, but they are as much positive and
necessary moments, as they are negative and evanescent.
In the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose, what distinguishes itself therein,
and gives itself particular existence, is preserved as something that recollects itself, whose
existence is self-knowledge, and whose self-knowledge is just as immediately existence. [47]
Science dare only organize itself by the life of the Notion itself. The determinateness, which
is taken from the schema and externally attached to an existent thing, is, in Science, the selfmoving soul of the realized content. The movement of a being that immediately is, consists
partly in becoming an other than itself, and thus becoming its own immanent content; partly
in taking back into itself this unfolding [of its content] or this existence of it, i.e. in making
itself into a moment, and simplifying itself into something determinate. In the former
movement, negativity is the differentiating and positing of existence; in this return into self, it
is the becoming of the determinate simplicity.
[BB: These are the two movements of experience: error and recollection (cf. [29]).]
It is in this way that the content shows that its determinateness is not received from something
else, nor externally attached to it, but that it determines itself, and ranges itself as a moment
having its own place in the whole. The Understanding, in its pigeon-holing process, keeps the
necessity and the Notion of the content to itself--all that constitutes the concreteness, the
actuality, the living movement of that reality, which it arranges...
A table of contents is all that it offers, the content itself it does not offer at all. [53]
...existence is a simple thought...simplicity is substance. On account of its simplicity or selfidentity it appears fixed and enduring. But this self-identity is no less negativity; therefore its
fixed existence passes over into its dissolution. The determinateness seems at first to be due
entirely to the fact that it is related to an other, and its movement seems imposed on it by an
alien power; but having its otherness within itself, and being self-moving, is just what is
involved in the simplicity of thinking itself; for this simple thinking is the self-moving and
self-differentiating thought. It is its own inwardness, it is the pure Notion. Thus common
thought [Verständigkeit] too is a becoming, and, as this becoming, it is reasonableness
[Vernünftigkeit].[55]
18
Brandom
The self-moving concrete shape makes itself into a simple determinateness; in so doing its raises
itself to logical form, and exists in its essentiality; its concrete existence is just this movement,
and is directly a logical existence. [56]
...in speculative [begreifenden] thinking, as we have already shown, the negative belongs to the
content itself, and is the positive, both as the immanent movement and determination of the
content, and as the whole of this process.
Looked at as a result, what emerges from this process is the determinate negative which is
consequently a positive content as well. [59]
Speculative [begreifendes] thinking behaves in a different way. Since the Notion is the
object's own self, which presents itself as the coming-to-be of the object, it is not a passive
Subject inertly supporting the Accidents; it is, on the contrary, the self-moving Notion which
takes its determinations back into itself. In this movement the passive Subject itself perishes;
it enters into the differences and the content, and constitutes the determinateness, i.e. the
differentiated content and its movement, instead of remaining inertly over against it. The
solid ground which argumentation has in the passive Subject is therefore shaken, and only this
movement itself becomes the object. [60]
19