Abstract
John McDowell has criticized readings of Hegel that would have him holding that freedom should be understood as the achievement of some mutual recognitive status. He thinks that this saddles Hegel with an “unconvincing” argument, and one that is “out of tune with the characteristic shape of Hegel’s thinking.” Second, he criticizes an interpretation of the “inner-outer” relation in acting, one that tries to account for Hegel’s claim for the speculative “identity” of inner and outer in action. McDowell thinks that the criticized interpretation involves, again, a “misreading”, one that has Hegel “mishandle” the topic in general. And again, an alternate interpretation is presented and defended; defended both as a better reading of the text and sounder philosophically. In both cases the interpretations are mine, and I respond to them in this essay as both correct interpretations and as philosophically sound.
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Notes
- 1.
TRHA, 166–182.
- 2.
TRHA, 176.
- 3.
TRHA, 173.
- 4.
TRHA, 179.
- 5.
- 6.
TRHA, 167.
- 7.
TRHA, 168.
- 8.
No passages from Hegel are cited in this brief section of McDowell’s article.
- 9.
I now realize that “taken to be one” is a misleading way of characterizing Hegel’s institutional theory of recognitive statuses. For this reason: It is a serious mistake to think of Hegel’s account of recognition as some sort of psychological exchange among individuals, as I argue, against Axel Honneth’s version , in Pippin (2007). Even more misleading are characterizations of Hegel’s position as “constructivist.” Mea culpa.
- 10.
See PR, § 113.
- 11.
See PR, § 113 again, where action is said to have as its necessary condition an “essential relation to the will of others.” There is no mention of this having anything to do with being able to make oneself understood to an other.
- 12.
See TRHA, 169.
- 13.
PR, § 258A.
- 14.
LPHI, 55; VG, 64.
- 15.
PSS, § 482R.
- 16.
TRHA, § 9.
- 17.
PR, § 196.
- 18.
LPHI, 137; VG, 166.
- 19.
PSS, 6–7.
- 20.
LPH 1822–1823, vol I., 151. VG, 58.
- 21.
Phen P, § 440; W3, 326.
- 22.
See PR, § 21A. See also, Mark Alznauer’s clarifying discussion of the issue of slavery for Hegel throughout his valuable Alznauer (2015).
- 23.
See TRHA, 172.
- 24.
See TRHA, 172.
- 25.
See Kant (1998, B681/A653).
- 26.
Phen P, § 439; W3, 325.
- 27.
If we continue to insist that this—learning to see better the reasons for having a gender-neutral division of labor—is indeed what happened, we would still need to provide what Bernard Williams would call an “error theory.” We are several centuries into liberal democratic constitutionalism. What prevented us from “seeing” the truth until just then. The prospects for this sort of account seem to me slim and none.
- 28.
Pippin (2008, 159), quoted by McDowell, TRHA, 173.
- 29.
TRHA, 174.
- 30.
TRHA, 174.
- 31.
Pippin (2008, 159).
- 32.
Phen P, § 404, my emphasis; W3, 309.
- 33.
TRHA, 179.
- 34.
Phen P, § 400; W3, 295.
- 35.
Phen P, § 418; W3, 309–310.
- 36.
TRHA, 176.
- 37.
TRHA, 177.
- 38.
TRHA, 178.
- 39.
TRHA, 178.
- 40.
Phen P, § 640, my emphasis; W3, 470.
- 41.
TRHA, 180, n.27.
- 42.
Phen P, § 401; W3, 297.
- 43.
Phen P, § 322; W3, 242.
- 44.
EL, § 139, 209. The original of this important passage is: “Das Äußere ist daher fürs erste derselbe Inhalt als das Innere. Was innerlich ist, ist auch äußerlich vorhanden und umgekehrt; die Erscheinung zeigt nichts, was nicht im Wesen ist, und im Wesen ist nichts, was nicht manifestiert ist.”
- 45.
EL, § 140, 209. This important passage introduces an issue much too large for this context: the principle of the unity of an action. The action is one event with many temporal parts, raising the issue, as here, of its appropriate form.
- 46.
EL, § 140R, 210.
- 47.
Of course in most case, there is no conflict. The outer has the same content of what was resolved “in” the inner. Hegel has an expressivist, potentiality-actuality, “realization” theory of that relation, but given the important role self-deceit plays in the Phenomenology, Hegel must have a theory that leaves open the possibility for the kinds of cases under consideration now. See my “Hegel über die politische Bedeutung kollektiven Selbstbetrugs,” forthcoming.
- 48.
Phen P, § 469; W3, 347. I like here, for thematic purposes, Miller’s translation, and think he is expressing what the passage says, especially in context—“Ethical self-consciousness learns from the deed the developed nature of what it actually did.” But it is quite a liberal translation and the German is more complicated: “Die entwickelte Natur des wirklichen Handelns erfährt nun das sittliche Selbstbewußtsein an seiner Tat […]” Hegel made the same point more clearly when discussing Lichtenberg in § 322: “Das wahre Sein des Menschen ist vielmehr seine Tat; in ihr ist die Individualität wirklich, und sie ist es, welche das Gemeinte in seinen beiden Seiten aufhebt.”
- 49.
Phen P, § 322; W3, 243.
- 50.
TRHA, 179.
- 51.
A, vol. I, 187.
- 52.
A, vol. I, 188.
- 53.
See TRHA, 181.
- 54.
See TRHA, 182.
- 55.
TRHA, 184.
- 56.
TRHA, 182.
References
Alznauer, Mark. 2015. Hegel’s Theory of Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and Trans. P. Guyer and A.W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pippin, Robert. 2000a. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: The Realization of Freedom. In The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, 180–199. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2000b. What is the Question for which Hegel’s Theory of Recognition is the Answer? European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2): 155–172.
———. 2004. Hegels praktischer Realismus: rationales Handeln als Sittlichkeit. In Hegels Erbe, ed. Ch. Halbig, M. Quante, and L. Siep, 295–323. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
———. 2006b. Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualized Agency in Hegel’s Jena Phenomenology. In Hegel: New Directions, ed. Katerina Deligiorgi. Chesham: Acumen.
———. 2007. McDowell’s Germans: Response to ‘On Pippin’s Postscript’. European Journal of Philosophy 15 (3): 411–434.
———. 2008. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Pippin, R. (2018). Reason in Action. A Response to McDowell on Hegel. In: Sanguinetti, F., Abath, A. (eds) McDowell and Hegel. Studies in German Idealism, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98896-2_12
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