IV
So the idea is that all determinate consciousness is positional,
is something likehaving a position
on what is its intentional object, or is to be understood as a judging, and it can onlybe
positional, have a position, if this involvestaking a position
actively, isapperceptive
. But this latter self-knowledge as an activity isnot
positional. It is not because itsapperceptive
self-awareness is not of an object but rather is something like the avowing of a practical commitment of a sort, something like a projecting (if we stay with the project language) of oneself outward into the world and the future; all in the same sense that knowing what I am doing is not observational or introspective. If I have such knowledge, it
is
to be carrying on
in the appropriate way. (So whatits
for me to be aware of my giving a lecture as I am giving it is for me to be continuously, now and into the future, following the rules of appropriateness for such an activity, something that certainly doesn’t happen automatically, and can be disputed.This stretching along or projecting or commitment-sustaining from the present into all appropriate contexts and futures in what Hegel calls “desire” and its satisfaction.)
As we saw, Hegel’s language for this is that the unity of self-consciousness “must become essential” for the subject, and he tells us thatthis means
that “self-consciousness is desire itself.” To some degree this means that no self-conscious consciousness can take up one “position” and no other. What it is to have one position is to be committed to the various inferences and exclusions and further commitments in the future in other situations that position or commitment would entail, many obviously not evident at the time of assertion, but which introduce the problem of self-unity and so theorectic
dimension of carrying on in a way that realizes the commitments I have undertaken. So the line of thought in Hegel has gone from consciousness to activity to necessarilyapperceptive
to the problem of negation or consciousness being beyond itself (never conscious just by being absorbed in a state) to the gloss on the problem of the unity or such striving for unity as “self-consciousness is desire itself” to this activity as a living self-sustaining as well as anorectic
striving to “get it right” to the issue we confront next: the distinctiveness of human self-conscious desire.
If this language of commitment, inference and practical projects sounds familiar in a contemporary context, I hasten to admit the relevance ofBrandom’s
terminology and I hereby “project into the future” my desire and my commitment to take up his interpretation of this chapter. The Hegelian point thatBrandom
captures extremely well in his own terminology is that self-consciousness, how I take myself to be, is self-constituting; I am who I take myself to be and accordingly functionally vary as such self-constituted takings vary. I can turn out not to be whom I took myself to be but that erroneous self-conception is still an essential dimension of who I am. (I mightbe
a fraud, for example, or self-deceived.)
So self-conscious beings do not have natures, they have histories. And that is indeed Hegel’s deepest point here and stressed throughout many formulations. “Geist
,” he says, “is a product of itself.”
What I want to say is thatBrandom
, because he favors his own account (not Hegel’s) of the relation between a causal perceptual interchange with the world and the role of sociality in the constitution of veridical claims (his RDRD - score-keeping account)
, reintroduces the two-step story Kant and Hegel were trying to avoid and so isolates the social nature of self-consciousness in a way that is the mirror opposite of McDowell’s account. Where McDowell’s interpretation made Chapter Four look like a repetition,Brandom’s
comes close to a “new topic” interpretation of Chapter Four. While McDowell is certainly not trying to deny that sociality and social dependence will play crucial roles in Hegel’s account later, he denies that such themes are relevant here, and so tries to preserve a common sense picture in whichsuccessful perception
does not involve such socialdependence,
Brandom
too distinctly isolates the sociality of self-consciousness.
I think this is because McDowell is generally suspicious of attributing any role to sociality in the conditions of perceptual knowledge. His position is more Kantian and concentrates only on the Hegelian account of the way conceptual activity shapes perceptual knowledge and intentional action.Brandom
concentrates on the issue of self-consciousness and sociality because he has his own quasiSellarsean
theory of perceptual content. What I am trying to argue is that neither gets right the relation between Chapter Four and the first three chapters.)
