One of the most interesting and also the most problematic aspects of Robert Brandom's interpretation of Hegel is his thesis that Hegel understands normative statuses, and therefore all conceptual commitments, as social achievements based on reciprocal recognition. This is expressed in the slogan ‘For Hegel, all transcendental constitution is social institution.’Footnote 1 This principle goes even further than locating the foundation of normativitiy in the social recognitive practices. By understanding all conceptual and linguistic performances as essentially normative, it interprets the very idea of conceptual commitments and content and therefore meaning as instituted by them. The objective of this work is to provide a critique of this principle both in terms of its success in capturing Hegel's historical position and its philosophical implications.
It will be argued that Brandom's line of interpretation not only fails to capture the core Hegelian idea of true infinite which Hegel calls the basic concept of philosophy and the speculative thought in its determining feature but also misses the closely related Hegelian principle of the primacy of the rational to social. I have argued elsewhere that the concept of true infinite is the kernel of Hegel's speculative thought, his primary conceptual innovation and contribution to history of philosophy and represents his break with Kant. What is lost in Brandom's interpretation is not merely a historically interesting dimension of Hegel's thought and the residues of some outdated neo-Platonist mode of thinking in Hegel's philosophy but a revolutionary notion that has every potential to gain new life and play a transformative role for contemporary thought.
The idea that ‘all transcendental constitution is social institution’ has paramount significance and is celebrated as one of the key aspects of what Rorty called the Hegelian stage in Analytic Philosophy. Rorty eloquently expressed one of the core ideas of this position which is closely linked with the connection Brandom sees between concepts, norms and reciprocal recognition as follows:
If you have cultural politics, you do not need either metaphysics or the illusory visions of the empiricists. The only way to bring together the primacy of the practical with the sociality of reason is to assert that cultural politics is autonomous, and that cultural freedom is the ultimate expression of human dignity.Footnote 2
By this reading, Hegel becomes a pragmatist, social constructivist and cultural relativist with respect to concepts. Without denying that there are certain dimensions which are irreducibly Hegelian in the impetus Brandom has given to the evolution of the post-empiricist analytic philosophy and its historical significance, the way I see it, Brandom's thesis misinterprets the relationship Hegel sees between social and rational by missing the primacy of the latter to the former. The projection of this problem to contemporary Hegel scholarship is one of the central aspects of the ongoing debate between metaphysical and non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel. If Brandom is right in saying that for Hegel normative statuses, and therefore all conceptual commitments, are social achievements based on reciprocal recognition, then there is a non-metaphysical Hegel that is at least, at its core, compatible with what historical Hegel wanted to achieve.
On the other hand, it is not difficult to find many passages in Hegel that contradict with this reading. A good example is the following from the Introduction of The Science of Logic:
But a concept is also, first of all, in itself the Concept, and this concept is only one concept, the substantial foundation; it is of course also a determinate concept, and it is this determinateness that appears in it as content even though, in fact, it is a form determination of the substantial unity of the concept, a moment of the form as totality, of the concept itself which is the foundation of the determinate concepts. This concept is not intuited by the senses, is not represented in imagination; it is only subject matter, the product and content of thought, the fact that exists in and for itself, the logos, the reason of that which is, the truth of what we call things…Footnote 3
At the end of the day, how can the concept, which Hegel does not hesitate to call the logosFootnote 4, the foundation of all determinate concepts and the truth of that which is, with all its ontological significance, be instituted by reciprocal recognition based on social negotiation unless we accept that the process of social negotiations itself is already constituted, in the ontological sense, by the concept at the first place?
In order not to be trapped in the tug-of-war between the metaphysical and non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel, we need to go beyond pointing out particular passages in Hegel which are incompatible with Brandom's reading and explain precisely where Brandom goes wrong and falls short of capturing important dimensions of Hegel's core ideas. In my view, first and foremost, this can be made visible by making explicit the relationship between Hegel's concept of recognition and the concept of true infinite and the important role this relationship plays in Phenomenology. In Logic, Hegel calls true infinite as the basic concept of philosophy and in his words, ‘it gives us the nature of speculative thought displayed in its determining feature’.Footnote 5 The way I see it, this is precisely what gets lost in Brandom's reading: the speculative turn that Hegel makes from Kant's transcendental idealism. In my view, without understanding the central role of this revolutionary concept in Hegel's overall system, it is not possible to grasp the extent and nature of Hegel's speculative turn and his break with Kant, which is at least as important as his continuity with him.
I will first present Brandom's thesis and how he uses it to interpret Hegel's core concept of Geist. I will argue that Brandom's thesis fails to account for genuine autonomy which requires autonomy of thought and which in turn requires primacy of the rational to social. I will proceed to a discussion on the historical accuracy of Brandom's interpretation and try to isolate what I believe Brandom takes to be the textual basis for his thesis and then propose an alternative interpretation which incorporates the essential relationship that Hegel saw between his concept of true infinite and reciprocal recognition. This alternative interpretation is motivated by a broader interpretative principle and related adequacy criterion I have proposed elsewhere: Logic gives us the deep ontological structure of nature and spirit and the concept of true infinite is the conceptual kernel of Hegel's speculative turn that allowed him to give this ontological role to logic without relapsing into pre-critical metaphysics. Finally, I will argue that Hegel's concept of true infinite establishes Hegel's idea of primacy of the rational to social and able to account for genuine autonomy which makes it a philosophically plausible thesis that has potential to receive new life in the context of contemporary thought.
