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Mighty Dead: Kant and Hegel

In the last chapter, we saw that Brandom has two overarching theoretical aspirations. First, he wants to account for the semantic features of language and cognitive mental states - conceptually structured propositional linguistic meaning and mental content - exclusively in terms of inferential role, that is, in terms of the inferential, compatibility, and incompatibility relations in which sentences and cognitive mental states stand to each other. Second, he wants to explain linguistic meaning and mental content in turn in normative pragmatic terms: that is, in terms of the norm-governed use of a public language in communication by at least two interlocutors. Pursuing this twofold aspiration is a minority position in the landscape of contemporary analytic philosophy. Yet Brandom sees it in continuity with two overlapping "rationalist" and "pragmatist" traditions within modern Western philosophy, ranging from strands in the philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz via central aspects of German Idealist thought broadly speaking (in particular Kant's and Hegel's work) to threads in the works of twentieth-century figures as diverse as Frege, Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Dummett. Brandom devotes much of his writing to interpretations of aspects of these thinkers' works, motivated by the goal of finding precedence, inspiration, and legitimization for his own systematic philosophical enterprise.

The bulk of Brandom's writings in the history of pre-twentieth-century philosophy to date concerns Kant's and Hegel's contributions to these rationalist and pragmatist traditions. This focus should be unsurprising. As mentioned at the outset, for Brandom the central task of philosophy is to provide a critique of reason, that is, the right account of us as reasoning creatures. This is, of course, Kant's and Hegel's enterprise and, accordingly, Brandom at some point goes so far as defining philosophy simply as "the kind of thing that Kant and Hegel did" (RP 126). Yet even more important for Brandom than these meta-philosophical affinities with Kant and Hegel are the substantial philosophical innovations ushered in by the German Idealist tradition, in particular Kant's idea to treat reason and reasoning as essentially normative and autonomous, and Hegel's approach to reason and reasoning so understood as essentially socio-historical, and as instituted and maintained via a process of specifically discursive mutual social recognition. This chapter introduces Brandom's interpretations of Kant and Hegel. In keeping with Brandom's main motives for these interpretive efforts, I shall abstain from assessing these efforts in light of existing Kant and Hegel scholarship and instead introduce Brandom's interpretations entirely with an eye on his own systematic philosophical ambitions.

The methodology of Brandom's historical writings

Brandom's engagement with the history of philosophy is unified in focus and methodology. He firmly focuses his interpretations of historical texts and figures on topics and notions that are central to his own systematic philosophy - representation, reasoning, logic, normativity, meaning, understanding, discourse, knowledge - leaving on one side aspects of those historical works that, no matter how central they may have been to the concerns of their authors and their contemporaries, are secondary for Brandom's own systematic concerns. Moreover, Brandom's interpretive method is consistently and avowedly "critical" and "reconstructive," in the sense that it does not so much place the topics and notions it focuses on into the context of the interpreted author's own specific, more or less idiosyncratic historical background, commitments, and concerns, but rather into the context of much larger historical traditions and developments - traditions and developments in which Brandom situates his own systematic philosophical convictions and commitments. Accordingly, these interpretations do not aspire to offer a charitable reconstruction of the interpreted author's (or his or her contemporaries) own interpretation of the significance of these works. His readings are, accordingly, of lesser value to someone interested in a close, historically faithful reading of these works. They are, in Brandom's technical terminology (the meaning of which will become clearer in chapter 7), not interpretations de dicto. Instead, by unabashedly and purposefully placing the author's work in the context of our contemporary philosophical concerns and commitments, some of the author's claims are set aside as false, unjustified, or irrelevant while others are distilled and magnified as true, important, and path-breaking to us. Thus, by interpreting the author's work in this, as Brandom calls it, de re fashion, ideas embedded in an otherwise more or less obscure, exotic historical text and context appear as truly instructive and, indeed, path-breaking in light of our own present philosophical concerns: they become "Animating Ideas."

Brandom himself compares this method of interpretation with improvisation in bebop, "in which a melody is treated as an occasion for improvisation on its chord structure" (TMD 117). The melody is the familiar idea or element of the historical work that is the focus of Brandom's attention, while the re-contextualized de re interpretation of that idea is the improvisation. On the one hand, the interpretation leaves the distinct, familiar contour of a historical figure's contributions recognizable to any student of Western philosophy. On the other hand, the interpretation freely elaborates and assesses these contributions in light of later developments and present concerns and, indeed, freely recasts these contributions in contemporary terminology (which from a historicist perspective may seem anachronistic), and thus aims to demonstrate that they offer important lessons for philosophy today.

This way of engaging with the history of philosophy has a twofold advantage. First, given Brandom's ambitions as a systematic philosopher, it makes the case that Brandom's own systematic work is situated in a larger historical tradition. This effort is designed to counter the impression that his work is simply a solitary individual's historically unmotivated rebellion against what, in chapter 1, we called the Received View. Second, by offering critical, reconstructive interpretations of figures as widely ignored, if not maligned, among contemporary analytic philosophers as Hegel and Heidegger, Brandom presents core elements of their works in rigorous and systematic terms that should be understandable to, and critically appraisable by, this analytic mainstream, thus potentially rekindling interest in these figures themselves and, indeed, rekindling interest in the history of philosophy as a source of inspiration for contemporary systematic philosophers.

The normative nature of reason

Brandom's interest in Kant largely focuses on central aspects of what Kant calls his theories of the understanding - the faculty enabling us, constrained by the pure concepts of the understanding, to form empirical judgments and to gain empirical knowledge - and practical reasoning. Brandom is not interested in what Kant calls reason narrowly conceived (the faculty producing what Kant calls regulative ideas), nor in what Kant calls intuition (sense experience per se, as structured by its "pure forms," space and time, in abstraction from the role the understanding plays in structuring experience). Accordingly, unless indicated otherwise, talk about reason is in the following to be understood as talk about the understanding and practical reason in Kant's sense and about the transformation of Kant's theories of the understanding and practical reason in Hegel's hands, as interpreted by Brandom.

Kant's "deepest and most original idea" (RP 32), according to Brandom, is this:

What distinguishes judgment and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is . that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authority - these are all normative notions.

(RP 32)

Kant's central idea is to draw the distinction between reason and nature in normative terms. Nature is the realm of what happens in fact, in accordance with deterministic causal laws or (according to certain post-Kantian developments) statistical regularities. Natural entities and processes as such are unconstrained by, and insensitive to, norms and standards determining what ought to happen, what rightfully may happen, or what should not happen. Accordingly, they are not bearers of responsibilities, authorities, commitments, entitlements, and prohibitions nor, therefore, the proper subjects of critical appraisal, praise, or blame. By contrast, rational beings as such are just such bearers and subjects. Qua theoretically rational, epistemic beings, we are responsible for forming judgments based on good evidence and in light of standards of good probabilistic thinking, to draw the right conclusions from our judgments, and...