Brandom
presents in his own terminology an account of the movement of Hegel’s argument in the text that illuminates a lot of what is going on in these tenebrous pages. The question is something like: what would we have toadd
to the picture of an object’s differential responsiveness to its environment (something that iron can do in responding to humid environments by rusting and to others by not rusting), from differential responses that are intentional, that are not simply caused responses to the world, but which can be said to involve taking the world to be a certain way. This is the proto-intentionality typical of animals who, when hungry (and so desirous), can practically classify, take, the objects in their environment as food (desire-satisfying). But differentially responding to food and distinguishing it from non-food, does not satisfy hunger just ipso facto. (As would be the caseif we
were still at the level of the iron.) The animal mustdo
something to satisfy its hunger and must do what is appropriate, sometimes involving several steps and even cooperation with other animals. It must get and eat such food. Another way of saying that the animal does not just respond to food items in its environment but takes things to be food is that there is now possible for the animal an appearance-reality distinction. It can take things to be food that are not and can learn from its mistakes. Or it only responds and acts to eat such food when it is hungry, when in a proto-intentional way, it takes the food as to-be-eatennow
.
And thus far, I think this tracks very well what Hegel is up to. Having conceded (as any sane person would)
a basic tenet of empiricism – no sensory interchange with the world, no possible knowledge about the world - he goes on to argue that such a perceptual interchange alone cannot amount to a world we could experience. We must understand how things are taken to be what they are by subjects, and that means understanding the kind of beings for whom things can appear, and so be taken (apperceptively
) to be such and such, or not. And I thinkBrandom
is quite right that this at least means understanding the difference between mere differential responsiveness, and anorectic
, discriminatory consciousness, a practical classification (or “taking”), which is the most basic, minimal way of understanding how things can be for a subject, and not just response-triggers,
The next step is the crucial one.Now
what do we have to add to this picture to get not proto-intentionality but real intentionality, not just something like a sentiment of one’s life in play as one seeks to satisfy desire, but genuine self-consciousness? What is it for aself
to be for itself? One way to look at this is: in line with what has been said, both in thisBrandom
section and before, we need to know what is necessary to introduce a distinction between what I take myself to be and what I am, and we must do this without suggesting that one misapprehends an object. Rather, what is involved in so taking oneself is to attribute a certain determinate authoritative status tooneself
, and that has to be provisional.
It could be in some psychological sense “sincere” but inconsistent with what someone attributing to himself such an authority would have to say and do, and this latter must eventually mean, by the lights of the relevant others. InBrandom’s
summation of the point, he says,
…what is required to be able to take something to be a self is to be able to attribute attitudes that have distinctivelynormative
significances: to move from a world ofdesires
to a world ofcommitments
,authority
andresponsibility
.
But, asBrandom
argues, to move from that world is necessarily to introduce both a social dimension into Hegel’s account and the appropriateorectic
attitude “after” such amove .
Attributing a normative significance tomyself
or acknowledging someone’s entitlement to claim authority cannot be expressions of sentiment or preference; these are claims that are supposed to hold for everyone.
(The radical Hegelian claim, which need not be an issue here, is that all having such authority amounts to is being acknowledged –under the right conditions and in the right way – to have such authority.)
And the relevantorectic
attitude for such a self-taking must be adesire
for recognition by others.
How this all works is then spelled out byBrandom
in ways quite close to his own account of the role of score-keeping as that constituent of this requirednormativity
essential to possible intentionality as well as self-consciousness.