I Brandom and ‘For Hegel, All Transcendental constitution is social institution’
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this thesis for Brandom's overall interpretation of Hegel and arguably for his broader philosophical position. As far as I can trace, this thesis was originally introduced in Brandom's ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism’ which was also later published in Brandom's Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002). We find a further development of this thesis in Brandom's Woolbridge Lectures and his associated book, Reason in Philosophy (2007). Brandom's most recently published article ‘Some Hegelian Ideas of Note for Contemporary Analytic Philosophy’ (2014) also features this thesis and presents it as one of the key Hegelian ideas to have an influence for contemporary analytic philosophy:
Hegel's view is what you get if you take the attitudes of both recogniser and recognised, both those who are authoritative and those who are responsible, to be essential necessary conditions of the institution of genuine normative statuses, and require in addition that those attitudes be symmetric or reciprocal [gegenseitig]. In a certain sense, Hegel also takes it that those individually necessary normative attitudes are jointly sufficient to institute normative statuses. 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.Footnote 6
In Woolbridge Lectures, he claims that this thesis is Hegel's principal innovation and his main difference with Kant:
As I read him, Hegel criticizes Kant on just this point. He sees Kant as having been uncharacteristically and culpably uncritical about the origin and nature of the determinateness of the contents of empirical concepts. 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. He broadens Kant's account of synthesizing normative individual selves or subjects (unities of apperception) by the activity of rational integration, into an account of the simultaneous synthesizing of apperceiving individual selves (subjects of normative statuses) and their communities, by practices of reciprocal recognition.Footnote 7
According to Brandom, with this move that places this social concept of reciprocal recognition at the very heart of normative bindingness, Hegel reconciles Kant's autonomy model of normative bindingness, the idea that subjects have authority over what they are responsible for or committed to, with the requirement that for one to actually bind oneself the normative content which one binds oneself should have relative independence from the attitude of the subject.
Autonomy thesis asserts that whether we are bound by or responsible to a particular conceptual norm is up to us. That is a choice we make depending on our normative attitudes. This is what Brandom calls the attitude dependence of normative force. Brandom sees this idea of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses such as responsibility and authority as one of the fundamental intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment tradition and perhaps the greatest contribution of modern philosophers to wider culture. Brandom explains that it was this revolutionary new conception of the relations between normative statuses and the attitudes of the subjects of those statuses that has led to the development of secular conceptions of legal, political and moral normativity, such as the social contract tradition of political thought culminating in Rousseau which derive from practical human needs instead of deriving ultimately from divine commands.Footnote 8 In these lights, authority, responsibility and commitment were no longer to be conceived as features of the non or pre-human world and they did not exist until human beings started taking or treating each other as authoritative or responsible. Brandom contrasts this view of the global attitude-dependence of norms with the traditional, pre-Enlightenment, one, according to which the norms that govern human conduct are independent of the attitudes of those subject to the norms and are to be based on the features of the non-human world. According to Brandom, the traditional view was that, subjects are obliged to discover and acknowledge the objective normative facts which are independent of their attitudes, on the practical side, as they are obliged to discover and acknowledge objective non-normative facts on the theoretical side. For Brandom, the great intellectual achievement of Enlightenment lies in the transformation of this traditional notion with this idea of the dependence of normative statuses to the attitudes of the subjects. This is one of the defining features of Enlightenment that distinguishes it from the pre-modern.
According to Brandom, Kant radicalizes this idea by making it into a criterion of demarcation of the normative. What distinguishes judging and intentional act from compulsive response or from the activities of the non-sapient creatures is not the sort of mental process that is involved but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments, endorsements, exercises of authority. All of these are normative notions making knowers and agents, unlike the non-sapient creatures liable to normative assessment. Under this reading, what distinguishes mental from non-mental is not an ontological but a normative one. Kant's this normative turn by itself is a revolutionary move and will be picked up by Sellars, McDowell and Brandom later in the analytic tradition and become the core of the defining anti-naturalist tendency in their positions:
Kant's most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of- fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental.Footnote 9
Kant develops the Enlightenment conception of the attitude-dependence of normative statuses into an account of what is distinctive of normative bindingness, according to a model of autonomy. The autonomy idea is that we, as subjects, are genuinely normatively constrained only by rules we constrain ourselves. Those are the rules that we adopt and acknowledge as binding on us. In contrast, natural creatures and objects are bound only by rules in the form of laws whose bindingness is not conditioned by their attitudes of acknowledging those rules as binding on them:
The difference between non-normative compulsion and normative authority is that we are genuinely normatively responsible only to what we acknowledge as authoritative. In this sense, only we can bind ourselves, in the sense that we are only normatively bound by the results of exercises of our freedom: (self-constitutive) self-bindings, commitments we have undertaken by acknowledging them. This is to say that the positive freedom to adopt normative statuses, to be responsible or committed, is the same as the positive freedom to make ourselves responsible, by our attitudes… The capacity to be bound by norms and the capacity to bind ourselves by norms are one and the same.Footnote 10
Together with the idea of the global attitude dependence of norms comes a challenge about the origin and nature of normative content. For normative binding, commitment or responsibility to be intelligible, the content of what we bind ourselves must be independent of our normative attitudes. Otherwise, ‘whatever seems right to us would be right’.Footnote 11 Attitude-dependence of normative content would make talk of what is right or wrong unintelligible and no normative statuses can be genuinely instituted. Therefore, the attitude-dependence of normative force asserted by the autonomy thesis is intelligible only within a context in which the normative content, ‘what I acknowledge as constraining me and by that acknowledgement make into a normative constraint on me in the sense of opening myself to upto normative assessments according to it’, is not attitude dependant.Footnote 12 Brandom calls this the relative independence of normative force and content.
