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Despair and the determinate negation of Brandom’s Hegel

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Abstract

In this paper, I contend that Brandom’s interpretive oversights leave his inferentialist program vulnerable to Hegelian critique. My target is Brandom’s notion of “conceptual realism,” or the thesis that the structure of mind-independent reality mimics the structure of thought. I show, first, that the conceptual realism at the heart of Brandom’s empiricism finds root in his interpretation of Hegel. I then argue that conceptual realism is incompatible with Hegel’s thought, since the Jena Phenomenology, understood as a “way of despair,” includes a critique of the philosophical framework upon which conceptual realism relies. Finally, I offer the Hegelian critique of Brandom that results from these textual infidelities.

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Notes

  1. Pippin (2005), alone, seems to understand how one needs to evaluate Brandom’s Hegel and Brandom together. By contrast, see DeLaurentiis (2007); O’Connor (2007); Nuzzo (2007); Rockmore (2007); Falkenroth et al. (2008); and Houlgate (2009).

  2. To be clear, the “common” form of conceptual realism up for investigation here is the specifically Cartesian interpretation, common to Brandom, Westphal (1989, 2008), and Ameriks (1985). The kind of conceptual realism that Maker (1994, 1998, 2008), Rosen (1988), and Stern (1990) defend is not explicitly up for investigation here. Although the latter group is much closer to the view that I defend, I disagree with them that this position counts as realism. Obviously, I cannot defend that position here, though I hope that the difference will become clear through the course of the argument.

  3. Brandom (2002a, p. 23).

  4. Brandom (2002a, p. 180).

  5. Brandom (2002a, p. 181).

  6. Brandom (2002a, p. 181).

  7. It is worth noting here that the conceptual reality of objects is also a central source of disagreement between Brandom and McDowell. While it is essential to McDowell’s account that the conceptual cannot grasp the non-conceptual (see McDowell 1994, 54), McDowell also stops short of speaking about properties (or, in this instance, meta-properties) of mind-independent reality. Such a view, which Brandom here adopts, falls under the scope of what McDowell calls “sideways on” pictures of the mind-world relation [see McDowell (1994, pp. 34–36)]. See also the following exchanges between the two: Brandom (2002b) and McDowell (2002), and Brandom (2010) and McDowell (2010).

  8. Brandom (2002a, p. 182).

  9. Thus Brandom, who traces his Hegelian notion of material incompatibility to Spinoza’s “omnis determinatio est negatio,” overlooks Hegel’s critique of this Spinozistic thesis. While it is true that negation and determination share an intimate relation in Hegel (indeed, this is the driving force behind the very idea of determinate negation), he nevertheless rejects the excessively mechanistic conception of nature that this thesis grounds in Spinoza [cf. Beiser (2005), p. 91–92]. Specifically, Hegel thinks that Spinoza’s thesis treats substance as a static, lifeless thing that holds determinations of objects fixed in opposition to one another. Hegel maintains that “If thinking stops with this substance, there is then no development, no life, no spirituality or activity” (Hegel 2009, p. 122). Thus, Hegel could not have endorsed the account of the “fixity” of objects that Brandom wishes to attribute to him here. See also Melamed (2012).

  10. See Brandom (2011), Lecture One: “Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge” (unpublished).

  11. See Brandom (2002a, pp. 212–215) for its clearest formulation.

  12. Brandom (1998, p. 222).

  13. Brandom (1998, p. 222).

  14. Pippin (2005) shows that one cannot develop a theory of Hegelian conceptuality without “theory of everything” questions inevitably arising; DeLaurentiis (2007) argues that Brandom’s semantic pragmatism is incompatible with the core metaphysical and logical commitments of Hegel’s absolute idealism; O’Connor (2007) criticizes Brandom’s failure to both distinguish between phenomenological and natural consciousness in the Jena Phenomenology, and also to understand the special sense of experience as Erfahrung that drives the progression of the text; Nuzzo (2007) contends that Brandom fails to understand the proper, systematic sense of the history of philosophy present within his writing on Hegel; similarly, for Rockmore (2007), Brandom fails to read Hegel the way Hegel reads others, i.e. “in terms of the internal development in [his] theory” (p. 62); Falkenroth et al. (2008) hold that Brandom cannot separate out Hegel’s ontological commitments from a semantic project; and Houlgate’s article (2009) contends, in line with O’Connor (2007), that Brandom’s reading of the Phenomenology overlooks the very idea of Hegelian phenomenology.