So specific recognition involves acknowledging another as having some authority concerning how things are (what things are Ks). When I do that, I treat you as one of us, in a primitive normative sense of ‘us’ – those of us subject tohe
same norms, the same authority – that is instituted by just such attitudes.” (p. 142)
There are various aspects ofBrandom’s
account that do not match Hegel’s in Chapter Four, and they are related. His account is of course a reconstruction
, but for one thing, he leaves out an element that on the surface seems quite important to Hegel’s sense of the case he is making. I mean his appeal to the experience ofopposed self-consciousnesses
. This concerns whatBrandom
has elsewhere called disparagingly the “martial” rhetoric of Chapter Four, especially the talk of a struggle to the death, which, as we have seen,Brandom
wants to treat as a metonymy for genuine commitment, but which Hegel seems to treat as a key elementin
the story itself, not an exemplification of a larger story (about the nature of commitment). The second concerns the way Hegel treats the relation between natural desire, its expression and the accompanying self-sentiment and, on the other hand, genuine self-consciousness, taking oneself as a taker, a being for whom things can be. Hegel does not just articulate the conceptual difference between these, asBrandom
does, andargue
that the added element to the picture,normativity
, has to be there in order to distinguish animal desire from self-conscious takings. Consistent with Hegel’s narrative and developmental approach throughout there is an experiential claim about the experience of a natural desirer when confronted with a kind of object which is not simply to be negated, as Hegel understands the term, but which, remarkably, negates back. Hegel seems to want to explain the difference between proto-intentional animal desire and the sort of “desire” that is self-consciousness - that is, one who takes the world to be such and such, and takes himself to be a taker, thereby aware of the defeasibility of the normative claim - all in experiential and developmental terms, not just by making explicit the conceptual conditions for such a differentiation but by appeal to this experiential and developmental argument. (I don’t mean actual historical experience, but an argument form like Hobbes’s, where a picture of everyone trying to maximize their own safety and well-being is shown unavoidably to result in everyone being maximally insecure and worse off.This suggestion about the state of nature experience functions as an argument for the rationality of exiting the state of nature, which of course no one was ever in and no one everexited
.
The same argument form is in play in Hegel)
So the key question is how does Hegelget
from his picture of animaldesire (
one who can take the world to be a certain way) to anorectic
self-consciousness, one who also takes himself to be a taker and so understands that his “takings” are normative phenomena, and what justifies Hegel’s contention that a necessary condition of the possibility of this latter phenomenon is striving to recognize and be recognized by other subjects? WhatBrandom
essentially does is pose this question as a structural one, by applying what he had called the tri-partite structure of erotic awareness (TSEA) not just to ordinary objects which one takes for-oneself to be a certain way (e.g. food), but to ask about how it applies with regard to another being for whom things also are. What is the TSEA for another TSEA as the object of awareness? When the object one takes to be in some such a way for oneself is another awareness taking things to be for-it
self – especially includingthat first taker
, when one is aware of being taken in a way by another taker – what are the relevant elements necessary to account for such anincipient social
situation?
I think that what Hegel wants to say at this point, when he wants to explain why it is that we cannot treat as satisfactory amonadically
conceived self-consciousorectic
consciousness, a desiring being who can practically classify but who is a aware of being a practical classifier and so has a normative sense of properly and improperly classifying, but imagined in no relation to another such self-conscious classifier or imagined to be indifferent to another’s takings, is simply that on the simple empirical premise that there are other such subjects around in a finite world, those other subjectswill not and from their point of view cannot allow
such pure self-relatedness. The sketch we have so far of a self-conscious theoretical and practical intentionality simply insures not only that there will be contention, but that on the premises we have to work with so far, it has to be a profound contention that can, initially or minimally conceived, only be resolved by the death of one, or the complete subjection of one to the other. That this is so will play a large role in Hegel’s account of the sociality on which we are said by him to depend.
Here are some examples of passages where Hegel makes such claims. The important remarks occur after ¶175. There Hegel contrasts the satisfaction of animal desire, whose subject, followingBrandom
, takes things a certain way, but then simply negates these objects, or satisfies its desire. Such a subject may be resisted in a sense by one’s desired object fighting back, if we are talking about predator and prey, but such resistance is just not a challenge, more like an obstacle. (No challenge to the correctness of the classifications or the entitlement to make it has been made.) With this sort of negation of one’s object, another desire arises. That is,
Desire and the certainty of itself achieved in its satisfaction are conditioned by the object, for the certainty exists by way of the act ofsublating
of this other.For this act ofsublating
even to be, there must be this other.
(¶175)
In this situation one cannot be said to be the subject of one’s desires but subject to one’s desires. One’s putative independence as the subject of one’s thoughts and deeds is actually a form of dependence and so one’s takings cannot yet be counted as normative takings.