Brandom suggests that Kant tries to secure this relative independence of normative force and content by taking that i) concepts are rules that determine what is a reason for what, ii) subjects have readily available a set of concepts with completely determinate contents and iii) judging and acting involve application of these concepts whose contents are determinate prior to their application. In judging and acting, subjects choose among their battery of available determinate concepts and invest their authority through their endorsements. Authority and responsibility of subjects lie in deciding which maxims and therefore concepts to endorse under given circumstances but that authority does not extend to the contents of the concepts that are being endorsed. Judging whether what I see is a dog or a fox is my responsibility but what other judgments are compatible and incompatible with my judgment are not up to me. It is settled by the concepts whose content is settled prior to and independent of my application and my attitudes. According to this, experience presupposes the availability of determinate concepts. For Brandom, Kant's appeal to noumenal activity is not satisfactory for settling the determinateness of the contents of conceptual norms and consequently after Kant the question about the origin and institution of conceptual norms comes to the center and becomes a defining theme for German Idealism.
Brandom claims that Hegel criticizes Kant just at this point. The concept of reciprocal recognition and its essential significance in instituting conceptual norms is intended to address this specific difficulty about establishing relative independence of normative content while maintaining the core Enlightenment idea about the attitude-dependence of normative force without committing to an unsatisfactory transcendental idealism. According to this, what institutes normative statuses is reciprocal recognition. Someone becomes responsible only when others hold him responsible, and has authority only when others acknowledge that authority. In order to become responsible or authoritative, one may petition others for recognition. However, to do that, one must recognize others as able to hold one responsible or acknowledge one's authority. To achieve such statuses, one must be recognized by them in return. This involves making oneself in a certain sense responsible to them. They have that authority only insofar as one grants it to them by recognizing them as authoritative. According to this, the process that synthesizes a normative subject, one who can bind himself in judgment and action, is a social process of reciprocal recognition. This process of reciprocal recognition at the same time synthesizes a normative recognitive community of those recognized by and who recognize that normative subject. This is a community bound together by reciprocal relations of authority over and responsibility to each other.
According to Brandom's reading of the recognitive model we bind ourselves, collectively and individually. No one has authority over me except that which I grant by my recognitive attitudes. My attitudes are a necessary condition of my having the normative status I do. However, others do exercise genuine authority over my normative statuses: what I am committed to, responsible for, and authoritative about. Their attitudes are also a necessary condition of my actually having the status I do. The two aspects of normative dependence, authority and responsibility, are mutual, reciprocal, and symmetrical. Collectively, the attitudes of myself and my fellows in the recognitive community, of those I recognize and who recognize me, are sufficient to institute normative statuses. By the lights of this line of interpretation, Hegel reconciles the tension between the Enlightenment idea of the attitude-dependence of normative force according to the Kantian autonomy model and the requirement of relative independence of normative content from normative force which is necessary to make normative bindingness intelligible.
Brandom further claims that for Hegel, social substance is synthesized by the same process of reciprocal recognition as well. It is articulated into individual recognizing and recognized selves, the subjects of normative statuses of commitment, authority, and responsibility which are statuses instituted collectively by those recognitive attitudes. According to this, the very synthesis of the individual subject, Kantian process of integrating conceptual commitments in order to synthesize a rational unity of apperception, can only take place within the context of these social recognitive practices which are now understood as the necessary conditions for intelligibility of normative content and statuses. By this reading, Hegel's concept of ‘Geist’ becomes the whole normatively articulated realm of discursive activity.
An important dimension of Brandom's reading is the connection he establishes between language and the concept of Geist through the concept of recognition. Brandom sees language at the very core of this concept of Geist that is instituted by the process of reciprocal recognitions. The recognitive model of reciprocal authority and responsibility work in the linguistic case as follows: It is up to me which word I use. But it is not then up to me what I have said or claimed by using that word. The content of what I have said is determined by the incompatibility and consequence relations it stands in to constraint my successful rational integration of the commitment I have undertaken with the rest of the commitments I acknowledge. It is up to me what concept I apply in a particular judgment, whether I claim that the coin is made of copper or silver, for instance. But if I claim that it is copper, it is not then up to me what else I have committed myself to by using that term both explicitly and implicitly. So, for instance, I have committed myself to the coin melting at 1084°C and not any other temperature. I have also endorsed a claim that is incompatible with saying that the coin is an electrical insulator. All of these relations of incompatibility and consequence relations that define meaning of the concept of copper are based on the socially accumulated recognitive practices and an essential part of what maintains them is the attitudes of others, in the case of copper, of the metallurgical experts who would hold me responsible for those commitments. By this reading, language becomes the paradigm case of institution of norms and therefore concepts based on recognitive practices:
I can bind myself by these determinate conceptual norms because they are always already there in the always already-up- and- running communal linguistic practices into which I enter as a young one … My authority to commit myself using public words is the authority to make myself responsible for and authorize others to hold me responsible for determinate conceptual contents. In this model, I am not authoritative over those conceptual contents which provides for the relative independence of conceptual contents to my attitudes which is a necessary condition for normative bindingness to be intelligible. My use of public words is a petition for determinate recognition (attribution of specific commitments) by those I implicitly recognize as having authority, and thereby grant the authority so to recognize me. That is granting them the authority to assess the correctness or success of my rational integrative performances.Footnote 13
Brandom's account is elegant and innovative. It locates the concept of reciprocal recognition at the centre of his pragmatist interpretation of a number of difficult Hegelian concepts such as Geist, a move that allows us to see them in a light that is friendly to contemporary analytic philosophy more than one would ever expected. In these lights, Hegel becomes the philosopher of Enlightenment, who completes the Humanist project of establishing the attitude-dependence of norms while providing an innovative strategy through his concept of reciprocal recognition for maintaining the relative independence of normative content as required for the intelligibility of any genuine normative status. Through Brandom's reading of Kant and Hegel, which sees the essence of concepts in being norms that define what is a reason for what, the significance of this analysis goes beyond what is explicitly social and extends to everything that is rational in general, paradigms of which are judgement and intentional action.