  15. Brandom (2002a, p. 211).

  16. O’Connor (2007, p. 131–2) This argument also suggests the central point that Pippin (2005) raises against Brandom. Specifically, Brandom wishes to restrict his works on Hegel to an account of the conceptual, and so thinks that he can leave behind systematic concerns by narrowing in on this single strand within Hegel. But Pippin shows that one cannot set one’s focus so narrowly in Hegel without broad, “theory of everything” kinds of questions arising. Although I’ve taken a slightly different approach in this article, the point I raise is analogous to Pippin’s objection: this narrow, everyday account of conceptual content inevitably gives rise to broad questions about how these concepts behave at the system level.

  17. The same issue is at play, for instance, in Berto’s (2007) Brandomian reading of Hegel: he believes, for instance, that Hegel’s distinction between correctness and truth rests on a distinction between non-inferential and inferential articulations. Hegel, rather, means to distinguish between correctness as a correspondence between judgment and object, and truth as systematic self-justification. See, for instance, Hegel (1991) §24, z. 2; p. 59–60): “We call a definition … correct if it agrees with what is found to be the case with its ob-ject in our ordinary consciousness of it. In this way, however, a concept is not determined in and for itself but according to a presupposition, which then becomes the criterion, the standard of correctness. We do not have to use such a standard, however: we can simply let the inherently living determinations take their own course instead … In the ordinary way, what we call ‘truth’ is the agreement of an object with our representation of it. We are then presupposing an object to which our representation is supposed to conform … In the philosophical sense, … ‘truth’, expressed abstractly and in general, means the agreement of a content with itself”.

  18. Brandom (2002a, p. 196).

  19. So the various references to “consciousness” in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, and in this paper, refer to the “main character”, so to speak, of Hegel’s text. This character takes on different forms as the text unfolds, and finds that, in any particular form, the principles that guide that form contain internal flaws that, once made explicit, demonstrate the “untruth” of that particular form.

  20. Brandom (2011) unpublished, Lecture 3, p. 16–17).

  21. Hegel (2012, §76, p. 73).

  22. Hegel (2012, §78, p. 75–76).

  23. Hegel (2012, §80, p. 77).

  24. Hegel (2012, §165, p. 152).

  25. Cf. Brandom (2002a, pp. 202–207) There, Brandom outlines how he sees consciousness “traversing the moments” of the dialectic. One begins, in “Sense-Certainty”, with “immediately contentful” properties. But since this initial position does not contain “a coherent conception” of determinate contentfulness, we augment this initial stage with an account of “strong difference” that we develop in the second stage. This position is also incomplete, however, since it puts conceptual relations in place “without yet providing the conceptual resources to make sense of the relata”. (205). Brandom’s Hegel develops those conceptual resources in the third “stage” of the dialectical progression.

  26. Brandom (2002a, pp. 188–191).

  27. “The object of consciousness has the holistic relational structure Hegel calls ‘infinity.’ This is a structure of differences (exclusions) that are canceled or superseded (aufgehoben) in that the identity or unity of the differentiated items is understood as consisting in those relations of reciprocal exclusion. But consciousness itself is such a structure. So consciousness of objects is consciousness of something that has the same structure as consciousness. It is therefore structurally like consciousness of selves rather than objects. Generically, then, it is to be understood as self-consciousness” (Brandom (2002a, p. 188)).

  28. Brandom (2002a, pp. 191–194).

  29. See also Pinkard (1996, pp. 43–45).

  30. Thus, in opposition to Redding (2007) and Priest (2002), Hegel is not a dialetheist. Contradictions provide the impetus for the progression of the immanent development of thought; and while the world may be, as Houlgate says, “a fundamentally contradictory place”, Hegel believes that such contradictions drive development, that this is just what development is. The resolution of contradiction is the engine inherent within all Life. That is why the discussion of Life arises near this same passage (§162, p. 147–148). See also Gadamer’s (1976) gloss on the transition, p. 52.

  31. Hegel (2010, §124; 21.142).

  32. Hegel (2010, §124; 21.142).

  33. Hegel (2010, §124; 21.142).

  34. Hegel (2010, §124; 21.142).

  35. Hegel (2010, 21.143).

  36. Hegel (2010, §125; 21.143).

  37. Hegel (1970, p. 122).

  38. Of course, Hegel is himself an “absolute idealist”. He ultimately endorses a form of idealism according to which “the Concept gives itself actuality” [Hegel (1991, §213)], or a self that recognizes conceptual determination as self-determination.

  39. Hegel (1991, §23, p. 55).

  40. Hegel (1991, §22, p. 54).

  41. Hegel (1991, §24 z., p. 57).

  42. Hegel (1991, §24 z., p. 57).

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    Joshua I. Wretzel

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Wretzel, J.I. Despair and the determinate negation of Brandom’s Hegel. Cont Philos Rev 47, 195–216 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9294-0

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