That is,
Self-consciousness is thus unable by way of its negative relation to the object tosublate
it, and for that reason it once again to an even greater degree re-engenders the object as well as the desire.
This all changes however, when, among the objects of self-consciousness’sorectic
attitudes there is an object which is not an object, another subject, which, as such a subject, cannot simply be “negated” (only destroyed as an object), but if it is to satisfy the desire of the first subject, “must in itself effect this negation of itself.” (He puts it less abstractly in ¶182, “For that reason, it can do nothing on its own about that object if that object does not do in itself what the first self-consciousness does in it.”)
At this point we must remember back all the way to ¶80, and the fact that a self-conscious consciousness is always “beyond itself” and that the problem this engenders, the unity of self-consciousness with itself, “must become essential” to self-consciousness. One form of such satisfaction is simple desire satisfaction; unity with self is produced by eliminating the gap or need within the self, the desire. But another sort of satisfaction altogether is at issue when one’s claims or takings, as such are confronted by another who denies them, who has his own claims, or when one’s deeds, inevitably affecting what others would otherwise be able to do, are rejected, not merely obstructed, by a being whose deeds conflict with one own.
The achievement of such a unity is not then possible alone. As Hegel will go on to show, one will not have responded to such challenges as the challenges they are (a resolution of unity of such disparity will not have become “essential to it”) by simply annihilating the other, and so one will not have satisfied oneself, achieved the unity (self-satisfaction) spoken of so frequently. (One would still be in the position of an animal desirer, subject to one’s desires.) The presence of another “taker who takes himself to be a taker” and so who is a potential challenge, not an obstacle, establishes that the normative problem, whether one’s takes on the world are as they ought to be, is essential to this self-reconciliation, and that means that this confrontation of affirmation and negation cannot be resolved on, let us say, the animal level. That is, “Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only inanother self
-consciousness
.” Or, “Only thereby does self-consciousness in factexist,
for it is only therein that the unity of itself in its otherness comes to be for it.” (¶177)
But in Hegel’s account, there is no non-question-begging criterion, or method, or procedure or standard by which such a contention can be resolved. One whatever might count as the giving and asking for reasons might be counted by the other as the arbitrary expression of the other’s desire for success, as a mere ploy or strategy.
So, Hegel reasons, the primitive expression of normative commitment, the only available realization (Verwirklichung
) of the claimas a claim
, is a risk of life itself.
…theexhibition
of itself as the pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself to be the pure negation of its objective mode, that is, in showing that it is fettered to no determinateexistence
, that it is not at all bound to the universal individuality of existence,that
it is not shackled to life. ¶187)
Hegel makes such a claim not because of any anthropological claim about the centrality of honor in human life but because, in assembling the central, minimal elements of sociality, the genuinely human sociality among self-conscious beings that can provide the satisfaction he has claimed arises as a problem with the realization that consciousness is always “beyond itself,” we must begin without begging any questions. So he proposes we think of the problem as a struggle within such narrow parameters and we get this famous picture.
The relation of both self-consciousnesses is thus determined in such a way that it is through a life and death struggle that eachproves his worth
tohimself, and that bothprove their worth
to each other. (…daß sie sich selbst und einander durch den Kampf auf Leben und Todbewähren
.) (¶187)
Throughout the rest of the chapter, Hegel shows the practical incoherence of any attempted resolution of such conflict by the establishment of mere power, or coerced recognition. It is clear that what is necessary for such a conciliation, for beings conceived as Hegel now has, is some resort to practical reason and so ultimately some shared view of a universal norm.
And it is true that Hegel has a “pragmatic” or a “historicized” or “dialogical”
view of what counts as the appeal to reasons. He understands practical reason as a kind of interchange of attempts at justification among persons each of whose actions affects what others would otherwise be able to do, and all this for a community at a time. But his account of what this consists inrequires ,
in effect, the rest of the book, the developmental and experiential procedure characteristic of a “phenomenology.”
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Author: Sayyid Moustafa Al-Qazwini