If this reading is accurate, far from being a metaphysical thinker, Hegel puts the last nail on the coffin of traditional metaphysics by eliminating its last residues in Kant's transcendental idealism and reference to noumena, albeit in a negative way. Thanks to the concept of reciprocal recognition, the only role left for transcendental constitution in establishing relative independence and determinateness of normative content, and therefore concepts, becomes redundant. We can, now, claim that all transcendental constitution is social institution and instead of transcendental arguments what we need is an analysis of incompatibility and consequence relations that are implicitly and explicitly instituted by social recognitive practices.
However, the essential question remains: is this an accurate interpretation of Hegel? Does it capture important dimensions of what Hegel wanted to achieve with his concept of reciprocal recognition and is the resulting account compatible with the core ideas of historical Hegel? For that discussion, first of all, we need to isolate the textual basis for Brandom's account and have a closer look at Hegel's discussion of recognition and its role within Phenomenology of Spirit. But before we do that I would like to point out some philosophical disadvantages of Brandom's account. Understanding those disadvantages will help us better understand some of the merits of Hegel's speculative turn and the concept of true infinite which is central to it.
II A Philosophical Criticism – Autonomy without Autonomy of Thought?
An important problem regarding the autonomy thesis should be noted here. We can ground a distinction between freedom and nature on the attitude dependence of norms only if our normative attitudes are free or at least autonomous at the very first place. On the other hand, one of the fundamental lessons we learnt from the psychoanalytical tradition is that our attitudes, including the normative ones, are influenced if not determined by unconsciousness factors and processes. These unconscious factors include personal elements such as drives, personal drive histories and natural propensities as well as collective ones including the social and cultural environment. Therefore, attitude-dependency cannot secure autonomy. If we consider that some of those unconscious factors are natural, then the distinction Brandom would like to establish between free self-conscious act and natural compulsiveness is also seriously threatened. I think the challenge posed by the concept of the unconscious and its influence on our attitudes prevents us from considering autonomy thesis in its form defended by Brandom as a sufficient ground that demarcates space of reasons and freedom from the space of causes, compulsion and necessity and make a clear cut categorical distinction between attitude-dependent normative statuses and compulsive responses.
For Freud, normative statuses which are superego positions are often symptomatic and derive from the deeper unconscious attitude and constitution.Footnote 14 They are far from being autonomous, free or self-determined. Carl Gustav Jung has argued that those unconscious factors are not merely personal and include collectively shared universal ‘a priori forms’, archetypes, that impose themselves on psychic phenomena and drive them towards some typical psychological structures that transcend boundaries of social, cultural and historical spheres. In his Psychological Types, Jung has gone as far as arguing that our position on philosophical matters is determined by our unconscious constitution or psychological type.Footnote 15 For example, he applied this notion to his treatment of realism vs. nominalism controversy in ancient and medieval philosophy.Footnote 16 In Jung's lights, realism vs. nominalism controversy arises as a consequence of the projection of the unconscious attitudes of the introvert and extrovert types’ to the metaphysical structure of reality. I neither agree with Jung's psychologism nor would like to base my critique of Brandom on any Freudian premise. However, after the experience of the psychoanalytical tradition, it is highly problematic to assume that a normative status is immediately autonomous, free or self-determined merely because it has been voluntarily adopted by a subject based on her attitude. This notion simply overlooks the abundance of material in the psychoanalytical literature that clearly shows how unconscious complexes, whether we take them as being personal as in the case of Freud or transpersonal as in the case of Jung, reflect themselves in the normative attitudes and moral, philosophical, religious or idealogical commitments of a subject.
Without the rational introspective self-critical process that will bring the unconscious conditions that motivate an attitude to consciousness gradually and underwrite it as a genuine self-conscious normative status, no attitude can be taken as autonomous, free or self-determining. Autonomy and self-determination is a potential achievement of a human subject that comes only gradually as a result of an introspective rational self-critical process and not actualized merely by taking our attitude as autonomous. However, if that rationality is determined or conditioned by a social recognition process as Brandom seems to suggest, it is unclear to me how it can ever be obtained apart from by assuming it in the form of a pseudo-autonomy that every subject starts with and has to give up in order to participate in its negotiation of recognitive statuses with its peers. In fact, there is nothing given up because there is no genuine autonomy at the first place to start with. Who can claim that an adolescent's normative status is autonomous?
