#robert brandom

“The selves of self-conscious creatures exhibit a distinctive structure: what they really are—as Hegel says, what they are in themselves—depends on what they take themselves to be—in Hegel-speak, what they are for themselves.

And that means that a self-conscious being can change what it is in itself by changing what it is for itself.

Self-conscious creatures accordingly enjoy the possibility of a distinctive kind of self-transformation: making themselves be different by taking themselves to be different.

Because what they are in themselves is at any point the outcome of such a developmental process depending on their attitudes, essentially self-conscious beings don’t have natures, they have histories.

Or, put differently, it is their nature to have not just a past, but a history: a sequence of partially self-constituting self-transformations, mediated at every stage by their self-conceptions, and culminating in their being what they currently are.

Understanding what they are requires looking retrospectively at the process of sequential reciprocal influences of what they at each stage were for themselves and what they at each stage were in themselves, by which they came to be what they now are.

Rehearsing such a historical narrative (Hegel’s ‘Erinnerung’) is a distinctive way of understanding oneself as an essentially historical, because essentially self-conscious, sort of being.

“Here is a mundane example.

Achieving the status of being a good chess player is not something I can do simply by coming subjectively to adopt a certain attitude toward myself.

It is, in a certain sense, up to me whom I regard as good chess players: whether I count any wood pusher who can play a legal game, only formidable club players, masters, or grand masters.

That is, it is up to me whom I recognize as good chess players, in the sense in which I aspire to be one.

But it is not then in the same sense up to me whether I qualify as one of them. To earn their recognition in turn, I must be able to play up to their standards.

To be, say, a formidable club player, I must be recognized as such by those I recognize as such. (…)

As in the Kantian autonomy model of normative bindingness, according to the recognitive model we bind ourselves, collectively and individually.

No one has authority over me except that which I grant by my recognitive attitudes.

Those attitudes of mine are accordingly a necessary condition of my having the status I do.

But as on the traditional obedience model, 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 entirely mutual, reciprocal, and symmetrical. (…)

Hegel’s term for the whole normatively articulated realm of discursive activity (Kant’s “realm of freedom”) is ‘Geist’: spirit.

At its core is language: “Language is the Dasein of Geist,” Hegel says.

“The thought behind the resemblance model is that appearance is veridical insofar as it resembles the reality it is an appearance of.

Insofar as it does not resemble that reality, it is a false appearance, an error.

The rise of modern science made this picture unsustainable.

Copernicus discovered that the reality behind the appearance of a stationary Earth and a revolving Sun was a stationary Sun and a rotating Earth.

No resemblance, no shared properties there. The relationship between reality and its appearance here has to be understood in a much more complicated way. (…)

If we are interested in investigating cognitive faculties in the context of theories like this, we are interested in the representation relation.

For cognitive faculties are the instrument or medium that produces representings of the real. (…)

This is the requirement that appearances (senses, representings) must be essentially, and not just accidentally, appearances of some purported realities.

One does not count as properly having grasped an appearing unless one grasps it as the appearance of something.

When all goes well, grasping the appearance must count as a way of knowing about what it is an appearance of. 

Appearances must make some reality semantically visible (or otherwise accessible). 

The claim is not that one ought not to reify appearances, think of them as things, but rather, for instance, adverbially: in terms of being-appeared-to-thus-ly. (…)

Instead of thinking of truth as an achievable state or status, Hegel wants us to think of it as characteristic of a process: the process of experience, in which appearances “arise and pass away.”

They arise as appearances taken as veridical: ways things are for consciousness that are endorsed as how they are in themselves. 

When they are found to be materially incompatible with other commitments in the experience of error, some are rejected—

a transformation of status that is the arising of the “second, true object,” the appearance as a misrepresentation, becoming to consciousness only how things are for consciousness.

“The tradition had thought of freedom as negative freedom: freedom from constraints of various sorts.

Kant focuses instead on positive freedom: freedom to do something. It is the freedom to act for reasons.

Freedom in that sense is freedom to bind or constrain oneself by norms, to commit oneself, to make oneself responsible. (…)

Engaging in discursive practices is accordingly the paradigmatic exercise of Kantian positive freedom.

In doing so, we bind ourselves by norms articulated by the contents of the concepts we apply.

If I claim that the coin is copper, I have said something that, whether I know it or not, is correct only if the coin would melt at 1084°C and would not melt at 1083°C. (…)