It should be noted that I am not making a point about the validity of any particular normative status but about the condition of possibility of a normative status to be autonomous or self-determined in general. A subject can be autonomous, self-determining or free only if it is endowed with a type of rationality that will allow it to transcend the prevailing normative attitudes in the context of her family, social, cultural and historical context including the unconscious commitments that motivate those attitudes. That is a necessary condition for having a potential for actual self-determination. This self-determination process may involve though the recognition that what it takes to be its other turns out to be not a genuine other and becomes a moment of its own self-actualization but this time self and its actualization understood at a higher and deeper level. The latter is broadly what takes place in the Bildung process Hegel describes in Phenomenology. While Hegel's speculative thought allows for these possibilities, Brandom's neo-pragmatism lacks the requisite conceptual resources for the account of self-determination just given. Consequently, this assumed formal autonomy is lost at every attempt of its actualization as its actualization is made dependent on negotiation with the others for recognition. This so-called autonomous subject has no external control or internal, that is ontological and existential, affinity with its other. This amounts to more or less to a view that cannot escape the unfortunate conclusion that each individual is trapped in the values and normative commitments of her own social, cultural and historical sphere. Even if we cannot fail to observe that this condition of being trapped into local spheres of influence is the norm for the human condition in the world we are living in today, it would be going too far to exclude the possibility of this capacity for self-transcendence from the nature of human rationality especially given that this capacity is more or less what amounts to its distinction from animal and artificial forms of intelligence.
What appears to be a gain in autonomy, self-determination and freedom with Brandom's autonomy thesis and substitution of transcendental argument with institution of social recognitive practices turns out to be, in fact, an actual loss of the possibility of autonomy at the level of principle. The attitude of the individual that is elevated to be the underwriter of her autonomy, freedom and self-determination is the most determined and non-autonomous element as we learnt from Freud, Jung and the psychoanalytical tradition and therefore cannot be the basis of her autonomy. To put it in a slogan, there is no autonomy without autonomy of thought. On the other hand, autonomy of thought requires the primacy of the rational to social, cultural and historical because it is only the rational element that the individual can have autonomous access and influence. It is one of the fundamental merits of Hegel's specuative thought and the concept of true infinite which is the conceptual kernel of the speculative, that allow us that type of rationality by acknowledging the primacy of the rational to social and show a rational path that will allow thought to transcend any fixed determinations autonomously. This notion is missed by Brandom.
III Textual Basis for ‘For Hegel, all transcendental condition is social institution’
The way I see it, Brandom's reading derives its textual basis from two elements. It starts with Hegel's remarks about self-consciousness and its intimate relationship with recognition that is discussed in Phenomenology:
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself because and by way of its existing in and for itself for an other; i.e., it exists only as a recognized being.Footnote 17
This and similar passages in Phenomenology appear to provide relatively robust evidence for a reading of self-consciousness as instituted by reciprocal recognition. To complete this, Brandom connects this with what he calls Hegel's discussion of ‘selves and concepts in the language of identity’Footnote 18:
The concept, when it has progressed to a concrete existence which is itself free, is none other than the ‘I’ or pure self-consciousness. True, I have concepts, that is, determinate concepts; but the ‘I’ is the pure concept itself, the concept that has come into determinate existence.Footnote 19
From the two premises, i) self-conscious selves are instituted by reciprocal recognition and ii) concepts have the same structure with selves, one may argue that for Hegel concepts and conceptual commitments are instituted by reciprocal recognition as part of a negotiation process. I think, broadly speaking, this is the textual basis for Brandom's thesis that ‘For Hegel, all transcendental constitution is social institution’. If we go beyond a very selective reading of Hegel, one would be forced to identify some serious challenges to this interpretation. This is where the concept of infinite and its essential role in constituting the phenomenology of self-consciousness and therefore recognition comes into the picture.
IV The Idea of Phenomenology and The True Infinite
The idea of true infinite is already implicit in Hegel's idea of Phenomenology. Hegel clearly expresses the goal of Phenomenology at the Introduction:
The goal lies at that point where knowledge no longer has the need to go beyond itself, that is, where knowledge works itself out, and where the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept. Progress towards this goal is thus also unrelenting, and satisfaction is not to be found at any prior station on the way.Footnote 20
This is closely linked with the point Hegel makes in Encyclopedia Logic when he says ‘the Logical is to be sought in a system of thought-determinations in which the antithesis between subjective and objective (in its usual meaning) disappears’.Footnote 21 This is the position of infinite thought which is no longer burdened with the dichotomy of the subjectivity and objectivity that falls outside it as a beyond and grasps this distinction as its inner distinction. To put it in a rather sketchy and imprecise way, it is this sense of self-determining dynamic holism as unity in difference that defines Hegel's concept of true infinity. The goal of phenomenology is to make the true infinity of thought and its object explicit. Logic starts from this perspective of the infinite thought attained at the end of Phenomenology. Hegel says in Science of Logic:
Pure science thus presupposes the liberation from the opposition of consciousness. It contains thought in so far as this thought is equally the fact as it is in itself; or the fact in itself in so far as this is equally pure thought. As science, truth is pure self-consciousness as it develops itself and has the shape of the self, so that that which exists in and for itself is the conscious concept and the concept as such is that which exists in and for itself.Footnote 22
It should also be noted that Hegel thought that this liberation from the opposition or dichotomy of consciousness that is attained at the level of infinite thought is one of the defining aspects that distinguishes his position from that of Kant's. It is this liberation that allows infinite thought to be self-transcending and self-sublating and therefore self-determining and autonomous. Here Hegel is not after formal autonomy that is based on attitude-dependence as Brandom suggests but actual autonomy that is based on self-determination of the true infinite or speculative thought. His concept of true infinite is the conceptual kernel of his project to account for this autonomy and self-determination of thought as such.
In recent Hegel scholarship, it is common to read Hegel's project rightfully as a continuation or completion of Kant's critical philosophy. Hegel did indeed take his Science of Logic as the true critique of the determinations of thought as such and therefore the true critique of reason.Footnote 23 However, he also held that this completion was possible only if Kant's finite perspective of the understanding is developed towards an infinite concept of reason and that required a significant conceptual transformation that goes beyond the conceptual resources that were available to Kant. The difference Hegel saw between understanding and reason, which can also be read more or less as the difference he saw between the standpoints of Kant's theoretical philosophy and his, cannot be accounted as Brandom does by merely referring to understanding as deploying categories with fixed contents that are determinate prior to their application and picturing reason as deploying dynamic and ever-changing concepts whose content is altered in every application of them.Footnote 24 The specific distinction should be accounted by incorporating Hegel's very specific notion of true infinite and showing its distinction from finite while preserving its significance as the determining feature of speculative thought. Hegel thought this precise point was missed by Kant and other Kantians and surely this distinction does not feature in Brandom's reading of Hegel which sees the main distinction between the two being involved in Hegel's social concept of normativity based on the concept of reciprocal recognition. I have argued elsewhere that this is Hegel's fundamental criticism of Kant's theoretical philosophy and that a number of other well-known and important criticisms such as i) Kant's failure to investigate thought-determinations in and for themselves, ii) his failure to recognize that critique of thought-determinations and their activity must be united within the process of cognition such that they must determine their own limits and show their own defects, iii) his failure to recognize that our thoughts are not cut off from the thing-in-itself by an impassible gulf but the true objectivity of thinking consists in that logical categories are not merely our thoughts, but at the same time the in-itself of things and of whatever else is objective, iv) failure to recognize that categories are not empty as stipulated by Kant's famous dictum ‘intuitions without concepts are blind, concepts without intuitions are empty’ but have a content by being determinate, v) his failure to recognize the true significance of the antinomies of reason by assessing them merely as consequences of theoretical reason's overstepping its limit instead of seeing what Hegel calls the dialectical moment of logical thinking in them are closely related to and in some cases directly derive from this more fundamental point.
For Hegel, the fault line between his and Kant's position lies in the distinction between the finite thought that is still burdened with the dichotomy of consciousness and infinite thought that has overcome it and that has become self-determining:
If other Kantians have expanded on the determining of the intended object by the ‘I’ by saying that the objectifying of the ‘I’ is to be regarded as an original and necessary deed of consciousness, so that in this original deed there is not yet the representation of the ‘I’ – which would be only a consciousness of that consciousness, or itself an objectifying of that consciousness – then this objectifying deed, liberated from the opposition of consciousness, is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed. The name ‘consciousness’ gives it more of a semblance of subjectivity than does the term ‘thought,’ which here, however, is to be taken in the absolute sense of infinite thought, not as encumbered by the finitude of consciousness; in short, thought as such.Footnote 25
Different stages consciousness undergoes throughout its Bildung in the Phenomenology of Spirit is to be considered as different stages or moments of a very specific convergent series, which is the process of the achievement of this liberation from the opposition of consciousness. This teleology and convergence to true infinite thought is essential to Hegel's idea of Phenomenology. I do not see how a phenomenological process without an underlying teleological ontological structure governed merely by social negotiation can be teleological and converge to absolute knowledge, the standpoint where the dichotomy of consciousness is overcome and the perspective of the infinite thought is attained, unless we accept that that very social negotiation process itself is ontologically constituted as involving that teleology at the very first place. The way I see it, under Brandom's interpretation, the very idea of the phenomenological process as the Bildung of consciousness to science, becomes an incoherent notion.
Here I do not have the necessary space to articulate my account of Hegel's concept of true infinite. I have done this elsewhere but it is necessary to highlight one defining aspect of it which I believe is missed in Brandom's interpretation and is the source of many problems in Brandom's reading of Hegel and his difficulties to account for true autonomy of speculative thought. The idea of infinity is closely related with the idea that all finite determinations are negatively self-related or to use Hegel's terminology self-sublating:
Finite things are, but in their reference to themselves they refer to themselves negatively – in this very self-reference they propel themselves beyond themselves, beyond their being.Footnote 26
This important idea of Hegel's seems to be missed by Brandom who takes incompatibility relations as merely holding between different determinations. Missing the negative self-relation of the finite is missing Hegelian dialectic and self-determining autonomy of speculative thought. Something is indeed determinate by excluding its other from itself. This idea Brandom rightfully captures. However, the story does not stop there. This exclusion of the other from itself is at the same time is its inclusion of its own limit. Its limit does not fall outside it but belongs to its very own determination. Without its limit, it would not be a determinate being but indeterminate pure Being. This is the important Hegelian idea that finitude is not being limited in general but inclusion of its own limit or its own non-being within itself. This inclusion of its own non-being, within itself is the negative self-relatedness of everything finite. It needs to be noted that this not a negative relation between our concepts and beings and therefore cannot not resolved by revising our concepts as Brandom seems to think. For Hegel, being negatively self-related belongs to the very constitution of every finite determination, in other words it is an essential aspect of being determinate. It is this negative self-relatedness of every finite determination and the recognition of this principle that is the basis of the self-dynamism and self-determination of speculative thought. Speculative thought attains autonomy and self-determination by uncovering the implicit negative self-relatedness of every fixed determination and recognizing the conceptual unity at the foundation of opposed determinations. Hence, the autonomy Hegel aims to establish for the speculative thought is not based on attitude-dependence of the subject but based on the true infinity of thought as such.
V Recognition as an Attempt to Realize the Infinity of the Self-Consciousness
The idea of the true infinity of thought as such and making this implicit infinity explicit is guiding, if not defining, the method of Phenomenology:
Consciousness, as it were, seems to be incapable of getting behind the object, that is, of getting at the object not as it is for consciousness but as it is in itself, and consciousness thus seems also to be incapable of really testing its knowledge by the object. Yet precisely because consciousness itself has knowledge of an object, the distinction is already present, namely, that in its eyes something is the in-itself, but another moment is knowledge, that is, the being of the object for consciousness. It is on this very distinction, which is itself now on hand, that the examination rests. If in this comparison, neither corresponds with the other, then consciousness looks as if it is required to alter its knowledge in order to make it adequate to the object. However, as knowledge changes, so too, in the eyes of consciousness, does the object itself change, since the knowledge at hand was essentially a knowledge of the object.Footnote 27
So from the beginning, the idea that consciousness distinguishes itself into poles of subjectivity and objectivity and that it transcends any finite instances of this subjectivity and objectivity through their internal dialectical relationship until their unity in difference is made explicit as moments of an infinite holistic structure is somehow there in the very notion of the phenomenological method. Consciousness cannot find satisfaction at any of these finite stations because all finite modes of consciousness prove themselves to be negatively self-related. The phenomenological process will show that these moments themselves, as thought and being or self-consciousness and life are also constituted by the category of true infinite.
In my view, the solution lies in seeing that Hegel's infinite ontology of the concept as already providing the deep structure of the phenomenological process. This reading is supported by the fact that emergence of self-consciousness in Phenomenology is marked by the emergence of infinity as an object of consciousness. Self-consciousness is characterized by a sequence of failing and gradually self-correcting attempts to know itself and its object as constituted by this infinity. This results with the transition to reason and eventually to spirit and absolute knowledge which corresponds to gradually higher stages of the realization of the infinity of the consciousness and its object. There is sound textual basis that supports this reading both in Phenomenology and in Science of Logic:
When infinity is finally an object for consciousness, and consciousness is aware of it as what it is, then consciousness is self-consciousness.Footnote 28
Up to this very important turning point in Phenomenology, consciousness takes its object and itself as an individual or a this at the level of sense-certainty, as a sensuous universal at the level of perception and as an unconditioned universal at the level of understanding. All of these categories, i.e., individual, sensuous universal and unconditioned universal prove as failing attempts to provide coherent accounts regarding the constitution of the object and I. Only when consciousness grasps the holistic dependency between itself and its object at the end of understanding, does it become self-consciousness. After this point, object and I can no longer be accounted as two finites, existing independently and related to each other in an external manner but need to be cognized by a new category that is suitable to their mutual dependence and unity in their difference. This must be a category that involves the unity of being-in-and-for-itself with being-for-another. This category cannot be other than infinity. Consciousness after this point needs to cognize its object and itself as constituted by this category and adjust all of its implicit and explicit commitments that prove incompatible with this infinity. By my reading, this gives us the deep structure of the Self-Consciousness Section of Phenomenology of Spirit. Consequently, function of recognition should be understood in its specific role for actualizing this infinity of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness becomes infinite only if it sublates otherness and remains in unity with itself in this otherness. This is what self-consciousness is set to achieve in recognition:
The concept of its unity in its doubling, of infinity realizing itself in self-consciousness, is that of a multi-sided and multi-meaning intertwining, such that, on one hand, the moments within this intertwining must be strictly kept apart from each other, and on the other hand, they must also be taken and cognized at the same time as not distinguished, that is, they must be always taken and cognized in their opposed meanings. This twofold sense of what is distinguished lies in the essence of selfconsciousness, which is to be infinitely or immediately the opposite of the determinateness in which it is posited. The elaboration of the concept of this spiritual unity in its doubling presents us with the movement of recognition.Footnote 29
It is the inadequacy of the self-consciousness to reflect the true form of infinity, i.e., true form of the Concept, as desire, as master and slave, stoicism, skepticism, which is the ground of the unrest of the self-consciousness. It is the urge to overcome this inadequacy that drives the development of higher forms from the lower forms of self-consciousness eventually leading to the emergence of reason. Recognition is the specific phenomenological process through which the infinity of self-consciousness is actualized in a social context by sublating or returning from otherness to itself which is the defining feature of true infinity. Hegel explains in the following passage why self-consciousness fails to sublate otherness in desire and therefore cannot find satisfaction in it:
Desire and the certainty of itself achieved in its satisfaction are conditioned by the object, for the certainty exists by way of the act of sublating of this other. For this act of sublating even to be, there must be this other. Self-consciousness is thus unable by way of its negative relation to the object to sublate it, and for that reason it once again to an even greater degree re-engenders the object as well as the desire.Footnote 30
This realization of the self-sufficiency of the object which prevents the self-consciousness of desire to sublate its other marks the transition to recognition as a strategy to realize the infinity of self-consciousness. Here, self-consciousness understands that it can be infinite, and therefore a real self-consciousness, only if the object conforms to it and effect this negation in it.
On account of the self-sufficiency of the object, it thus can only achieve satisfaction if this object itself effects the negation in it [the object]; and the object must in itself effect this negation of itself.Footnote 31
This ‘effecting the negation in the object by the object’ is a critical dimension of reciprocal recognition and is intimately linked with Hegel's innovative concept of infinity. This self-negation of the other is an essential moment because it is only through the self-negation of the finite, the infinity can be established. It is not sufficient for self-consciousness to merely negate its other but it is necessary that the other is self-negating. It is only through this self-negating that the self-consciousness and its other can be grasped as moments of the same infinite process and self-consciousness can elevate itself from a finite particular to infinity. This self-negation can take place only in and by another self-consciousness at this stage of the Phenomenology and hence the concept of recognition.
The deep structure of everything that is going on here is defined by the category of true infinite and various attempts to realize it. Consequently, reciprocal recognition cannot institute concepts. It is already constituted by the ontology of true infinite or one may also say by the ontology of the Concept, which is for Hegel the absolutely infinite or infinite form.
In this fashion have I tried to portray consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Consciousness is spirit as concrete, self-aware knowledge – to be sure, a knowledge bound to externality, but the progression of this subject matter, like the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests exclusively on the nature of the pure essentialities that constitute the content of the logic.Footnote 32
To say that self-conscious selves are constituted by a social recognition process does not amount to saying that this process is deontic or does not have an ontological structure but it amounts to saying that it has a social ontology. In my view, this ontology is the infinite ontology of the Concept that Hegel explains in Logic in detail. This establishes the ontological primacy of the logical or the rational in Hegel to the social. This is why Hegel calls Logical as the Absolute as it is in its pure essence:
Also the logicality of the absolute idea can be called a mode of it; but mode signifies a particular kind, a determinateness of form, whereas the logicality of the idea is the universal mode in which all particular modes are sublated and enveloped. The logical idea is the idea itself in its pure essence, the idea which is enclosed in simple identity within its concept and in reflective shining has as yet to step into a formdeterminateness.Footnote 33
Conclusion
Brandom's oversight is not arbitrary and is consistent with the widespread tendency to overlook the important connections between Hegel's Science of Logic and Phenomenology and read the latter as a work almost independent of Hegel's works on Logic and Realphilosophie. The resulting interpretation is one that misses Hegel's core idea, true infinite and the speculative. This innovative and complex notion represents the core of Hegel's break with Kant and his original contribution to the key topics we are discussing today such as the nature of normativity, freedom, nature and self-consciousness. I take Hegel true to his word when he says that true infinite is the basic concept of philosophyFootnote 34, not logic alone but philosophy in general, and when he says that true infinite gives us the speculative in its determining feature.
It should be noted that what is at stake here is much more than historical accuracy of Brandom's interpretation of Hegel. I have argued that Brandom's account, by making normative statuses dependent on social recognitive practices, fails to recognize genuine autonomy of human normativity and rationality. A subject can be autonomous, self-determining or free only if it is endowed with a type of rationality that will allow it to transcendent the prevailing normative attitudes in the context of her family, social, cultural and historical context including the unconscious committments that motivate those attitudes. Brandom's thesis that makes social recognition as a necessary condition of normative bindingness does not leave room for that type of rationality. The way I see it, it is one of the fundamental merits of Hegel's specuative thought and the concept of true infinite which is the conceptual kernel of this specific mode of thought, that allow us that type of rationality by establishing the primacy of the rational to social.
What appears to be a gain in autonomy, self-determination and freedom with Brandom's autonomy thesis and substitution of transcendental argument with institution of social recognitive practices turns out to be, in fact, an actual loss of even the possibility of autonomy. The attitude of the individual that is elevated to be the underwriter of her autonomy, freedom and self-determination is a highly determined and non-autonomous element as we learnt from Freud, Jung and the psychoanalytical tradition and therefore cannot be the basis of her autonomy. Furthermore, the formal autonomy that is granted to the subject through the autonomy thesis, cannot be actualized even in principle as the social recognitive practices are made into necessary conditions for having normative and cognitive statuses.
To put it in a slogan, there is no autonomy without autonomy of thought. Autonomy of thought requires the primacy of the rational to social, cultural and historical. The latter is what Hegel aims to establish with his concept of true infinite and Brandom misses this notion. What is lost is not merely a historically interesting dimension of Hegel's thought and the residues of some outdated neo-Platonist mode of thinking in Hegel's philosophy but a revolutionary notion that has every potential to gain new life and play a transformative role for contemporary thought for accounting the foundations of our autonomy, freedom and normativity.
